When David Pares works in his garage at night, he has to do it by flashlight. That's because he just doesn't have the power for lights with what he says he's building in there: the first-ever working warp motor, the holy grail of sci-fi technology.

Even as bold claims go, it's an especially ballsy one. The Omaha-based science professor and former Air Force meteorologist—whose beard, white hair, and soft-spoken manner combine for a distinctly George Lucasian air—insists he's successfully created the proof-of-concept for technology that'll ultimately take humans to the stars.

The larger scientific community isn't so sure. Pares doesn't work with the kind of precision instruments, at the scales of energy, or with the absolutely exhaustive controls against error that typically mark the bleeding edge of physics research. Part of what makes Pares interesting is how little this distinction bothers him. He is just as happy to use his wife's croquet ball for a weight as anything forged in precision steel.

"The only difference between a garage and [NASA's] lab is that I've got lower overhead," he says.

Another difference, of course, is that Pares says he's built a warp drive, while NASA maintains that "for the near future, warp drive remains a dream."

Warp drive is widely known as a storytelling device—not a real one—used to get characters from one part of a fictional universe to another, without having to account for thousands of years of transit time. The idea, rather than moving a ship directly, is to drag it along with the actual frame of space and time it occupies. This could allow, in effect, faster-than-light travel, something the laws of physics says is impossible with any form of Newtonian propulsion—like rockets—that involves shoving matter in one direction to make thrust in the other. If achieved, warp drive could cut an interstellar trek from centuries down to a couple weeks.