In a seismically isolated room within the Johnson Space Center, NASA scientists are performing an extraordinarily ambitious experiment—aiming to use a strong electric field to bend the fabric of space and time. The goal? Faster-than-light interstellar travel. The story may seem like science fiction and it is…or at least, it used to be.
In the early 1990s, Miguel Alcubierre, a theoretical physics Ph.D. student, sat down to watch an episode of Star Trek. In the show, a technology called “warp drive” gave ships the ability to travel multi-light-year distances in a single prime-time episode. Alcubierre’s curiosity was peaked—how would a warp drive work in the real world?
To answer this question, Alcubierre had to sidestep the “cosmic speed limit.” That’s a fear that Einstein’s theory of special relativity calls impossible. But the student spotted a loophole. Everything in the universe may be limited by the speed of light, but the fabric of space and time itself can expand contract at any speed. Alcubierre discovered that if space-time could be made to contract in front of a ship, and expand behind it, the ship would be propelled forward at an immense speed.
“While it sounds very sci-fi, the warp drive is theoretically possible, by making space and time bend in a particular way,” Geraint Lewis, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sydney, says. “With this bending, a small bubble of unbent space-time can be propelled across the Universe at any speed you want.”
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