Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The Alcubierre drive is frequently referred to in any and all discussion about FTL travel as "the Star Trek drive", but is there any in-universe evidence to suggest that the principles are at all similar?
Are the principles and workings of the Warp Drive shown at all in-universe, and if so, is there any similarity to that of the Alcubierre theory?
The Star Trek warp drive has some features in common with the Alcubierre drive, a theoretical faster-than-light drive proposed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. There is no canonical statement by producers or writers of the series to suggest that the warp drive is the Alcubierre drive.
From the Wikipedia article on the Alcubierre drive:
The Star Trek television series used the term "warp drive" to describe their method of faster-than-light travel. Neither the Alcubierre theory, nor anything similar, existed when the series was conceived, but Alcubierre stated in an email to William Shatner that his theory was directly inspired by the term used in the show, and references it in his 1994 paper.
In particular, the Alcubierre drive uses a "warp bubble".
From the same article:
The ship would then ride this wave inside a region of flat space, known as a warp bubble, and would not move within this bubble but instead be carried along as the region itself moves due to the actions of the drive.
As it stands, the Alcubierre metric is the best model we currently have for understanding Star Trek's warp drive at a mathematical / general relativistic level. (Caution: being the best model does not mean it is a good model).
IIRC the star trek drive creates a warp bubble that pushes the ship into a layer of subspace or something to that effect (which is why the omega particle and the damaging of subspace are plot points in certain episodes)
Alcubierre was inspired by the star trek description of a warp drive but the star trek warp drive is not technically an Alcubierre drive
No.
The Alcubierre drive makes use of a supply of negative energy whose gravitation creates a carefully shaped distortion in the space-time of General Relativity, nicknamed a "warp bubble" because Alcubierre was a Star Trek fan.
The Star Trek drive uses field coils to generate a warp field which in turn form a subspace bubble. Our current model of physics does not include either warp fields or subspace. There is no tradition in science fiction of using the word "subspace" to mean distortions in space-time, and as far as I know there is no indication in Star Trek canon of any direct connection between the warp drive and the various space-time distortions that they do come across.
In addition to the incompatible terminology, there are some explicit discrepancies:
There is no indication in canon that the Star Trek drive requires a supply of negative energy. If a supply of negative energy were required it would surely have been mentioned at some point. Note: antimatter has positive energy, just like ordinary matter.
Conversely, an Alcubierre drive does not require a supply of antimatter like a Star Trek warp drive does.
I believe an Alcubierre ship has a net mass of zero, so would not be directly affected by gravity even when the drives were off. In such a ship, it should (for example) be easy to avoid crash-landing on a planet. Ahem.
It is clear that in Star Trek there is an absolute rest frame, i.e., a meaningful "now" that applies at least throughout the galaxy, and that warp drive speeds are relative to the rest frame. While warp drives can be used to violate causality they do not do so as a matter of course. The theory of the Alcubierre drive does not allow for this, and in fact the lack of any obvious mechanism to resist causality violations is perhaps the primary criticism leveled at the concept.
