A physicist named Harold White recently made the landmark announcement that he and his team at NASA were beginning work on a faster-than-light warp drive. And he doesn’t say ‘warp drive’ lightly – it works very much like the engines we see in Star Trek.
You see in 1994, a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre published a paper titled, “The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity“. In this paper, he showed that it was possible to travel faster than light without violating relativity and without the introduction of wormholes.
How? The mechanics of it involves a localized expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship, and a corresponding contraction in front of it. This creates what Star Trek would call a “warp bubble” around the spaceship, moving spacetime around the ship. Since spacetime can be contracted/expanded as fast as you like, from a frame of reference outside the disturbed region, it would appear that the spaceship was moving faster than light. Of course, within the ship’s frame of reference, it will perceive no acceleration at all, and would not be exceeding the speed of light, thus not violating relativity. To the ship, everything else has moved around it, while to us Earthlings, it’s sped off at warp 9.