Star Trek to Alcubierre and back out

A television drive of 1966 lends its name to a general relativity paper in 1994, and the paper then lends its name and its bill back to three fictions that name the physicist.

Kind: lineage · Span: 1966–2019 · Last reviewed: 2026-09-13

The line

The word came first. Star Trek premiered on NBC on 8 September 1966 with a ship that moved by warp drive, and the catalogue's Star Trek warp drive dossier records that the word itself is older still, going back to John W. Campbell's Islands of Space (1931), which is the story told on hyperspace-the-word. For twenty-eight years the drive was a stage convention with a warp factor chart and no physics. Then Miguel Alcubierre, a doctoral student at Cardiff, published a four-page letter in Classical and Quantum Gravity showing that general relativity permits a bubble of spacetime to carry a ship faster than light as seen from outside, at the price of negative energy. The abstract of Alcubierre 1994 says the distortion is "reminiscent of the 'warp drive' of science fiction". That sentence is the whole of the primary evidence for the borrowing, and it names science fiction, not Star Trek.

Star Trek by name rests on Alcubierre's later interviews, and until this page was written the catalogue had found none of them. There is now one in his own voice. In a long BBVA "Aprendemos Juntos" conversation, posted to YouTube in December 2024, Alcubierre says that as a child he watched everything in science fiction and a lot of Viaje a las estrellas, that in those programmes the ships always go faster than light, and that the idea of cheating relativity came to him during his doctorate while he was studying black holes. That is a weaker claim than the popular one. The show gave him the wish; the calculation came from his thesis work. The stronger story, in which he rents a VHS tape of The Next Generation on a Friday night in 1992 and cannot sleep, appears in a Popular Mechanics feature of November 2025 with a direct quotation, and it may well be true, but it is a press account and graded as one. The much-repeated line that he wrote to William Shatner that the theory was directly inspired by the show has never been traced past a blog; the likeliest home for it is Shatner's book I'm Working on That (2002), and Alcubierre did appear on camera in the 2005 documentary made from that book, but nobody in this catalogue has opened the book.

The line then runs back out into fiction, and this time the physicist is named. Frontier's Elite Dangerous (2014) has a supercruise mode that moves space rather than the ship, and its community wiki links the mechanism to Alcubierre with no developer statement behind it. Seth MacFarlane's The Orville (2017) is the clean case: its science consultant André Bormanis told a set visit that the writers were "using the theories of physicist Miguel Alcubierre", that the ship's rings come from the theory's toroidal requirement and that the exotic matter is named after Freeman Dyson. Chris Roberts's Star Citizen has a quantum drive that a developer post on the Spectrum forum describes as a warp bubble inspired by the Alcubierre theory, with quantum fuel as the source of the negative energy density. In every case what travelled was the picture, contraction ahead and expansion behind, and the one real line item on the bill, the exotic matter. Nothing on the register beyond WRP-1 and the negative energy of ENE-1 made the trip. The consultants who did the carrying are on physicists-in-the-writers-room.

The links

What is not sourced

• Alcubierre naming Star Trek before 2024. Every earlier statement that he was inspired by the show is a paraphrase, an encyclopedia line with no source, a press retelling or a documentary appearance in which the show's host does the talking. The 2024 BBVA interview is the first thing in this catalogue in which Alcubierre himself says the name, and what he says is milder than the legend: childhood viewing and a general wish, with the idea arriving in doctoral work on black holes. A dated interview from the 1990s or 2000s in which he says it would close this. The Cardiff or UNAM pages do not.
• The Shatner email. Wikipedia's sentence rests on a blog that has been offline since 2013. If the email exists it is almost certainly quoted in Shatner and Walter, I'm Working on That (Pocket Books, 2002), which is where the 2005 documentary featuring Alcubierre came from. Reading that book would settle it in one afternoon.
• The Friday-night VHS story. A press feature of 2025 with a direct quotation and no stated interview. It reads as a retelling of something Alcubierre has said on camera, perhaps the 2026 Pop Culture Scientist interview or a Spanish-language talk, but the original has not been found.
• Elite Dangerous. No Frontier newsletter, developer diary or Braben interview naming Alcubierre has been located. The link is a community wiki's own comparison, plausible from the flight model and nothing more.
• Star Citizen's exact words. The Star Citizen Wiki gives the drive as "essentially an Alcubierre drive"; the forum copy of the same post gives "somewhat inspired by the theory behind an Alcubierre drive". The dossier's stronger wording is the wiki's, and only a login to Spectrum would show which is Roberts's.

Sources

• S1 Alcubierre, M., "The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity", Class. Quantum Grav. 11, L73–L77 (1994), arXiv:gr-qc/0009013. Abstract read 2026-09-13 for the "warp drive of science fiction" phrase.
• S1 Star Trek (NBC, 1966 to 1969) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (syndication, 1987 to 1994), as the fiction the paper's abstract points at; not re-watched for this page.
• S3 BBVA Aprendemos Juntos, "El científico que imaginó viajar más rápido que la luz: Miguel Alcubierre", video with transcript (aprendemosjuntos.bbva.com/mx); the YouTube copy is dated 26 December 2024. Transcript read 2026-09-13 for the Viaje a las estrellas passages.
• S3 Gast, R., "Star Trek's Warp Drive Leads to New Physics", Scientific American, October 2021. Read; contains no quotation from Alcubierre about the show.
• S3 James, A., "The truth about Warp Drive with Miguel Alcubierre", Pop Culture Scientist, YouTube, 20 May 2026. Description read; video not watched.
• S3 How William Shatner Changed the World (Discovery Channel Canada, 2005), and Wikipedia's article on it; Moria review (moriareviews.com) for the Alcubierre segment. Documentary not watched.
• S3 Darling, D., "Alcubierre warp drive", Encyclopedia of Science (daviddarling.info). Read; quotation unsourced there.
• S3 Pascale, A., "6 Takeaways From A Set Visit To 'The Orville'", TrekMovie.com, 31 August 2017. Read 2026-09-13.
• S3 Elite Dangerous Wiki (elite-dangerous.fandom.com), "Supercruise", wikitext read 2026-09-13.
• S3 Star Citizen Wiki (starcitizen.tools), "Quantum drive", wikitext read 2026-09-13; cites "Chris Roberts on Quantum Drives", Spectrum, accessed 21 March 2020.
• S3 Star Citizen Base forum, "Quantum Drives - by CR", 2 April 2019, a copy of the Spectrum post with its thread link. Read 2026-09-13.
• S3 Wikipedia, "Alcubierre drive" and "Warp drive", for the Shatner sentence and its footnote. Read 2026-09-13.
• S4 Orf, D., "To Escape Extinction, We Need to Achieve Warp Speed", Popular Mechanics, 26 November 2025 (syndicated copy read).
• S5 Shapiro, A., "The Physics of Warp Drive", blog archived April 2013, as cited by Wikipedia. Not opened.
• Not opened: Shatner, W. and Walter, C., I'm Working on That: A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact (Pocket Books, 2002).