Star Trek warp drive comes closer to reality | Albuquerque Express

Star Trek warp drive comes closer to reality

Albuquerque Express (ANI) Sunday 17th August, 2008

London, Aug 17 : Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive may no longer be the exclusive domain of science fiction writers, with two physicists from Baylor devising a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light.

Associate Professor Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy have come up with a novel idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics.

A starship could "warp" space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it.

By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds.

According to the physicists, scientists would require to harness a mysterious and poorly understood cosmic antigravity force, called dark energy.

The dark energy is believed to be responsible for speeding up the expansion rate of the universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light for a very brief time.

According to relativity theory, matter cannot move through space faster than the speed of light, which is almost 300,000,000 metres per second.

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