Examples of FTL proposals are changing the " frequency " of mass to a higher state by applying high-frequency waves of energy, the Alcubierre drive, and the traversable wormhole, although the physical plausibility of some of these solutions is uncertain.

Miguel Alcubierre theorized that it would be possible to create an Alcubierre drive, in which a ship would be enclosed in a " warp bubble " where the space at the front of the bubble is rapidly contracting and the space at the back is rapidly expanding, with the result that the bubble can reach a distant destination much faster than a light beam moving outside the bubble, but without objects inside the bubble locally traveling faster than light.

However, several objections raised against the Alcubierre drive appear to rule out the possibility of actually using it in any practical fashion.

As with the Alcubierre drive, travelers moving through the wormhole would not locally move faster than light which travels through the wormhole alongside them, but they would be able to reach their destination ( and return to their starting location ) faster than light traveling outside the wormhole.

One such distortion is the Alcubierre drive, which can be thought of as producing a ripple in spacetime that carries an object along with it.

* Alcubierre drive

Two-dimensional visualization of the Alcubierre drive, showing the opposing regions of expanding and contracting spacetime that displace the central region.

The Alcubierre drive, however, remains a hypothetical concept with seemingly insuperable problems: Though the amount of energy required is no longer thought to be unobtainably large, there is no method to create a warp bubble in a region that does not already contain one, and there is no method to move from the warp-bubble once having arrived at an intended destination.

The Alcubierre metric defines the warp drive spacetime.

Alcubierre chose a specific form for the function f, but other choices give a simpler spacetime exhibiting the desired " warp drive " effects more clearly and simply.

Faster-than-light travel is often used in science fiction to denote a wide variety of imaginary propulsion methods, though not necessarily based on the Alcubierre drive or any other physical theory.

The Alcubierre drive theory is proposed as a possible reason for events occurring in the graphic novel " Orbiter " by Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran.

The Ian Douglas " Star Carrier " series exclusively uses the Alcubierre drive as the main mode of interstellar travel.

:* H. E. Puthoff, " SETI, the velocity-of-light limitation, and the Alcubierre warp drive: an integrating overview ," Physics Essays 9, 156-158 ( 1996 ).

da: Alcubierre drive

A valid solution for faster-than-light travel which models the warp drive concept, called the Alcubierre drive, was formulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.

* Alcubierre drive

( See: warp drive ; hyperspace ; Alcubierre drive.

Thus the mathematical formulation of the Alcubierre metric does not contradict the conventional claim that the laws of relativity do not allow a slower-than-light object to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds.

For those familiar with the effects of special relativity, such as Lorentz contraction and time dilation, the Alcubierre metric has some apparently peculiar aspects.

In general relativity, one often first specifies a plausible distribution of matter and energy, and then finds the geometry of the spacetime associated with it ; but it is also possible to run the Einstein field equations in the other direction, first specifying a metric and then finding the energy-momentum tensor associated with it, and this is what Alcubierre did in building his metric.

( Amoroso claims to have solved problems of the Alcubierre metric such as need for large negative mass energy.

* Alcubierre metric ( which has been used as a speculative toy model of effectively superluminal space travel, as in the warp drive from Star Trek ).

The particular form that Alcubierre studied is defined by:

In particular, Alcubierre has shown that even when the ship is accelerating, it travels on a free-fall geodesic.

But in this case, the Alcubierre Drive vessel is not able to go dashing around the galaxy at will.

Thus, according to Coule, an Alcubierre Drive is required in order to build an Alcubierre Drive.

A more recent paper by Carlos Barceló, Stefano Finazzi, and Stefano Liberati makes use of quantum theory to argue that the Alcubierre Drive at FTL velocities is impossible ; mostly due to extremely high temperatures caused by Hawking radiation destroying anything inside the bubble at superluminal velocities and leading to instability of the bubble itself.

* Exact solutions in general relativity ( for more on the sense in which the Alcubierre spacetime is a solution ).

The Alcubierre drive is the only feasible concept, highly hypothetical, that exists nowadays and that is able in theory to impulse a spacecraft to speeds faster than light.

In M. John Harrison's novel Light, the character Ed Chianese, while trying to get a job with the Circus of Pathet Lao, claims that he " rode navigator on Alcubierre ships.

In 1994 Alcubierre proposed a way of changing the geometry of space by creating a wave which would cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand.

Coule has argued that schemes such as the one proposed by Alcubierre are infeasible as matter placed en route of the intended path of a craft has to be placed at superluminal speed.

Coule argues that an analogous objection will apply to any proposed method of constructing an Alcubierre Drive.

These results seem to make it rather unlikely that one could construct Alcubierre warp drives using exotic matter generated by quantum effects.

The Alcubierre theory, or anything similar, did not exist when the series was conceived, but Alcubierre stated in an email to William Shatner that his theory was directly inspired by the term used in the show, and references it in his 1994 paper.

* Alcubierre, Miguel ; The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity, Classical and Quantum Gravity 11 ( 1994 ), L73 – L77

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