Warp Drive: A Cottage Industry Emerges

[Swede]

Mention the term ‘warp drive’ and the name Miguel Alcubierre immediately comes to mind. But it was only recently that the Mexican physicist’s connection to the idea arose. His 1994 paper, written while he was at the University of Wales, took what had been a science fiction concept (most famously, I suppose, in Star Trek) and extended it into the realm of serious science. Not that Alcubierre put forth a realistic proposal for building a starship that could travel faster than light. What he was doing was the essential first step in such study, trying to demonstrate that FTL travel times could be achieved within the context of General Relativity.

You would think that flying to Alpha Centauri in, say, a few days would be a gross violation of Einstein’s laws, but this may not be the case. What Alcubierre proposed was that warp drive could function not by acceleration through space, but by the acceleration of space itself. Interestingly, while there is a seemingly iron-clad prohibition against superluminal movement through space, the movement of spacetime itself is not restricted. A warp drive could theoretically expand spacetime behind the ship while contracting it in front, allowing the vehicle to reach its destination far faster than the speed of light limitation would otherwise allow. Space itself moves around the craft while vehicle and crew remain motionless within a bubble of transient spacetime.


http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=1881

[Truth4Justice]

1. As nice as this is we need a cheap clean energy source first.

[MindPilot]

2. Yeah, but somebody has got to be the one thinking ahead of everyone else

This conversation is probably as old as humans themselves.

"Idea of flying machine nice but right now Orga need good way to carry fire."

[Vinnie From Indy]

3. lol!

amen!

[GreenPartyVoter]

13. That and Star Trek replicators.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

4. ... fascinating. n/t

[Warpy]

5. Years ago, I read that some gang of obscure

pencil necked geeks had achieved a minute bubble of something that could be considered a "warp field" for a few picoseconds. I never read anything more about it.

We already have the communicators Cap'n Jerk used. We're working on the tricorders but require chip implants to access medical history.

Roddenberry had an uncanny ability to predict where applied science was heading.

The transporters, however, are just plain silly. He needed to rethink that one.

[caraher]

7. My understanding is that Star Trek "transporters" were a budget move

What I heard was they ran out of money to make "shuttlecraft" sets, so they made up the transporter mechanism to get characters in and out of the Enterprise for a modest special effects investment.

[jobendorfer]

9. to solve one set of problems they created another set

The reasoning behind the transporter was twofold:
1. They couldn't afford to create special effects shots of the enterprise landing on a new alien planet each week, as matte shots using 1965 technology took many weeks to process, and
2. It was a nifty way to get the characters into the action quickly.

The problem it created is this: if the transporter can get the characters into trouble quickly, it can get them out just as quickly.

Which is why, according to Roddenberry, every Star Trek episode fits into one of two categories:
- the aliens are so powerful they can block the transporter beam
- the aliens are so primitive they club the landing party over the head and take away their radios.

The other really interesting thing to consider is replicator (or holodeck) technology. How in blazes do you have an economy
if anyone can walk up to a computer and say, I'd like a <fill in the blank> and voila! it materializes.

Still trying to figure out why the Enterprise designers didn't know about circuit breakers, though.

J.

[GreenPartyVoter]

14. There are scientists who have "working transporters". Just can't transport more than inches & it is

questionable as to whether or not organic material can be moved.

[caraher]

15. I think it's less a matter of distance than of quantity of matter

The "transport" is really more the replication of quantum states at a remote location.I haven't followed this too closely but I'd be surprised if even the simplest molecule had been "transported;" even a single atom is a challenge.

[GreenPartyVoter]

16. Right. It's not moving it. It's reconstructing its design in a new place. (If I remember correctly)

[Occulus]

6. The comments are pretty interesting, too

I didn't know that someone was already trying to reproduce Tajmar's experiment to prove the existence of the gravito-photonic force postulated by Heim theory, for example. One of the commenters on that also mentions the Polywell, being developed and tested by Rick Nebel & co. at EMC2 out in Santa Fe.

(Before anyone knocks Heim's particle structure theory, I should point out that at least it has an experiment that can be performed, while string theory does not...)

I just love how out understanding of high-energy physics is evolving to the point that we can perform these experiments that might have required Unobtanium even ten or fifteen years ago. Who knows what we'll discover when the LHC fires up?

Good times, people, good times....

[phantom power]

8. 10^65 grams of negative mass equivalent. About 10^38 earth-masses.

That is a big heaping plate of mass.

[comrade snarky]

10. Hold on a sec

I got a big party platter around here somewhere...
Nope not big enough.

Still cool though. Isn't negative mass the stuff you need to keep a wormhole open and maybe stable? Might be a better use for it when we get it\make it.

[phantom power]

12. That is the same stuff...

whatever that stuff actually is...

[and-justice-for-all]

11. At least someone is thinking about it...

kinda like the 'Triquarter', which inspired the guy who invented it the CELL PHONE.

[Indenturedebtor]

17. I thought the triquarter was the inspiration for PDA's and communicator was for cellphone? n/t