Chance Glenn’s Experimental Spacetime Distortion & Warp Research

August 29, 2026

Inside a shielded enclosure, a high-voltage spark gap will sit at one end of a carefully balanced arm, with an equal mass mounted at the other. The arm will hang from a thin tungsten wire, while a laser reflected from a small mirror magnifies any minute rotation onto a distant sensor. Dr. Chance Glenn believes the apparatus may detect movement created not by expelled propellant, air currents, or ordinary electromagnetic forces, but by a localized distortion of spacetime. The claim is extraordinary, and Glenn knows the next result must be harder to dismiss than the optical fringe shifts he previously reported. Supported by an Innovate Alabama Supplemental Grant, his new experiment is designed to search for force in the micronewton range and possibly below. It won’t build a starship, and it may not move at all. But if the arm produces a repeatable, reversible deflection that survives vacuum testing, electromagnetic shielding, control runs, and independent replication, Glenn argues that it could represent an early step toward an electrically powered propulsion system that doesn’t consume propellant.

A New University, an Old Ambition

Glenn is pursuing that experiment while beginning a demanding new chapter at Wilberforce University in Ohio. Founded in 1856, Wilberforce is the nation’s oldest private historically Black university owned and operated by African Americans. Glenn joined the institution in 2026 in engineering and graduate-studies leadership and as Special Assistant to the President, with a mandate to strengthen engineering, technology, scientific research, academic partnerships, and graduate education. The opportunity arrived after he’d deliberately stepped away from senior academic administration so he could concentrate on teaching, laboratory work, paper writing, and collaboration. A former colleague who had become Wilberforce’s president eventually persuaded him to return to institutional leadership. Glenn told podcast host Tim Ventura that the new assignment has been “nonstop,” but he added, “I love it.”

The role draws on a career spanning approximately four decades. Glenn worked as an engineer at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory from 1986 to 1997, where his interests included microwave systems, nonlinear dynamics, physics, and advanced engineering. He later founded Syncrodyne Systems Corporation, taught electrical engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and served as RIT’s associate dean of graduate studies. From 2012 to 2019, he led Alabama A&M University’s College of Engineering, Technology and Physical Sciences. He then served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Houston–Victoria before returning to Alabama A&M as a professor and research director. His academic training includes a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland and master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, along with management studies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

Running parallel to that institutional career is Morningbird Space Corporation, which Glenn has led since 2012. He describes the company as a mechanism for moving ideas from concept to research, from research to prototype, and eventually from prototype to commercial product. Its interests extend beyond advanced propulsion into robotics, additive manufacturing, autonomous construction, STEM education, workforce development, and interplanetary transportation. Glenn told Ventura that Morningbird is the practical embodiment of a fascination he’s carried since childhood. “Space and being able to go out there and see what’s out there and extend humanity’s reach beyond planet Earth,” he said, “that’s something that’s always been a part of me.” He’s also attempting to connect the company’s commercial programs with educational opportunities through Alabama A&M, Wilberforce, and a planned technical-training initiative called Morningbird Academy.

The latest financial support comes from the Innovate Alabama Supplemental Grant Program, which provides non-dilutive state funding to companies that have already received federal Small Business Innovation Research or Small Business Technology Transfer awards. Under the program’s published rules, Phase I recipients may seek up to half the value of their federal award, capped at $100,000, while Phase II recipients may seek as much as $250,000. Morningbird hasn’t publicly disclosed the amount of its award. Glenn’s 2025 experimental paper identifies the underlying federal support as an NSF Phase I SBIR grant. Morningbird says the state supplement will fund construction of an apparatus intended to measure and quantify possible force from its Experimental Spacetime Distortion system, in collaboration with Alabama A&M through the AAMU-RISE Foundation. Glenn summarized the philosophy behind the work in the grant announcement: “Reaching the farthest destination requires the first step.”

