Scientists Haven’t ‘Created’ a Warp Bubble, But They’re a Bit Closer to Testing One

by Jessica Hall

Sorry to our fellow hopeful space nerds, but we have to burst everyone’s warp bubble. Despite recent reports that scientists have “accidentally created a warp bubble,” it looks like warp speed is still a few baby steps away. But all hope is not lost: a group of scientists led by Dr. Harold G. “Sunny” White has proposed a structure that could actually be built in the real world and used to study the Casimir effect. It might be a baby step, but it’s a real one.

The Casimir effect, for the uninitiated, is a very small attractive force that exists between two uncharged but conductive parallel plates that are held very, very close together. It used to be a purely hypothetical offshoot of relativity, but now that we’ve seen it happen in real life, it’s high on the list of real-world phenomena scientists are investigating to figure out how we might finally crack the problem of interstellar space exploration.

Specifically, the idea of an Alcubierre warp drive rests on the principle that under the right conditions, the space itself between a traveler and their destination could be induced to contract. This would mean that a hypothetical vessel could break the “cosmic speed limit” by arriving at their destination faster than the speed of light…