At the very beginning of the XX century, a young employee of the patent office from the city of Bern shocked the world community with his new proposed picture of the world. The clerk's name was Albert Einstein, and his idea today is widely known as Theory of Relativity. The fact is that at the turn of the century in the world of physics there was a popular opinion that all the secrets of nature are already, in general, known, and scientists have only to solve a few minor problems.
The theory of relativity literally turned all ideas about the laws of physics. Its main achievement was finding the exact relationship between space and time. Thanks to Albert Einstein, these two quantities were now presented and are presented to physicists as clearly connected and interdependent. The constant linking time and space is the constancy of the speed of light propagation in a vacuum. However, the same Theory of Relativity claimed that the speed of light is the highest possible speed in nature. Since photons are massless quantum particles, not a single particle with a positive mass (and the material surrounding us consists of them) can approach light speed. Indeed, for this acceleration, she would need infinite energy, which by definition is impossible. But after all, there are several light years to the stars closest to us. And before many of them hundreds and thousands of light years! So, is any, even the fastest possible spacecraft, doomed to spend centuries on overcoming interstellar spaces?
Rescue Warp Speed
The laws of physics cannot be violated, but it turns out that they, like any legal laws, leave us loopholes that allow us to circumvent them and outwit nature itself. And the answer lies all in the same Theory of Relativity. Developing his ideas, Einstein and some of his contemporaries also managed to discover the connection between space-time and gravity. In short, this connection is that gravity bends time and space.
So, near objects in space that have monstrous gravitational influence, the passage of time greatly slows down, and space itself is literally compressed. The warp engine owes this discovery to its discovery as a popular image in science fiction of the second half of the 20th century, and also as a promising idea for modern scientists. In space it is impossible to move faster than the speed of light, but theoretically the space itself can be deformed so that it is compressed between two objects. For example, a spacecraft and a coveted star. The warp engine, therefore, could not quickly overcome long distances, but with the help of a specially created curvature field, it could make these very distances surprisingly close. Of course, while this is just a fantasy, nothing of the sort exists in human technology. The warp engine is better known for series like Star Trek, Star Gate, Star Wars, and the like. After all, there he is the most important element of science fiction stories, explaining their very possibility.
NASA Warp Engine
However, such a technology could theoretically be implemented in the future. Moreover, research in this area is already underway. The idea was first proposed in 1994 by a physicist from Mexico Miguel Alcubierre. Actually, it was he who proposed creating a kind of bubble that will surround the ship and deform the space around it as necessary. The main problem of current calculations remains that the warp engine may require too much and yet unattainable energy for its work. However, NASA is already conducting many experiments to solve important problems regarding the capabilities and physical properties of the phenomenon.