Beyond Alcubierre’s Negative-Energy Barrier

The theoretical starting point is physicist Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 warp-drive metric, a mathematical solution to Einstein’s field equations in which spacetime contracts ahead of a craft and expands behind it. The craft wouldn’t locally accelerate through space faster than light. Instead, the geometry surrounding it would change, allowing the enclosed region to move relative to distant observers without the spacecraft itself breaking the local light-speed limit. The idea was elegant enough to make “warp drive” a legitimate subject for general-relativity research, but it arrived with severe physical problems. The original configuration appeared to require negative energy density, enormous total energy, unusual stress-energy distributions, and a means of creating and controlling a stable spacetime geometry that no known technology can produce.

Researchers have spent the last three decades exploring whether modified geometries, positive-energy configurations, subluminal shells, soliton-like structures, or alternative stress-energy distributions might reduce those problems. The literature has produced interesting mathematical constructions, but no working warp device, and physicists continue to disagree about which formulations can satisfy physically reasonable energy conditions. Glenn entered that debate through a 2026 paper in the Journal of Material Sciences and Engineering Technology titled “Overcoming the Negative Energy Density Requirements in the Alcubierre Warp Field Equations with a Complex Shaping Function.” Rather than accepting the original real-valued shaping function, Glenn proposed treating it as a complex quantity whose imaginary component is equal to or larger than its real component.

In Glenn’s formulation, that mathematical change alters the sign of the energy-density result, allowing the equations to yield a positive, non-exotic requirement under the assumptions of his model. The paper examines several candidate shaping functions and simulates the corresponding spacetime profile, time deformation, and energy-density distribution around a hypothetical warp region. To translate the mathematics into hardware, Glenn proposed a radio-frequency resonant cavity filled with a lossy dielectric material. A lossy dielectric has both real and imaginary components in its electromagnetic response, which gave him a possible physical analogue for the complex shaping function. He identified ethylene glycol—the principal ingredient in many antifreeze products—as one candidate because, at relevant frequencies, its dielectric response can have a sufficiently large imaginary component.

Glenn built an early cavity experiment, filled it with the dielectric, energized it with radio-frequency power, and passed a laser through the system to search for a change in optical path length. The experiment didn’t produce a convincing positive result. He concluded that he couldn’t place enough energy into the cavity to create a measurable effect, and rather than treating the failed attempt as proof that the underlying idea was impossible, he changed the engineering question. “I pivoted because I asked the question in a different way,” he told Ventura. The cavity concept appears in a published U.S. patent application titled “Method and System for Generating a Warp Field.” A second application, “System for the Generation of Gravitational Waves,” covers the later spark-gap architecture. Both are applications rather than issued patents, and neither constitutes experimental validation.

The Fringe Shift at the Center of the Claim

Glenn’s pivot was based on a simple observation: if a large resonant cavity couldn’t reach the required energy density, perhaps a tiny plasma could. His experimental apparatus begins with a signal generator feeding a 100-watt amplifier, which drives a high-voltage transformer capable of producing potentials around 400,000 volts. That voltage breaks down the gas between two sharpened tungsten electrodes, creating a brief spark plasma. The electrode separation can be adjusted, with the published experiments using gaps on the order of a few millimeters. Because the plasma occupies a tiny volume and forms rapidly, Glenn argues that its local energy density and rate of change can become extremely high even though the total input energy remains modest by propulsion standards.

The paper models the plasma as a narrow cylindrical volume with a radius near 0.25 millimeters. Depending on which portion of the analysis is used, its estimates span several orders of magnitude. The theoretical discussion describes possible energy densities in the range of (10^{11}) to (10^{12}) joules per cubic meter, while plotted experimental comparisons include approximately 1.4 and 2.4 gigajoules per cubic meter. The conclusion states that the reported effect appeared once the plasma exceeded roughly 1 gigajoule per cubic meter. Glenn’s argument also depends on how rapidly that density changes as the spark forms. The paper estimates power densities near (8\times10^{10}) to (10^{11}) watts per cubic meter for its tested gap lengths, although those values depend on assumptions about the spark’s geometry, current, pulse duration, and energy distribution.

