So, an interesting and even-handed account of the recent acknowledgement by the US government of ongoing investigations into UFO phenomena contains this whopper:

Interstellar travel by living beings still seems like a wildly remote possibility, but physicists have known since the early nineteen-nineties that faster-than-light travel is possible in theory, and new research has brought this marginally closer to being achievable in practice.

This is not an accurate scientific assessment of the possibility of faster-than-light travel. What it appears to be referring to is the mathematicist fantasy of an Alcubierre warp-drive. You can find a succinct presentation of this “theory” here. It is a short and not technically difficult presentation which seems to reach a straightforward conclusion:

At present, such a thing just doesn’t seem to be entirely within the realm of possibility. And attempts to prove otherwise remain unsuccessful or inconclusive.

Things would have been fine if they left it at that but the nerd community, having had their minds warped by too many repeated viewings of Star Wars-Trek fantasy-fiction- movies, had to add a more hopeful note:

But as history has taught us, what is considered to be impossible changes over time. Someday, who knows what we might be able to accomplish?

Unfortunately history has also taught us that the human imagination is not a reliable guide to the nature of physical reality. The Alcubierre drive rests on the scientifically baseless presumption that spacetime is a causally interacting element of physical reality. There is no empirical evidence for such a presumption.

There is, however, a significant contingent of Academy Certified Scientists who believe in the existence of a physical spacetime. This belief is entirely based on the assumption, by the mid-20th century neo-Relativists (Misner, Thorne, Wheeler, et al), that such a spacetime exists. However, real science cannot be based on what MTW (or you or I) believe. Real science rests on empirical evidence, not on, in this case, the spurious reification of relational concepts.

Like Star Wars itself, the Alcubierre drive is a pseudo-scientific fantasy that amuses and confuses a certain reality-challenged subset of humanity, many of whom, unfortunately, are puking up this indigestible, hairball of irrationality in the halls of the Scientific Academy. The New Yorker is not to blame for this mess, but thoughtlessly repeating such unscientific nonsense, as if it had a scientific basis, is not helpful.