It does not need /negative matter/ or energy, though.
What is needed, in the original, non-scammer-friendly version by Alcubierre is /something/ that can push spacetime in the opposite direction that mass and energy do.
At least the original Alcubierre solution, he basically lays out the mechanism and says, paraphrasing: "hey, the numbers do work out. We just need something that doesn't make sense, or something that makes /the thing/ happen"
We see then that, just as it happens with wormholes, one needs exotic matter to travel faster than the speed of light.
However, even if one believes that exotic matter is forbidden classically, it is well known that quantum field theory permits the existence ofregions with negative
energy densities in some special circumstances (as, for example, inthe Casimir effect [4]).
The need of exotic matter therefore doesn’t necessarily eliminate the possibility of using a spacetime distortion like the one described above for hyper-fast
interstellar travel.
The excitement here is partly due to the fact that this is both a trekkie thing and one that was previously not even supposed to numerically make sense.
It's likely this "not requiring any specific fringe-physics thing" is what is causing the idea to catch on and continue to be ellaborated, because having specificed this mechanics well enough, then maybe and only maybe it might be possible to cause at least an analogue of it to exist and that'd be awesome.
Any real warp drive is going to be kind of like setting off a bomb in the middle of a lake and then surfing the water to the center on a jetski, and hoping you can jump off the jetski before you hit the other stuff that is also rushing in with the water on the other side.
What is needed, in the original, non-scammer-friendly version by Alcubierre is /something/ that can push spacetime in the opposite direction that mass and energy do.
At least the original Alcubierre solution, he basically lays out the mechanism and says, paraphrasing: "hey, the numbers do work out. We just need something that doesn't make sense, or something that makes /the thing/ happen"
https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0009013.pdfThe excitement here is partly due to the fact that this is both a trekkie thing and one that was previously not even supposed to numerically make sense.
It's likely this "not requiring any specific fringe-physics thing" is what is causing the idea to catch on and continue to be ellaborated, because having specificed this mechanics well enough, then maybe and only maybe it might be possible to cause at least an analogue of it to exist and that'd be awesome.