To detect a possible optical-path change near the spark, Glenn used a Michelson interferometer in a common-path configuration. A beam splitter divided laser light into mirrored paths and recombined it to form alternating bright and dark interference fringes. The setup used both a 532-nanometer green laser and a 650-nanometer red laser, with mirrors about 150 millimeters from the splitter, a screen about 500 millimeters away, and a stated optical path length of 725 millimeters. A camera recording at 30 frames per second tracked the fringe positions while the spark repeated at rates no greater than about five pulses per second. The two wavelengths were important because ordinary changes in refractive index frequently vary with wavelength; a genuinely geometric change in the optical path should be less dependent on the laser’s color.

The paper reports maximum fringe displacements of approximately 140 to 160 nanometers, synchronized with the spark. The displacement reportedly increased with input power, decreased as the spark was moved away from the beam, and disappeared when the spark was about 20 millimeters or more from the laser path. Tests with the gap oriented at zero and 90 degrees relative to the beam produced broadly similar results. Glenn also reported that helium didn’t eliminate the shift, that the effect appeared more pronounced under some helium conditions, and that multiple gaps produced apparently additive displacements. In the interview, he summarized the central observation without qualification: “Every time it sparked, you see the fringes move.” The published interpretation is that something near the spark increased the optical path length and that spacetime distortion remained after attempts to mitigate vibration, shock, heat, refraction, and electromagnetic interference.

The Measurement Problem

An interferometer fringe shift establishes that the optical conditions changed somewhere in the system. It doesn’t, by itself, identify the cause. A high-voltage spark is a difficult object to place near a precision optical instrument because it simultaneously creates plasma, light, heat, acoustic impulses, pressure waves, ionized gas, mechanical vibration, electrostatic fields, magnetic fields, radio-frequency emissions, and potentially tiny movements in wiring and structural components. Any one of those effects can influence a beam, a mirror, the surrounding air, the camera, or the electronics. Glenn’s paper discusses efforts to reduce those alternatives, including vibration isolation, varying distance and orientation, comparing two laser wavelengths, testing helium, looking for chromatic dispersion, and observing whether the effect vanished when the spark was moved farther away.

The wavelength and orientation tests are among the most important features of the experiment. Glenn argues that if hot plasma were simply changing the refractive index, the 532- and 650-nanometer beams should respond differently because dispersion depends on wavelength. The similar measured displacement therefore weighs against at least some refractive explanations. He also argues that an ordinary pressure wave should travel farther than 20 millimeters and show a stronger dependence on the spark’s orientation. Those are reasonable control ideas, but they don’t exhaust the possibilities. Thermal lensing can be complicated, plasma density can evolve faster than a 30-frame-per-second camera resolves, electromagnetic interference can enter through cables or sensors, and common-path interferometers can still respond to local mechanical or optical changes.

The numerical scale makes rigorous controls especially important. Glenn’s paper uses the standard strain relationship (h=\Delta L/L), where (\Delta L) is the optical-path change and (L) is the original path length. Applying that formula to a 140-to-160-nanometer displacement over 725 millimeters yields a nominal strain of approximately (1.9\times10^{-7}) to (2.2\times10^{-7}). For comparison, the peak strain measured during LIGO’s first direct detection of an astrophysical gravitational wave was about (10^{-21}). The two situations aren’t directly comparable: LIGO measured a wave that had traveled from a black-hole merger roughly 1.3 billion light-years away, while Glenn describes a localized near-field optical-path effect only millimeters from its source. Still, the roughly 14-order difference shows why conventional explanations must be excluded with exceptional care.

