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Thursday May 7, 2009
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Okay, so we all know that warp drive isn't possible, since nothing can go faster than the speed of light, right? It turns out that some physicists believe it may be feasible after all. According to Space.com, the idea is to find another method of propulsion besides a rocket, which could never propel something faster than the speed of light--the universe's speed limit as set by Einstein's general theory of relativity. (A few physicists theorize that this has already happened, just after the time of the Big Bang.)
"The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it," said Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, in the article. "The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it's not moving at all. It's the space-time that's moving." So how do you do that? Since any concentration of mass warps space-time around it--just very little, given real world, everyday objects--"some unique geometry of mass or exotic form of
energy can manipulate a bubble of space-time so that it moves faster than
light-speed, and carries any objects within it along for the ride."
To accomplish this, scientists are already experimenting with rotating super-cold rings, parallel uncharged metal plates, and (in a purely theoretical sense) harnessing dark energy, that mysterious stuff that is supposedly out there but no one can find yet. So they're on it--awesome. In the meantime, got your tickets for Star Trek yet?
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May 7, 2009 5:47 PM
I think perhaps these "scientists" are basing this theory on Alien technology??? Hmmmmm....
May 7, 2009 10:43 PM
@Steven: not at all! This is very real physics and has been discussed theoretically for years now - the principle being that if you consider space-time something of a sheet, with massive objects resting on that sheet, they actually make dips in the sheet - which technically make points in the dip closer to each other than if there were no massive object in that space.
Now if you put a super-massive object of some kind, something able to create a massive gravitational field, on that sheet, it would create a massive dip in space-time. That would bring two distant points very close to one another thanks to the gravitational field of the supermassive object. That would concievably allow an object to travel great distances just by creating very strong gravitational fields - what some people are calling the "warp" field, as it "warps" spacetime around the object being propelled. The object doesn't feel like it's moving at all; it's really just bringing the space behind it and the space at its destination in immediate spatial proximity.
Space-time doesn't REALLY work that way, but it's a rough approximation. I'm curious to see the research around it.
July 9, 2009 11:40 PM
robots came from science fiction, now we have robots, and ray guns are lasers, and all that kind of stuff. when will they make alien girls though? like the blue ones.
July 18, 2009 4:36 AM
That sounds a lot like how the planet express ship works in Futurama.