“I call it the 'you need one to make one' problem,” says Natário. The warp drive experiences the same effect with light waves, meaning there is no way to send a message ahead of you. You don’t hear the aircraft until it has already gone past, because the sound waves can’t keep up. Imagine a supersonic aircraft travelling faster than the speed of sound. Natário believes there’s an even greater problem with the concept of the Alcubierre drive. Star Trek 's USS Enterprise, the iconic warp-capable ship © Alamy Instead of being pulled towards a planet or star, they would be thrown away. These particles would react to gravity in the exact opposite way to particles of positive mass. One way to think about it is to consider a particle with negative mass. Negative energy is not something that we can currently create – certainly not in the quantities needed to power a warp drive. The science of Picard with Dr Erin Macdonald.Star Trek Picard premiere: solving plot holes, supernovae and our Sun’s fate.“To have the deformation that you need for this kind of thing to work, you'd need much, much more energy than the Sun or the Galaxy,” he says. “You have to have a very, very large amount of energy,” says José Natário, Associate Professor in mathematics at the Instituto Superior Técnico in the University of Lisbon.
Unfortunately, actually creating a warp drive is even harder than it sounds. The result is that the bubble of space-time is hurled across the Universe, with the travellers sitting comfortably inside their ship, speedometer still reading the same number.
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.
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. Five things from Star Trek that came true.Star Trek-inspired aeroplane powered by ‘ionic wind’ takes flight.' Star Trek replicator' uses light to create 3D objects in minutes.Read more about the science of Star Trek:
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