By Barry Eitel
Well, maybe Star Trek isn’t really that far away. An announcement a few months ago from physicist Harold White surprised many in the space community. White claimed that he and a NASA team were working on developing faster than light warp drive.
White spoke to website io9 last month to explain the project, which combines Einstein’s theory of relativity, the latest in science and a touch of science fiction.
The idea came out of a 1994 paper White wrote regarding an equation proposed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. Alcubierre suggested that space-time could be warped both in front of and behind a spacecraft.
“Remember, nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed,” White says to io9. “However, space-time is really stiff, so to create the expansion and contraction effect in a useful manner in order for us to reach interstellar destinations in reasonable time periods would require a lot of energy.”