Space.com brings us hurtling into the future with the science of quantum thrusters… a real-life warp drive:
A warp-drive-enabled spacecraft would look like a football with two large rings fully encircling it. The rings would utilize an exotic form of matter to cause space-time to contract in front of and expand behind them. Harold “Sonny” White, a NASA physicist, is experimenting with these concepts on a smaller scale using a light-measuring device in the lab.
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“We’re looking for a change in path length of the photon on the interferometer, because that would be potential evidence that we’re generating the effect we’re looking for,” White told SPACE.com. “We’ve seen, in a couple different experiments with several different analytic techniques, a change in optical-path length. We’re making one leg of the interferometer seem a little shorter because of this device being on, versus the device being off. That doesn’t mean that it’s what we’re looking for.”
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The warp-drive ship itself would never be going faster than the speed of light, but the warped space-time around it could help the spacecraft achieve an effective speed of 10 times the speed of light within the confines of White’s concept.