Miguel Alcubierre

Miguel Alcubierre Moya (born March 28, 1964 in Mexico City) is a Mexican theoretical physicist.

Alcubierre is known for the proposed Alcubierre drive, a speculative warp drive by which a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel.

Alcubierre was born in Mexico City in 1964.

He is married to María Emilia Beyer.

Alcubierre obtained a Licentiate degree in physics in 1988 and a MSc degree in theoretical physics in 1990, both at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). At the end of 1990, Alcubierre moved to Wales to attend graduate school at Cardiff University, receiving his PhD degree in 1994 through study of numerical general relativity. After 1996 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, developing new numerical techniques used in the description of black holes. Since 2002, he has worked at the Nuclear Sciences Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he conducts research in numerical relativity, employing computers to formulate and solve the physical equations first proposed by Albert Einstein. The solitary wave solutions proposed by Alcubierre for the Einsteinian field equations may possibly prove general relativity consistent with the experimentally verified non-locality of quantum mechanics. This work militates against the idea that quantum non-locality would ultimately require abandoning the mathematical structure of general relativity.

On June 11th 2012, Alcubierre was appointed Director of the Nuclear Sciences Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

On June 14th 2016, after a very successful four-year term as Director of the Nuclear Sciences Institute at UNAM, Miguel Alcubierre was re-elected by the Governing Board of UNAM as Director of the Nuclear Sciences Institute for another four-year period.

Alcubierre is best known for the proposal of "The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity" that was published in the science journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. In this, he describes the Alcubierre drive, a theoretical means of traveling faster than light that does not violate the physical principle that nothing can locally travel faster than light. In this paper, he constructed a model that might transport a volume of flat space inside a "bubble" of curved space. This bubble, named as Hyper-relativistic local-dynamic space, is driven forward by a local expansion of space-time behind it, and an opposite contraction in front of it, so that theoretically a spaceship would be placed in motion by forces generated in the change made by space-time.

Miguel Alcubierre made a special appearance on the TV productions How William Shatner Changed the World and Michio Kaku's Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, in which his warp bubble theory was discussed.

Alcubierre has been invited twice to interviews on radio station Radio Educación XEEP (1060 AM), first on February 18th 2011, and later on March 4th 2011, on the technology-related talk show Interfase, where he explained his views on the current state of scientific and technology research in Mexico, and gave a brief introduction to his warp drive model and how it came to be.

Introduction to 3+1 Numerical Relativity (International Series of Monographs on Physics, Paperback, 2012, ISBN 978-0199656158)