Dr. Miguel Alcubierre is the Director of the Nuclear Sciences Institute at UNAM, and published the first definitive scientific paper on faster-than-light travel.

Alcubierre’s proposed Warp Drive solution was first published as “The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity” 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.