They have just given humanity the keys to interstellar travel

With the vehicle’s ease of operation, the crew of the starship USS Enterprise embarks on a new adventure in each episode of Star Trek, somehow traveling at speeds several times faster than the speed of light. This science fiction style of practical interstellar travel, first seen by television viewers in 1966, inspired Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre Moya to investigate the feasibility of an actual method of propulsion at the speed of light. Decades later, he published his cutting-edge research to an amazed community of theoretical physicists. The Alcubierre warp drive is supposed to shrink the spacetime in front of the spacecraft and expand the spacetime behind it, so that the spacecraft moves from point A to point B at an “arbitrarily fast” speed. By distorting space-time — the continuum surrounding the three dimensions of space and time — an observer outside the ship’s curvature bubble will see it moving at a speed faster than the speed of light, although observers inside the ship will not feel it. That is, acceleration forces.

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If a hyperluminous (i.e., faster-than-light) engine like the one in Alcubierre were to succeed, it would revolutionize humanity’s efforts in the universe, allowing us, perhaps, to reach Alpha Centauri, our closest star system, in days or weeks even if Four light years away.

However, the Alcubierre engine faces an obvious problem: the force driving it, called “negative energy,” involves exotic particles, a hypothetical matter that, as far as we know, does not exist in our universe. Exotic particles are described only in mathematical terms, and act in unexpected ways, such as having negative mass and acting against gravity (in fact, they have “anti-gravity”). For the past 30 years, scientists have been publishing research that removes the inherent constraints on the speed of light, revealed by Alcubierre’s seminal 1994 article in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Now, researchers at the New York-based Center for Applied Physics Research believe they have found a new and innovative way to solve the fundamental obstacle of the curved motor. In collaboration with colleagues from other institutions, the team created a “positive energy” system that does not violate known laws of physics. According to two of the study’s authors, this is a radical change: Gianni Martier, CEO of Applied Physics, and Jared Fox, a physician and senior scientist at the same company. Their work, which was also published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity at the end of April, could be the first chapter in the handbook for interstellar spaceflight.

You can read the full memo at Respected