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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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The first warp drive design from the early 90s required massive amounts of negative energy, but three decades of honing the math later, scientists have lowered that threshold considerably.
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Now, a new study shows that Star Trek-inspired geometries can funnel those exotic energy requirements to end-caps of Gaussian cylinders (or nacelles), showing that warp metrics can fit starship designs.
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However, these designs still require negative energy—an exotic matter that appears impossible in classical physics.
While living in his dorm at the University of Cardiff, Wales, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre—then pursuing a Ph.D. in numerical relativity—wrote a short paper detailing the physical reality of the warp drive. Alcubierre often spent Friday nights with friends watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and one night, he pondered how exactly such an engine could work. Eventually published in 1994, the young physicist couldn’t have known that the resulting paper would inspire decades of research into the real-world applications of warp drives.
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Now, a new study led by Harold “Sonny” White—former NASA scientist and leader of the experimental Eagleworks laboratory at Johnson Space Center—presents the latest chapter based on Alcubierre’s original work. Instead of relying on Alcubierre’s spherical warp bubble metric, White and his colleagues at Casimir Space developed a new kind of warp topology that limits the physical limitations of warp-drive physics. The results of the study were published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
“The study derives a new class of warp bubbles built from discrete warp nacelles, rather than the single continuous ring used in the traditional Alcubierre model,” Harold told Popular Mechanics in an email. “This creates a more modular, engine-like architecture for shaping spacetime.”
Serious Star Trek fans are familiar with the term nacelles—the long, cylindrical engines that power the Starship Enterprise—but in an interview with The Debrief, White ssaidays the nacelles (technically Gaussian cylinders) are much more than just an homage.
“The resemblance to the twin nacelles of the USS Enterprise is not merely aesthetic,” White told The Debrief, “but reflects a potential convergence between physical requirements and engineering design, where science-fiction architectures hint at practical pathways for real warp-capable configurations.”
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Alcubierre’s original warp metric came with a few limitations, but the big one is that it required exotic matter known as “negative energy.” While evidence of this matter can be observed in the quantum world with the Casimir effect, classical physics doesn’t allow for its existence—and Alcubierre’s warp bubble required universal quantities of the stuff. In the three decades since Alcubierre’s paper, scientists have improved on the design (mainly by lowering the amounts of negative energy required), but they have only brought the idea of warp travel from the impossible to the improbable in doing so.
This new design creates a geometry that shifts the energy to nacelle cylinders, allowing the body of the spacecraft to remain stable in a hypothetical faster-than-light journey. However, White’s design still relies on some future breakthrough that could somehow create and harness negative energy—a big “if.”
Because negative energy is such a confounding limitation in warp drive physics, some physicists have instead focused their attention on sunlight warp drives that don’t rely on exotic matter. But regardless of design philosophy, the warp drive remains a thing for fiction—at least, for now.
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