Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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A research paper proposes a fully physically realized model for the warp drive.
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This is based on an existing model that requires negative energy – an impossibility.
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The new model is exciting, but warp speed is still likely decades or centuries away.
In a surprising paper, scientists say they’ve found a physical model for a warp drive that flies in the face of what we’ve long thought about the crazy concept of warp speed travel: that it requires exotic, negative forces.
To best understand what the discovery means, you’ll need a quick crash course on the far-fetched idea of traveling through folded space.
The colloquial term “warp warp” 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 suggests that this tremendous power alone propels the ship to speeds greater than light.
Scientists have studied and theorized about faster-than-light space travel for decades. One of the major reasons for our interest is pure pragmatism: without the warp drive, we’ll probably never reach a neighboring star system. The closest trip is another four years at the speed of light.
Our current understanding of warp speed dates back to 1994, when a now-iconic theoretical physicist named Miguel Alcubierre first proposed what we have since called the Alcubierre unit.
The Alcubierre unit conforms to Einstein’s theory of general relativity to achieve superluminal travel. “By a purely local expansion of space-time behind the spacecraft and an opposite contraction in front of it,” Alcubierre wrote in the abstract of his paper, “motion faster than the speed of light seen by observers outside the perturbed region is possible.”
Essentially, an Alcubierre unit would expend an enormous amount of energy—probably more than what’s available in the universe—to contract and twist spacetime in front of it and create a bubble. Inside that bubble would be an inertial frame of reference where the explorers would feel no proper acceleration. The rules of physics would still apply in the bubble, but the ship would be located outside of space.
It might help to think of an Alcubierre machine like the classic “tablecloth and dishes” party trick: the spaceship sits on top of the spacetime tablecloth, the unit drags the material around it, and the ship is located in a new place relative to the material.
Alcubierre describes space-time expanding on one side of the ship and contracting on the other, due to that enormous amount of energy and a necessary amount of exotic matter—in this case, negative energy.
Some scientists have criticized the Alcubierre engine, however, as requiring too much mass and negative energy for humans to seriously build 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 significant progress.
Applied physics
This brings us to the new study, which scientists from the Advanced Propulsion Laboratory (APL) at Applied physics just published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. In the report, the APL team unveils the world’s first model for a physical warp drive—one that not it requires 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—exotic matter that doesn’t exist and can’t be generated in our current understanding of the universe—this new concept uses floating bubbles of spacetime rather than floating ones. VESSELS in space-time.
The physical model uses almost none of the negative energy and capitalizes on the idea that space-time bubbles can behave almost as they please. And, APL scientists say, that’s not the only other way warp speed could work. Making a model that is at least physically understandable is a big step.
Furthermore, Alcubierre himself endorsed the new model, which is like having Albert Einstein appear in your introductory physics class.
Here’s a helpful video where Sabine Hossenfelder, professor and researcher at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study, details the results:
Of course, there is a gigantic caveat here: the concept in this paper is still in the realm of “distant future” possibility, consisting of ideas that scientists do not yet know how to build in any sense.
“Although the mass requirements required for such modifications are still enormous at present,” the APL scientists write, “our work suggests a method to build such objects based on fully understood laws of physics.”
But while a physical unit may not be a reality today, tomorrow, or even a century from now, let’s hope it’s not that long—with this exciting new model, traveling at warp speed is now much more likely in a much shorter amount of time than previously thought.
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