Harold White, known to his friends as Sonny, was only 11 years old when the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum was unveiled in his home city of Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1976. He and millions of other visitors explored the museum’s halls to marvel at decades-old airplanes and space modules that had only just returned Earth-side, including the Apollo 11’s command module, Columbia. It had remained in orbit as Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the moon. For White, visiting the museum became a pivotal moment that would ripple through his life and career as both a NASA scientist and dogged investigator of one of science’s most challenging problems: how to reach the stars.
As an avid Star Trek fan and a kid who showed an aptitude for math, White says his path toward studying space may have been predetermined, but wandering the museum’s halls helped stoke the flame. “This premise and the promise of space exploration for humanity just really always stuck with me,” he says. After all, we still haven’t sent people past the Moon, a cosmic stone’s throw from home, and our fastest unmanned spacecraft, Voyager 1, will take 75,000 years to reach our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri.
For White, the only solution that would extend the exploration of humanity beyond our solar system is to design a spacecraft that can travel the stars within a fraction of a human lifetime. In other words—warp drive.
Like many technologies White’s beloved Star Trek: The Original Series in the 1960s predicted, such as the flip phones and wireless headsets, warp drive is a science fiction creation that has demonstrated surprising scientific validity.
In the television show, switching to warp drive is as easy as putting your car into a higher gear and allows the U.S.S. Enterprise to blink out of existence as it skips through space-time at speeds quicker than light. Captain Kirk and his crew still have a head start of more than 200 years on this technology, and today’s warp drive science is still nowhere close to this ideal.
Here’s the modern science of warp drive, in a nutshell. Physicist Miguel Alcubierre published the prevailing model of warp drive in 1994, and it shows that warp speed travel could theoretically be possible. However, we first need to manipulate Einstein’s equations of general relativity using a type of exotic matter with negative energy. These equations essentially tell us that massive objects can distort space-time. A warp drive powered by this massive amount of energy would contort space-time into a bubble around the spacecraft, expanding space-time in front of the craft and compressing it behind. This warping would allow the craft itself to jump through interstellar space—without its passengers being any the wiser.
This idea has more than a few problems, chiefly that we’ve never observed this kind of negative energy source that Alcubierre predicts. But it’s this problem that White has been trying to solve.
Since his museum days, White has come a long way in studying the underlying technology for humanity’s race to interstellar space. When Alcubierre published his warp drive paper, it inspired White, who at the time was a young engineer at Boeing and pursuing his master’s degree in mechanical engineering.
White would go on to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Rice University in Houston before a 16-year stint at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where he worked on advancing human spaceflight. Yet, while White was already doing his part to further our exploration of the stars, the idea that warp drive could revolutionize it never left his mind. In 2013 while still working at NASA, White gave a presentation called “Warp Field Mechanics 102: Energy Optimization” that modified Alcubierre’s warp bubble to drastically reduce the amount of negative energy it required.
“By applying our optimization technique, we reduce the amount of exotic matter [required] from something the size of Jupiter to something about the size of the Voyager spacecraft,” White says. Voyager 1 is roughly the size of a compact car and weighs 733 kg.
Six-years later, White left NASA to become the director of advanced research and development at the newly founded Limitless Space Institute, whose goal is to “advance human exploration beyond our solar system” by researching both known physics, like nuclear powered propulsion, and unknown physics, like warp drive.
It was at the Limitless Space Institute in 2021, as part of ongoing work for the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), that White published a paper in the European Physical Journal C which showed that it was possible—though not yet experimentally proven—to develop a micro-scale warp bubble using a kind of quantum-level negative energy created by the Casimir effect.
Named after Dutch physicist, Hendrik Casimir, it describes a phenomenon that occurs when two uncharged but conducting metal plates are placed oppositely in a vacuum. The magnetic field surrounding them creates a negative force, which attracts them to each other. White and co-authors wrote in the paper’s abstract that this study suggests that “chip-scale” miniaturized experiments could be explored using the Casimir effect to develop “a real, albeit humble, warp bubble.”
Despite this splashy news and subsequent confusion that a real warp bubble had already been created, development on this work has been quiet over the last three years. White himself has said that he’s laser-focused on DARPA-funded work to explore Casimir cavities, the space between plates that creates the Casimir effect. in 2023 he became the CEO and founder of a nanotechnology company called Casimir that aims to“transform the energy landscape” by using nanotechnology that can interact with quantum fields.
So what does this mean for warp drive? At least for White, having no active projects in the works doesn’t mean that either he, or other researchers, are giving up.
Around the same time White published his warp bubble paper, a physicist in Germany published a paper in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity which suggests there may be a warp drive solution that could do away with negative energy altogether. This idea has sparked interest in the scientific community but, as of yet, this model still brings us no closer to achieving true warp drive.
Yet despite it all, White has not lost hope in this dream for humanity. “I think the thing that really resonated with me when I was young [was] always the people’s story — people working together to solve problems,” White says, thinking back to his days at the National Air and Space Museum.
Comparing the study of warp drive to the long construction of a French cathedral in Strasbourg between 1015 and 1439, White says that it’s possible he’ll never see the final product of his warp drive research. Still, he’s happy to contribute what he can so that one day it might be realized.
“I don’t know when or if warp drive will be developed,” White says, “But I know what I need to do next.”
Sarah is a science and technology journalist based in Boston interested in how innovation and research intersect with our daily lives. She has written for a number of national publications and covers innovation news at Inverse.
