I am not a scientist, but I think people interested in this topic should read the answer by Matt Visser and colleagues [0]
In short: if a warp drive were static relative to all observers, it wouldn’t drive anything — it would just be a peculiar spacetime geometry with no effective motion..
Note the paper discusses some proposals of positive-energy warp drives. The well-known Alcubierre drive[1] requires negative energy density. So while it dodges the critique of this paper, negative energy is highly likely to be unphysical. And no, what Michio Kaku fantasized on that Discovery show won't work as the Casimir effect isn't due to vacuum energy[2][3] and thus you can't get negative energy that way.
JPLeRouzic•2h ago
In short: if a warp drive were static relative to all observers, it wouldn’t drive anything — it would just be a peculiar spacetime geometry with no effective motion..
[0] https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.105.0...
magicalhippo•1h ago
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04143
[3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0503158