yahoo news wrote:

Warp-drive technology, a form of "faster than light" travel popularized by TV's "Star Trek," could be bolstered by the physics of quantum thrusters — another science-fiction idea made plausible by modern science.

NASA scientists are performing experiments that could help make warp drive a possibility sometime in the future from a lab built for the Apollo program at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

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. [Warp Drives and Transporters: How 'Star Trek' Tech Works (Infographic)]

"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."

While these results are intriguing, they are in no way definitive proof that warp drive could work, White said. The scaled-down experiments are just a first step toward understanding if these concepts can be taken out of the realm of theory and applied practically.

On 2013-08-27 10:25, General_Magician wrote:
Man, you guys are ready to tell people something can't be done before you will ever tell anybody it can be done. I imagine back in the 60s when Star Trek first came out they said the same thing about cell phones. It couldn't be done and here we are today with cell phones. They probably said the same thing about putting a man on the moon back in the 1930s and 40s: that it couldn't be done and would never happen. Yet, 20 or 30 years later Neil Armstrong walked the moon.

On 2013-08-27 08:54, General_Magician wrote:
Some of the Star Trek technologies like cell phones have now become reality. Who knows, maybe warp drive will become reality as well:

yahoo news wrote:

... The rings would utilize an *exotic form of matter* to cause space-time to contract in front of and expand behind them.

On 2013-08-27 20:32, Jonathan Townsend wrote:
... Remember the decade(s) wait for Alain Aspect's work on entangled photons.

On 2013-08-27 10:25, General_Magician wrote:
Man, you guys are ready to tell people something can't be done before you will ever tell anybody it can be done. I imagine back in the 60s when Star Trek first came out they said the same thing about cell phones. It couldn't be done and here we are today with cell phones. They probably said the same thing about putting a man on the moon back in the 1930s and 40s: that it couldn't be done and would never happen. Yet, 20 or 30 years later Neil Armstrong walked the moon.

On 2013-08-28 02:17, acesover wrote:
Lets see. Does faster than light mean that if I am looking right from where said object is coming from it will be here and gone, then I will see it coming?

Is that about right?

On 2013-08-28 17:10, Jonathan Townsend wrote:

Quote:

On 2013-08-28 02:17, acesover wrote:
Lets see. Does faster than light mean that if I am looking right from where said object is coming from it will be here and gone, then I will see it coming?

Is that about right?

Yup, there's some mention of this in Adam Roberts recent book Jack Glass.