did scientists figure out how to make a warp drive? well... yes, and no

According to popular science headlines claim that we've cracked how to make a warp drive within the known laws of physics. The reality is a lot more complicated.

Warp drives, much like fusion reactors and quantum computers, seem to be a source of reliable clicks for pop sci publications. It makes sense to an extent because we are more or less expecting these technologies to show up any day now thanks to just how often we see them in sci-fi, and because we seem to be making steady progress with fusion and quantum computing. But warp drives on the other hand... Yeah, that's a bit more complicated. And by a bit, I mean very.

Supposedly, scientists already created the first warp bubbles in late 2021 in a NASA lab, which sounds impressive until you dig into the actual story and realize that their success is limited to simulations, and only with subatomic particles at that. Quantum particles do weird stuff all the time, but they're not magic — no matter what cheery people on the internet asking for your money will tell you — and we don't know what effects that can see in the subatomic world can scale up to our macro reality. If we did, we wouldn't still be hunting for the Theory of Everything in physics.

Enter the new paper from a think tank called Applied Physics, which claims that they figured out how to build a workable warp drive. Except it's not a warp drive as we know it because it couldn't travel faster than the speed of light, just get really, really close. This is because the current problem with many recent warp drive models is a need for the bubble to be already traveling faster than light when it forms, and the study's authors didn't want to bite off more than they could chew.

Basically, they could solve for how to make a warp bubble, or they could do that and solve a paradox that's been leaving a lot of physicists scratching their heads, so they decided to focus on just the first part and create a simulation package others could use to push their math even further.

No, no, stop booing, that's actually a good thing. The team just wanted to learn how to crawl and maybe take their first step or two before running, which is just good, proper engineering. Their math is also interesting. There's quite a bit of it, especially if you're a fan of integral calculus. Unfortunately, a lot of said math is jargon-heavy spherical chicken in a vacuum type of stuff which assumes that we could use a phenomenon of some sort to create black hole-like gravity wells with spaceships in the center without actually creating an event horizon by not exceeding the speed of light.

And that's the catch. If you use something the authors heavily imply to be the Casimir effect — see the first link for more detail — some of the big paradoxes created when you try to move the fabric of space-time faster than 299,792 km/s never really have to happen in the first place. Of course, that's a pretty big catch because isn't the whole point of a warp drive to travel between stars in months and years instead of centuries and millennia? We already know how to travel at 99% the speed of light. We just need a whole bunch of antimatter and some heavy duty shielding.

But even a sub-luminal warp bubble may still have plenty of value, and would in fact be a fantastic addition to an ultra-relativistic spaceship powered by antimatter.

You see, space may be a vacuum, but it's not an absolute one, and a whole lot of stuff still floats between stars and planets. In interstellar space, its density is about an atom per cubic centimeter, meaning that a 30 meter wide spaceship would hit an estimated 121 quadrillion atoms per second, three in four of them hydrogen, one in four of them helium, and maybe one in a hundred being something else. That sure seems like a lot but keep in mind that it would take at least 317 years to collide with enough of atoms to pick up the mass of an average human. In typical interplanetary space, that number becomes 64 years.

But if all we had to deal with were some hydrogen and helium atoms, that wouldn't be much of a problem. Random floating space rocks, rogue planets, blasts of radiation from exploding or convulsing stars are far more disconcerting, and have a real chance of either knocking spacecraft off-course, or surprising them. Imagine rear-ending an asteroid at 98% the speed of light. You'd be instantly dissolved into a plasma of, well, mostly hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen ions.

Now, if you're protected by a warp bubble that allows you to push all these obstacles out of your way using what is effectively gravity... Well, that would make your trip a lot safer, wouldn't it? Plus, if we at least know how to bend space approaching the speed of light, maybe it will give us crucial insights we need to one day exceed it. We won't know unless we try, and thanks to this paper, we have some new math and simulation tools to start conducting new experiments.

See: Fuchs, J., et. al (2024) Constant velocity physical warp drive solution, Classical Quantum Gravity 41:9, DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/ad26aa