A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein’s law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.
The above image of a Vulcan command ship features a warp engine similar to an Alcubierre Drive. Image courtesy CBS.
The Alcubierre Drive
The idea came to White while he was considering a rather remarkable equation formulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In his 1994 paper titled, “The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity,” Alcubierre suggested a mechanism by which space-time could be “warped” both in front of and behind a spacecraft.
via How NASA might build its very first warp drive.
http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw81.html
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/ideachev_prt.htm
http://members.shaw.ca/mike.anderton/WarpDrive.pdf
http://tobias-lib.uni-tuebingen.de/dbt/volltexte/2001/240/pdf/09warp.html
http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/11/5/001/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#External_links