Jonathan McCrea

Dr. Katie Clough is an astrophysicist at Queen Mary University of London.

She joins me now.

Welcome to the program, Katie.

This is obviously something that's been in so many science fiction movies and TV series, obviously in Star Trek, but the physics and the ideas behind a warp drive, being able to jump at light speed to another part of the universe.

That's kind of what you're working on, in a way?

A side hustle.

And so how did you end up actually studying something like this, and what drives your interest?

Okay, so talk to me about the physics of a warp drive.

You talked about the curvature of space.

And this idea that time and space are sort of not constant is kind of a crazy one.

Talk to me about the physics of a warp bubble.

And so this shrinking of the space in between us,

I mean, do we see that in black holes?

Is that what you mean?

Is that theoretically, if we had the immense power to do something like that, and I presume it requires some immense power and some fancy physics, it is theoretically possible.

What is negative energy?

We would need a lot of this, though, presumably.

It really is.

I mean, and that's a lot of, that's even more negative energy than my poor producer has to deal with.

So just forgetting the impossibility of that right now, because who knows, future technologies and all that.