While living in his dorm at the University of Cardiff, Wales, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre—then pursuing a Ph.D. in numerical relativity—wrote a short paper detailing the physical reality of the warp drive. Alcubierre often spent Friday nights with friends watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and one night, he pondered how exactly such an engine could work. Eventually published in 1994, the young physicist couldn’t have known that the resulting paper would inspire decades of research into the real-world applications of warp drives.