I hold in my hands tickets for tonight's first showing of Star Trek Into Darkness IMAX 3D and my goldshirt (new JJ style) is waiting to be worn.
Star Trek's aesthetics and philosophy has always seemed more attainable than the sword and sorcery fantasy of Star Wars.
Star Trek science fiction has produced science fact because so many kids growing up with the show became inspired to become scientists and engineers by the show.
Mobile phone designs were inspired by Starfleet communicators, iPads were PADDS, tazers were phasers, handheld computers were tricorders, etc.
But the thing that made Star Trek go was Warp Drive.
Decades after the original "Star Trek" show had gone off the air, pioneering physicist and avowed Trek fan Miguel Alcubierre argued that maybe a warp drive is possible after all.
Since Alcubierre published his paper "The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity" in 1994, many physicists and science fiction writers have played with his theory —including "Star Trek" itself.
According to Alcubierre's theory, one could create a warp bubble by applying negative energy, or energy created in a vacuum. This process relies on the Casimir effect, which states that a vacuum is not actually a void; instead, a vacuum is actually full of fluctuating electromagnetic waves. Distorting these waves creates negative energy, which possibly distorts space-time, creating a warp bubble.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...