Teleportation is technically demanding, especially when the object being teleported is a whole human. The energy required to turn Captain Kirk into a matter stream at near light speed would exceed the total power consumed by the Earth in 1995 by a factor of 10,000. (Alternatively, Scotty could find a way to heat a human being instantaneously to roughly a million times the temperature at the heart of the sun, reducing the energy cost at least a bit).

Talking of bits, the information required to correctly identify and reassemble all the atoms within an entire human (not to mention boots, yellow jumper and phaser set to stun) is considerable: if converted to 10 gigabyte hard disks (once again, we are dealing in 1995 technology) you would end up with a stack of disks that stretched upwards for 10,000 light years, which is a third of the way to the centre of the galaxy or about five years' travel at Warp 9.

Travel for the starship Enterprise, of course, would impose fierce energy demands. To accelerate even to half the speed of light, Enterprise must burn 81 times its entire mass in hydrogen fuel.

Of course it would need to burn just as much to slow down when it got to wherever it was going, not that the captain or crew would really care, because the G-forces required to accelerate to half the speed of light would have reduced all of them to a paper-thin mush of blood, skin and bone smeared round the starship's bridge.

This is not killjoy stuff, quite the reverse. What Lawrence Krauss's entertainment does in spades is provide pleasure: delight in the clarity of the physics needed for space travel; delight in the hypothetical challenges of really going somewhere far away and long ago in the galaxy; delight, too, in the sheer zest and generosity of the Star Trek world, where the impossible happens every day, aliens always speak English, phasers are always to stun and Scotty is always saying "But I canna change the laws of physics, Captain!"

Krauss's venture into the world of antimatter drives, dilithium crystals, tractor beams, deflector shields, the Borg, warp speeds, wormholes in space, holodecks, Romulan Warbirds and two-dimensional travellers tied up in fragments of cosmic string is, of course, entirely serious: if you wanted to teach cosmological science, then an alternative cosmology that has enraptured so many, for so long and in so many ways, is a good place to start.

Begin with the physics you know, embrace all those possibilities not excluded by the logic of mathematical physics, and you can indeed get warp drive, and without any local acceleration. All it takes is for space to expand behind and contract in front of the Enterprise and it will ride along like a surfboard on a wave: clocks in synchrony at both origin and destination and no relativistic laws actually broken, because light, too, travels (locally) at light speed.

"This scenario must be what the Star Trek writers intended when they invented warp drive, even if it bears little resemblance to the technical descriptions they have provided," says Krauss, generously, before going on to discuss the idea of "designer spacetimes" in general.

All great fiction, of course, occurs inside its own designer spacetime: Swift confected several, with their own distinctive biology, for Gulliver to explore; C S Lewis found one at the back of a wardrobe in the Narnia series and another in the "cosmic trilogy" that began with Out of the Silent Planet. Terry Pratchett not only confected his own special cosmology with the Discworld series but has once again gleefully co-operated with the mathematician Ian Stewart and the biologist Jack Cohen in the Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day, newly published by Ebury Press.

Roger Highfield, now of the Science Museum, wrote The Science of Harry Potter, and to salute J R R Tolkien, Henry Gee of the journal Nature wrote The Science of Middle-Earth. Each of these is an exploration not just of the fantasias but of the palpable world in which such fantasies have always been so popular. Books like these serve science, but they serve literature too.

What makes Krauss's book a winner is that it provides a pulpit for a thoughtful sermon on the possibilities locked in a universe that might or might not include a planet called Vulcan and a language called Klingon but that certainly could – in theory - deliver an antigravitational force called vacuum energy.

Krauss is a theoretical physicist and vacuum energy remained a theory when he wrote this book in 1995: "How come such vacuum energy is not overwhelmingly dominant in the universe today?" he asks. In fact, the first indications that vacuum energy might be pushing the most distant galaxies away from us at almost light speed, and that the biggest component of the mass-energy budget of the universe consisted of something called dark energy, or vacuum energy, came three years later in 1998.

So to reread this book is to be reminded both of how much science has advanced in the past two decades, and of the enduring grip of the world created by Gene Roddenberry in 1966 when he first introduced Mr Spock to Captain Kirk (the number of people in the US who would not recognise the phrase "Beam me up, Scotty", says Krauss, is "roughly comparable to the number of people who have never heard of ketchup").

Krauss did deliver a sequel, which I haven't read. I'm only sorry it wasn't the one he promised at the close of this book, after a chapter on the blunders and follies of the series (for instance the discovery of a body frozen at minus 295°C, considerably below Absolute Zero) – The Physics of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Krauss.

Tim Radford is the author of The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things

Photograph: Rex

We are now reading Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh, which Tim will review on Friday 2 August