Warp drive
The general concept of "warp drive" was introduced by John W. Campbell in his 1957 novel Islands of Space and was popularized by the Star Trek series.
Its closest real-life equivalent is the Alcubierre drive, a theoretical solution of the field equations of general relativity.
[5]: 142 A spacecraft equipped with a warp drive may travel at speeds greater than that of light by many orders of magnitude.
[8][9]: 77 [10] Brave New Words gave the earliest example of the term "space-warp drive" as Fredric Brown's Gateway to Darkness (1949), and also cited an unnamed story from Cosmic Stories (May 1941) as using the word "warp" in the context of space travel, although the usage of this term as a "bend or curvature" in space which facilitates travel can be traced to several works as far back as the mid-1930s, for example Jack Williamson's The Cometeers (1936).
[5]: 212, 268 Einstein's theory of special relativity states that speed of light travel is impossible for material objects that, unlike photons, have a non-zero rest mass.
Warp drives are one of the science-fiction tropes that serve to circumvent this limitation in fiction to facilitate stories set at galactic scales.
[11] However, the concept of space warp has been criticized as "illogical", and has been connected to several other rubber science ideas that do not fit into our current understanding of physics, such as the transporters and replicators in Star Trek, antigravity or negative mass.
The spacecraft resides within this bubble, moving with the local spacetime without experiencing relativistic time dilation or violating causality.
Casimir effect experiments have hinted at the existence of negative energy in quantum fields, but practical production at the required scale remains speculative.
The drive could theoretically manipulate virtual particle pairs or create localized energy gradients via quantum entanglement.
[8] Alcubierre stated in an email to William Shatner that his theory was directly inspired by the term used in the TV series Star Trek[16] and cites the "'warp drive' of science fiction" in his 1994 article.
[3] In the first pilot episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, "The Cage", it is referred to as a "hyperdrive", with Captain Pike stating the speed to reach planet Talos IV as "time warp, factor 7".
A strong energy source, usually a so-called warp core or sometimes called intermix chamber, generates a high-energy plasma.
The energy produced passes through a matrix, which is made of a fictional chemical element, called dilithium.
In order to focus more on the story and away from the technobabble, Gene Roddenberry commissioned Michael Okuda to invent a revised warp scale.
In the same author's comment, Okuda explains that the motivation was to fulfill fan expectations that the new Enterprise is much faster than the original, but without changing the warp factor numbers.
[22] Only in a single episode of Star Trek Voyager there was a specific numerical speed value given for a warp factor.
In the episode "The 37's", Tom Paris tells Amelia Earhart that Warp 9.9 is about 4 billion miles per second (using customary units for the character's benefit).
Rick Sternbach described the basic idea in the Technical Manual: "Finally, we had to provide some loophole for various powerful aliens like Q, who have a knack for tossing the ship million of light years in the time of a commercial break.
