Unfortunately, the negative energy would have to come from exotic matter that is difficult to come by, and we're currently only at the level of miniature lab experiments on warp drives. It was later refined to requiring a planet-sized amount and then again to needing an amount around the size of the Voyager 1 space probe.

This concept was originally modeled by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 as a theoretical possibility, but one that would require a universe-sized amount of negative energy to power the phenomenon. The idea is that space time could be contracted in front of a spaceship and expanded behind it, while the ship would remain stationary in a warp bubble that itself was moving faster than the speed of light. In fact, bending space-time is one theory of how superluminal вЂ“ faster-than-light - speeds in space travel might be reached.

Other researchers are trying to bend the rules rather than break them. So no rewriting of Einstein's theories turned out to be necessary. Finally, equipment issues, including a loose cable, were discovered as likely culprits, and the results were declared erroneous. Ideas as to either how these neutrinos could have actually broken the speed of light, or as to what errors could have caused the impossible results, abounded. In September 2011, physicists working on the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) created a frenzy in the scientific community when they announced that their experiments resulted in subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L'Aquila, Italy and arriving around 60 nanoseconds earlier than a beam of light. Light, in a vacuum, travels at approximately 299,792 kilometers per second (186,282 miles per second). But in science, if you make a hard-and-fast rule, someone will try to disprove it, or at least find a loophole. Light speed is considered the universal speed limit of everything, and this is widely accepted by the scientific community. One of the tenets of Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.

Superluminal travel