With the ease of starting a car, the crew of the USS Enterprise starship streaks to a new adventure in every episode of Star Trek, somehow traveling at several times the speed of light. This sci-fi mode of practical interstellar travel, which television audiences first saw in 1966, inspired Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre Moya to investigate the feasibility of a real method for light-speed propulsion. Decades later, he published his cutting-edge research to an astonished community of theoretical physicists. The eponymous Alcubierre warp drive hypothetically contracts the spacetime in front of a spaceship while expanding the spacetime behind it, so that the ship moves from Point A to Point B at an “arbitrarily fast” speed. By…