Dr. Katy Clough

No, no.

Well, okay, I should caveat a bit before we start and say, you know, most of my work doesn't involve warp drives.

I work mainly on black holes.

But I have a kind of, yeah, side interest in warp drives.

So I guess, you know, this idea of warp drives, it does have several technical problems in practice, but it is grounded in real physical theory, in particular in Einstein's theory of general relativity, that tells us that space-time can be curved by particular types of matter.

So, I mean, my regular research, as I say, is into black holes and black holes are where space time has become so curved that actually nothing can escape from that region.

So things just sort of fall into the black hole because it's like a really deep well that they fall into.

So describing this kind of curvature of space time is actually, you know, as I say, it's my day job.

It's what I do most of the time.

And I use computers to do that.

And at some point we realized that all these simulations that we were doing of black holes actually would work for describing this phenomenon of warp bubbles, of warp drives that appear in Star Trek.

And since I'm a bit of a Star Trek fan and a couple of my colleagues who I work with are also big Star Trek fans, we couldn't resist doing some simulations to see what would happen with warp drives in the hypothetical world in which they existed.

Yeah, so it's really, it is a really radical concept in physics, this idea of space-time curvature.

So, you know, if you and I are sitting across from each other in some room, you know, you think that there's a fixed distance between us and that that is somehow something that we move through.

You know, you could walk across the room to me.

But actually what I have in mind with this idea of space-time curvature is that somehow I could shrink the space between us.

So we wouldn't get closer because we move through space towards each other.

We'd get closer because somehow I compressed space.

So space could be kind of squashed into a smaller space.

And so by doing that, I arrive next to you automatically.