Here’s what you’ll learn as you read this story:
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A research paper proposes a fully physically realized model for warp drive.
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It builds on an existing model that requires negative energy – an impossibility.
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The new model is exciting, but warp speed is still decades or centuries away.
In a stunning paper, scientists say they’ve created a physical model for warp drive, which flies in the face of what we’ve long thought about the crazy concept of warp speed travel: that it requires alien, negative forces.
To better understand what success means, you need a quick crash course in the distant idea of traveling through folded space.
The colloquial term “warp drive” comes from science fiction, most famously Star Trek. The Federation’s faster-than-light warp drive works by colliding matter and antimatter and converting explosive energy into propulsion. Star Trek This extraordinary force alone suggests that the ship is being pushed to speeds faster than light.
Scientists have been studying and theorizing about faster-than-light space travel for decades. A major reason for our interest is pure practicality: without a warp drive, we’d probably never make it to a neighboring star system. The closest such trip is still four years away at the speed of light.
Our current understanding of warp motion dates back to 1994, when a now-iconic theoretical physicist named Miguel Alcubierre first proposed what we’ve since called the Alcubierre drive.
The Alcubierre drive conforms to Einstein’s general theory of relativity to achieve superluminal travel. “By a purely local expansion of space-time behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it,” Alcubierre wrote in the abstract of his paper, “motions faster than the speed of light seen by observers outside the perturbed region are possible.”
Essentially, an Alcubiert drive expends a large amount of energy – possibly more than is available within the universe – to compress and rotate the space-time in front of it and create a bubble. Inside that bubble would be an inertial reference frame where the explorers feel no proper acceleration. The laws of physics will still apply inside the bubble, but the ship will be localized outside of space.
It might help to think of Alcubierre Drive as a classic “tablecloth and dishes” party trick: the spaceship sits on top of a spacetime tablecloth, the drive pulls the cloth around it, and the ship is located in a new place relative to the cloth.
Alcubierre describes spacetime expanding on one side of the ship and contracting on the other, thanks to that huge amount of energy and the required amount of foreign matter – in this case, negative energy.
Some scientists have criticized the Alcubierre drive, however, because it requires too much mass and negative energy for humans to seriously construct a warp-based propulsion system. NASA has been trying to build a physical warp drive through Eagleworks Laboratories for most of the past decade, but has yet to make any significant progress.
Applied Physics
This brings us to a new study, by scientists at the Advanced Propulsion Laboratory (APL). Applied Physics Recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. In the report, the APL team unveiled the world’s first model for a physical warp drive—that is does not Needs negative energy.
The study is pretty thick (read the whole thing here), but here’s the gist of the model: Where the existing paradigm uses negative energy — foreign matter that doesn’t exist and can’t be generated within our current understanding of the universe — this new concept uses floating bubbles of spacetime rather than floating. Ships In space time.
The physical model uses almost no negative energy and capitalizes on the idea that spacetime bubbles can behave as they please. And, APL scientists say, it’s not just another way warp speed could work. Creating a model that is at least physically understandable is a big step.
Also, Alcubierre himself supported the new model, which is like showing Albert Einstein in your introductory physics class.
Here’s a helpful video in which Sabine Hosenfelder, professor and research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, breaks down the findings:
Of course, there’s a big caveat here: the concept in this paper is still in the “far future” realm of possibility, made up of ideas that scientists don’t yet know how to build into any sense.
“While the public needs for such modifications are still great,” the APL scientists write, “our work suggests a way to build such objects based on fully understood laws of physics.”
But while physical drive may not be a reality today, tomorrow, or even a century from now—let’s hope it isn’t. that Longer—With this exciting new model, warp speed travel is now much more possible in a much shorter period of time than we previously thought.
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