The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity
1994/05/01 by Miguel Alcubierre · 5 voices · 15 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0264-9381/11/5/001
openalex publication_date 1994/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Abstract
It is shown how, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the `warp drive' of science fiction. However, just as happens with wormholes, exotic matter will be needed in order to generate a distortion of spacetime like the one discussed here.
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Discussions
- It depends on what you mean by "valid." If you're asking whether $G_{00}=8\pi T_{00}$ implies that $G_{\mu\nu} = 8\pi T_{\mu\nu}$ then the answer is of course not - you need the other components of $T [stackexchange, 4 points]
- The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity [hn, 1 points, 0 comments]
- C'est en 1994 que Miguel Alcubierre, physicien mexicain et fan de Star Trek, publie un article : “The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel within General Relativity”. Il voulait voir si on pouvait rendre ce [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]
- Good question. The research is at the point where there is a serious debate about what drives the warp drive bubble. The question can be divided into two parts: What is the mechanism that maintains th [stackexchange, 0 points]
- Warp Drive Within Einstein’s General Relativity • The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within #general relativity (Miguel Alcubierre, arXiv) — foundational theoretical physics paper proposing a metric to [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]
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