The paper has attracted substantial attention, but attention isn’t replication. As of August 2026, the publisher’s page showed roughly 17,400 reads, more than 1,000 downloads, and no listed citations. Glenn says the major components are available to a conventional laboratory and that the paper provides enough information for another group to attempt a reproduction. “I would welcome that,” he told Ventura. Independent teams would ideally bring complementary expertise in precision interferometry, high-voltage plasma, thermal modeling, electromagnetic compatibility, vibration analysis, and general relativity. Replication won’t be established by reproducing a moving fringe alone. It will require reproducing the signal under matched controls, confirming the same scaling laws, and showing that independent instruments identify the same physical mechanism.

The Pendulum Test

The new experiment is intended to move beyond light and ask whether the device produces force. Glenn’s team is constructing a torsion balance designed in computer-aided design software by engineer Corey Mack. A horizontal arm will be suspended from a thin tungsten wire. The spark-gap assembly and its shielding will be mounted on one side, with an appropriate counterweight on the other. If the source generates a lateral force, the arm should rotate slightly and twist the wire. Because the torsional properties of the wire can be calibrated, an observed angular displacement can be converted into torque and then into an estimated force.

A small mirror mounted near the balance will provide the optical readout. A laser beam reflected from that mirror will travel to a distant screen or position-sensitive detector, creating an optical lever that magnifies an extremely small rotation into a larger displacement of the laser spot. Glenn says the system is being designed to search for forces at the micronewton level and perhaps smaller. The spark-gap assembly will operate inside a Faraday cage to suppress electrostatic and radio-frequency coupling. Glenn also intends to conduct testing in a vacuum, which would reduce ion wind, convection, buoyancy, pressure pulses, and other effects associated with air. “It’s a standard physics experiment,” he explained. “We’re just applying it to our particular concept to see if and how much thrust is actually created.”

Even a vacuum chamber and Faraday cage won’t automatically make the result unambiguous. High-voltage systems can produce forces through charged surfaces, magnetic interaction, cable motion, thermal expansion, asymmetric outgassing, vibration, shifting centers of mass, and mechanical relaxation in the suspension wire. At the force levels Glenn hopes to measure, a small temperature gradient or slow structural drift can look like propulsion. Precision-force experiments have repeatedly shown that the hardest part isn’t making a pendulum move; it’s demonstrating that the movement follows the proposed mechanism rather than an overlooked environmental coupling.

A persuasive test would therefore require more than a simple comparison between power off and power on. Runs should be randomized, and the analyst should be blinded to the operating sequence where practical. The source should be rotated so that a genuine directional force reverses while the thermal load remains similar. Electrically equivalent dummy loads should reproduce power consumption and heating without creating the same plasma geometry. Accelerometers, magnetometers, temperature sensors, vacuum gauges, and high-voltage diagnostics should record continuously. The decisive pattern would be a signal that appears on command, scales predictably with a defined electrical parameter, reverses when the apparatus is reversed, persists under vacuum and shielding, disappears in controls, and reappears in another laboratory. Glenn has framed the threshold succinctly: “If it’s non-zero and it’s scalable, then we can go to the next step.”

From Micronewtons to Starflight

If the apparatus detects only a very small force, Glenn sees satellite station-keeping as a more plausible first application than a crewed warp ship. Satellites carry finite propellant for orbit adjustment, momentum management, collision avoidance, and eventual disposal. Once that propellant is exhausted, an otherwise functional spacecraft may lose much of its operational value. An electrically powered device that could generate continuous force without consuming reaction mass might extend a mission as long as the spacecraft retained electrical power and the propulsion hardware remained reliable. Even a tiny force could be useful if the maneuver is gradual and the system can operate for months or years.

