We all know that the Starship Enterprise, like all spaceships, zips between the stars using a space warp. You know, it bends space so that here and there are brought very close together, so that the absolute speed limit of the speed of light doesn’t cause any problem.

There is one difficulty with this approach. The recent detection of gravitational waves has shown that space is really, really stiff. You need to annihilate two neutron stars to bend space a distance equal to one one-thousandth of the diameter of a proton. Captain Kirk would need to load a mass hundreds of times larger than the mass of the Sun to move his ship 0.00000000000000001 feet. (As an aside, I should mention that the Enterprise is powered by “dilithium.” Lithium contains 3 protons, so dilithium (“di” means “two”) contains two lithium atoms per dilithium atom. Unless you are a democratic socialist who believes that basic arithmetic is an oppressive tool of white supremacy, two times three is six. Unless you are a democratic socialist who took a course in gender studies instead of chemistry, you would notice that an atom with six protons is called carbon. Carbon is the primary ingredient of coal. Apparently, the Enterprise, like a nineteenth century steam locomotive, runs on coal.)

So, space warps are out. But does that mean that we are tethered to the solar system? Fear not! It turns out that there is another way to reach the stars. To the consternation of physicists (like me), the path to going boldly where no weasel has gone before was foreshadowed by Star Wars (the Force) and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (the Infinite Impossibility Drive).

The secret is hidden in the bowels of quantum theory.

Fact 1: since you are obviously literate and well educated (you follow Fun with Doom), you have heard of quantum entanglement. If you zig one member of a pair of entangled objects, the other member zags IMMEDIATELY. And I do mean immediately. Recent experiments by Chinese physicists have managed to entangle two atoms that are 1500 miles apart. And some Italian physicists have measured how long it takes for the second atom to zag after you zig Number One. If you divide the distance between the two atoms by this time (that gives you the speed), you find that this speed is at least ten million times the speed of light. Take that Einstein!

Fact 2: we learn from quantum field theory (an area in which I pursued research before finding honest employment) that the vacuum is not empty! The vacuum is filled with “virtual pairs” of particles and antiparticles which wink in and out of existence in trillionths of a second (which proves that you can get away with anything if you do it fast enough).

Let us now combine these two facts. To zip across the known universe, we need merely entangle the Enterprise with one of the virtual particles, then entangle this virtual particle with a nearby virtual particle, and so on. Shoveling a little more coal in the furnace, we depart on our intergalactic adventure!

My Nobel Prize awaits.