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Warp Drive remained in the world of fiction until 1994 when Mexican Mathematician Miguel Alcubierre presented a mathematical model under which a human-piloted craft could theoretically exceed the speed of light. A decade passed, but quietly in the background, NASA brought in scientist Dr. Harold G. “Sonny” White in the mid-2000s to continue developing the Warp Drive. White made refinements to the original model, and in 2003 and 2011, significant leaps were made in Warp Drive theory, seemingly making the impossible a little more possible. Even more revisions have been, and today, the leading model for faster-than-light travel is dubbed...

The concept of time travel has always captured the imagination of physicists and laypersons alike. But is it really possible? Of course it is. We're doing it right now, aren't we? We are all traveling into the future one second at a time. But that was not what you were thinking. Can we travel much further into the future? Absolutely. If we could travel close to the speed of light, or in the proximity of a black hole, time would slow down enabling us to travel arbitrarily far into the future. The really interesting question is whether we can travel...

Astronomers propose an experiment that may close the last major loophole of Bell's inequality -- a 50-year-old theorem that, if violated by experiments, would mean that our universe is based not on the textbook laws of classical physics, but on the less-tangible probabilities of quantum mechanics. Such a quantum view would allow for seemingly counterintuitive phenomena such as entanglement, in which the measurement of one particle instantly affects another, even if those entangled particles are at opposite ends of the universe. Among other things, entanglement -- a quantum feature Albert Einstein skeptically referred to as "spooky action at a distance"...

HOUSTON — Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory. Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects. He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it...

Two new studies to be published in the European Physical Journal D demonstrate that the speed of light is variable in real space. Textbook explanations of the speed of light assume that light travels in a vacuum, but space is not a vacuum. … It is not expected that the small variation in the speed of light which has been found will affect the universally accepted theories of particle physics and quantum mechanics to a large extent. However, the studies are proof that the speed of light may be variable, and shows that the mathematical treatments that have long been...

New theory describes faster than light travel, could explain CERN's results Some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, including Albert Einstein, consider the speed of light a sort of universal "speed limit".  But over the past couple decades physicists theorized that it should be possible to break this law and get away with it -- to travel faster than the speed of light. I. CERN Results Potentially Described One of several possible routes to faster-than-light travel was potentially demonstrated when researchers at CERN, the European physics organization known for maintaining the Large Hadron Collider, sent high-energy particles through the Earth's crust from Geneva, Switzerland...

There was definitely some excitement in the physics world last Fall when the OPERA Collaboration in Gran Sasso, Italy, announced that they had measured neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. I’ve been skeptical of this announcement since the first day, and in the intervening months since, things have been looking worse for the measurement. This culminated last month when the OPERA Collaboration admitted that the faster-than-light measurement may have been due to a simple measurement error. Now, in what may well be the final nail in the coffin for the claim that neutrinos travel faster than light, scientists...

An international team of scientists has recorded neutrino particles traveling faster than the speed of light, a spokesman for the researchers said on Thursday -- in what could be a challenge to one of the fundamental rules of physics. If confirmed, the discovery would overturn a key part of Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that nothing in the universe can travel faster than light.

Einstein's special theory of relativity predicts that nothing can exceed the speed of light. But special relativity applies when spacetime is flat. When spacetime is curved, the theory applies only "locally"--that is, over regions of spacetime small enough to be considered flat. Consider the analogy of a plane that is tangent to a sphere. The flat geometry of the plane is a good approximation to the geometry of the sphere when the size of the plane is very small compared to the sphere's radius of curvature.

The Future According to Professor Paul Davies "Scientists have no doubt whatever that it is possible to build a time machine to visit the future". Since the publication of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, few, if any, scientists would dispute that time travel to the future is perfectly possible. According to this theory, time runs slower for a moving person than for someone who is stationary. This has been proven by experiments using very accurate atomic clocks. In theory, a traveller on a super high-speed rocket ship could fly far out into the Universe and then come back...