The arithmetic also exposes the distance between a laboratory signal and interstellar travel. A continuous force of one micronewton applied to a one-kilogram object produces an acceleration of (10^{-6}) meters per second squared. If that force acted perfectly and continuously for a full year, it would change the object’s velocity by about 31.6 meters per second. Applied to a 10-kilogram spacecraft, it would add roughly 3.16 meters per second per year. By contrast, reaching one-tenth the speed of light in 10 years would require an average acceleration of approximately 0.095 meters per second squared—around 95,000 times greater than one micronewton per kilogram. Continuous operation matters, but so do force-to-mass ratio, electrical efficiency, waste heat, control authority, structural mass, and scalability.

Glenn and his collaborators have proposed other applications that are even more speculative. His 2025 paper introduces “gwavelets,” multiple spark-gap elements driven with controlled phase, amplitude, and frequency so their reported effects might combine into a shaped or steerable field. A conceptual 4-by-4 array is presented as a possible route toward reinforcing the disturbance. Glenn has also worked with researcher Greg Hodgin and fusion-propulsion specialist Jason Cassibry on the idea that a controllable spacetime gradient might redirect escaping neutrons and improve fusion confinement. The paper mentions communications, biological processes, reaction-rate changes, and localized time effects as additional possibilities.

Each of those ideas sits farther down the evidentiary chain than the torsion balance. Before researchers can discuss steering a field, confining fusion products, modifying reaction rates, or generating useful propulsion, they must establish that the optical shift is reproducible, identify its physical cause, demonstrate a controlled mechanical effect, and quantify how that effect scales with power and geometry. A null torsion-balance result wouldn’t make the interferometer data worthless, but it would undercut the assumption that the reported optical-path change can generate propulsion. A positive result wouldn’t prove warp drive either. It would create a narrower and more productive question: what force is being measured, and can every conventional mechanism be ruled out?

Faith, Star Trek, and the Permission to Be Wrong

The machinery is only part of Glenn’s story. His book, Chasing God, traces his upbringing in a deeply religious Southern family, his years singing and writing gospel music, and the questions that emerged as he became an engineer and scientist. Those questions include the age of the Earth, the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere, the relationship between evidence and belief, and whether unexplained personal experiences reveal anything beyond human psychology. Glenn doesn’t present the book as a proof of God or a tidy reconciliation between science and religion. “I don’t try to tie it into a neat bow,” he told Ventura. “I just ask questions, and I let the reader ask the questions along with me.”

That attitude parallels the way Glenn describes scientific research, although he draws a sharp distinction between faith and evidence. Religious beliefs may be treated as immutable, he said, while scientific beliefs must change when the evidence changes. He discussed the “God of the gaps,” the tendency to place divine action inside whatever science hasn’t yet explained, and noted that many of those gaps shrink as knowledge advances. At the same time, he sees conviction and curiosity as psychologically important to invention. A researcher has to believe an experiment is worth attempting without confusing that motivation with proof that the hypothesis is correct.

His other formative mythology is Star Trek. Glenn has described Morningbird Space as a practical expression of the future the series taught him to imagine. After William Shatner’s Blue Origin flight, Glenn encountered the actor at South by Southwest and approached him to say that Star Trek had inspired his work. According to Glenn, Shatner looked up and asked, “Do I know you from somewhere?” Glenn later joked that perhaps a future version of himself had traveled back to the original television set. The conversation became serious enough that Shatner repeatedly called him back to continue discussing warp-drive research. The anecdote adds warmth to Glenn’s story without turning cultural inspiration into scientific evidence.

The most revealing statement Glenn made during the interview was also the least romantic. “Nature doesn’t care about our equations and our theories and hypotheses,” he said. “It’s just going to do what it does.” That sentence contains both the attraction and the danger of his research program. Equations can suggest possibilities, interferometers can reveal anomalies, patents can describe inventions, and grants can fund better instruments, but none of them can compel nature to produce a warp field. The tungsten wire and reflected laser will get the next vote. For now, the question isn’t whether Glenn has built a starship engine. It’s whether a spark inside a shielded, calibrated apparatus can make a pendulum move—and whether another laboratory can make it move again.