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.