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From the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/06/11/this-is-the-amazing-design-for-nasas-star-trek-style-space-ship-the-ixs-enterprise/:
NASA engineer and physicist Harold White announced a few years ago that he was working on a potentially groundbreaking idea that could allow space travel faster than the speed of light.
Yes, like in "Star Trek." http://techland.time.com/2012/09/19/nasa-actually-working-on-faster-than-light-warp-drive/
An over-simplified explanation is that the concept seeks to exploit a "loophole" in Albert Einstein's theory of relativity that allows travel faster than the speed of light by expanding space-time behind the object and contracting space-time front of it. Essentially, the empty space behind a starship would be made to expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction — passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration. White speculates that such a drive could result in "speeds" that could take a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks — even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.
So how quickly can this all become a reality? According to White, in an interview with i09 http://io9.gizmodo.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive, proving that the math can become a reality in the lab is the first and probably most important step in the process:
What White is waiting for is existence of proof — what he's calling a "Chicago Pile" moment — a reference to a great practical example.
..."In late 1942, humanity activated the first nuclear reactor in Chicago generating a whopping half Watt — not enough to power a light bulb," he said. "However, just under one year later, we activated a ~4MW reactor which is enough to power a small town. Existence proof is important."
White explains in great detail the science behind his quest in this lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M8yht_ofHc&feature=youtu.be
(Score: 1) by raattgift on Thursday March 10 2016, @06:22PM
Yes, that's pretty much the idea.
There's a relatively recent paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.3706) whose greatest value is a good compilation of citations of work on the idea in the original Alcubierre paper (arXiv:gr-qc/0009013), with references to about 15 papers on the topic.
Conformal gravity was popular five years ago, but has some problems just reproducing GR in the weak field limit; it gives the wrong physics at short length scales (in particular natural-seeming approaches to Conformal Gravity badly mispredict the outcomes of Cavendish style experiments); it doesn't offer up a clear initial values formulation; and it's not very useful as a purely classical theory, and quantization of its gravitational field almost certainly has to rely on couplings with matter fields. There's a lot of work to do to demonstrate that conformal gravity is viable; massaging gives good galactic rotation curves, but not good galaxy-collisional results; it's hard to see why one shouldn't therefore prefer \Lambda-CDM. Conformal gravity is also likely to have trouble with gravitational waves so far matching GR within experimental limits; in CG, gravitational waves have a different structure, as vacuum solutions grow in space or time.
So a "physicalization" of the Alcubierre metric (maybe) being more theoretically viable in a context of a theory of gravity that is not itself clearly viable is not especially interesting in itself. That said, Section I is a good well-referenced overview of literature right up to the half-way point of page 3. (Section III, right up to the paragraph after equation 15) is also worth a look, even if one doesn't think highly of conformal gravity).