The Alcubierre drive, also known as the Alcubierre metric, is a speculative   
   mathematical model of a spacetime exhibiting features reminiscent of the   
   fictional "warp drive" from Star Trek, which can travel "faster than light",   
   although not in a local    
   sense.   
      
   In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method of   
   stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space   
   ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand.[1] The   
   ship would ride this wave inside    
   a region known as a warp bubble of flat space. Since the ship is not moving   
   within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional   
   relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would   
   in the case of a ship    
   moving at high velocity through flat spacetime relative to other objects.   
   Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light   
   in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move   
   faster than the ship;    
   it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of   
   the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a   
   light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble. Thus, the   
   Alcubierre drive does not    
   contradict the conventional claim that relativity forbids a slower-than-light   
   object to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds. However, there are no known   
   methods to create such a warp bubble in a region that does not already contain   
   one, or to leave    
   the bubble once inside it, so the Alcubierre drive remains a hypothetical   
   concept at this time.   
      
   http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Alcubierre_drive.html   
      
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