Miguel Alcubierre

Miguel Alcubierre (b. 1964, Mexico City) lives and works in Mexico City. Theoretical physicist Alcubierre moved to Wales in 1990 to attend graduate school at the University of Wales, Cardiff, UK. He received his Ph.D. for research in numerical general relativity in 1994. In 1994 he discovered 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. He published his results in The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity which appeared in 1994 in the science journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. After leaving Wales in 1996, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, where he developed new numerical techniques to describe the physics 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, the effort to employ computers to formulate and solve the physical equations. In 2012 Alcubierre was appointed Director of the Nuclear Sciences Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).