Next stop, Alpha Centauri!
At a conference last week, NASA physicist Harold White gave a talk about ongoing experiments at the space agency, designed to see if "warp drive" (essentially, faster-than-light travel without violating the laws of physics) is feasible, among other things.
Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican Physicist, first proposed a model for warp drive way back in 1994, suggesting that a ring of exotic matter could generate a "warp bubble" that would allow the ship to travel in a different space continuum than the rest of the universe (and that's REALLY oversimplified, sorry), moving through our universe at approximately 10 times the speed of light. The big problem was that it was estimated that you'd need to convert most of Jupiter's mass to energy to power the thing. Hmm - well, we're not using it anyway, right?
Anyway, one of the ideas that Harold White is researching is the possibility that, by using a donut-shaped field instead of a ring, the mass-to-energy requirements goes down from Jovian scale to about the same as a decent automobile. We've got lots of those, right?
But wait, it gets better - by oscillating the field over time, White believes they can reduce the amount of energy required even more.
There are other problems to be solved, like the annoying fact that you apparently can't generate a warp bubble in a region of space if there isn't already one there, or the possibility of producing a naked singularity (i.e. a black hole) at the front of the field. Still, the work is kind of cool, and it's not even 100% theoretical - they've built the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, to try to instigate micro versions of space-time warps. "We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.
Is Harold White our version of Zefram Cochrane?
Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican Physicist, first proposed a model for warp drive way back in 1994, suggesting that a ring of exotic matter could generate a "warp bubble" that would allow the ship to travel in a different space continuum than the rest of the universe (and that's REALLY oversimplified, sorry), moving through our universe at approximately 10 times the speed of light. The big problem was that it was estimated that you'd need to convert most of Jupiter's mass to energy to power the thing. Hmm - well, we're not using it anyway, right?
Anyway, one of the ideas that Harold White is researching is the possibility that, by using a donut-shaped field instead of a ring, the mass-to-energy requirements goes down from Jovian scale to about the same as a decent automobile. We've got lots of those, right?
But wait, it gets better - by oscillating the field over time, White believes they can reduce the amount of energy required even more.
There are other problems to be solved, like the annoying fact that you apparently can't generate a warp bubble in a region of space if there isn't already one there, or the possibility of producing a naked singularity (i.e. a black hole) at the front of the field. Still, the work is kind of cool, and it's not even 100% theoretical - they've built the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, to try to instigate micro versions of space-time warps. "We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.
Is Harold White our version of Zefram Cochrane?