Inside the bubble, space-time is completely flat, meaning the space travellers wouldn’t notice any strange, relativistic effects. Alternatively, thanks to Einstein’s E = mc 2 (energy is equal to mass, times the speed of light squared), you could equally use a huge amount of energy.

As with gravity, you could create this distortion using a large amount of mass. The ‘bubble’ surrounding the ship is an area of space-time that is compressed in front of the ship and expanded behind it. The Alcubierre drive uses the same concept. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast.“We think of the bowling ball on the trampoline and that bowling ball dips the trampoline down,” says Macdonald, “and that's what mass does to space-time.” This distortion of space-time is what we experience as gravity. It’s similar to the idea of a racecar driving onboard a train: someone standing by the tracks would see the car travelling much faster than its top speed.Īccording to General Relativity, the Universe is a flat sheet of space-time which is warped by any object with mass. “And so the concept of warp drive is to say, all right, let's take our ship, let's build a bubble of space-time around it, and then we'll have that propel us faster than the speed of light,” she says. “What warp drive is doing is basically saying that there is no law of physics that says space-time itself can't go faster than the speed of light,” says Dr Erin Macdonald, astrophysicist and science consultant for Star Trek. The key that makes it possible is that, technically, the ship itself doesn’t travel faster than light. The first scientific theory of warp drive came about in 1994, when theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre used Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to develop a framework that would allow faster-than-light travel within the confines of the laws of physics.

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