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Your support makes all the difference.It turns out that Star Trek's Mr Scott was right when he would tell Captain Kirk: "Warp Factor Nine? But Captain, the engines canna take it!" The reason being that physicists have, yet again, quashed hopes of building a spaceship that could travel faster than light.
Why? Because they have calculated that to work, it would require more energy than is contained in the universe. Not so much Warp Factor Nine, as Warp Factor None.
The hopes of Trekkies were raised three years ago when Miguel Alcubierre, then at the University of Wales in Cardiff, suggested that a faster-than- light starship might be possible. Although the laws of physics do not allow an object to travel faster than light, he suggested that the same effect could be produced by "shrinking" space in front of the craft, and "expanding" that behind to make the destination closer and the departure point further away, propelling the spaceship faster than light. However, Mitchell Pfenning and Larry Ford, at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts used Einstein's general theory of relativity to work out that the total amount of negative energy needed to sustain such a warp would have to be about 10 billion times the energy locked up in all the visible mass of the universe. Professor Ford told New Scientist magazine: "I don't think it's very likely anyone will find a way to do this."
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