Warp Technology: In the Laboratory
White-Juday Interferometer: White, H. “A Discussion on space-time metric engineering” Gen. Rel. Grav. 35, 2025-2033 (2003). Image courtesy of NASA
There are two sets of microscopic warp drive experiments planned at White’s Eagleworks laboratory.
In the current “low fidelity” experiment, NASA is using ordinary positive energy to try and warp local spacetime. A “White-Juday” interferometer splits a laser beam into two beams. Very high energy capacitors are placed around a small region of one beam.
“The light will go through that region as though it seems like a shorter distance.” Dr. White told Decoded Science. “So it takes less time for it to cover that region with the device on versus off.” When the two beams are recombined, detectors look for tiny changes in the interference pattern.
A future experiment will attempt to extract negative energy from the vacuum to warp local spacetime. “We have a line of technology called Q-thrusters, which works off the principle of pushing off of the quantum vacuum.” said Dr. White. “Q-thruster technology has invention disclosures in the NASA system.”
“We hope to adapt that technology to construct some test devices for our interferometer — to get closer to negative (energy and) pressure. This would get us one step closer to something that is non-trivial in magnitude.”
Objections to Warp Drive Theory
I asked Dr. White about a number of arguments against warp drive (some of his responses are a bit technical, so bear with us). First, University of Sydney research says that during warp drive the spacecraft will collect high energy particles in the cosmic void. Upon return to normal space, they will be released at colossal energies — destroying the entire star system you are trying to get to.
“Yes, I’ve seen that,” said Dr. White, “but I don’t know that I agree with that technical assessment. When you look at the null-like geodesics of the metric (the Alcubierre solution) using the canonical form, I don’t see how that arises.”
Others argue there will be enormous tidal forces (squeezing in one direction and stretching in the other) near the edges of the flat space volume because of the large space curvature you’re producing.
“The tidal forces will be very pronounced the thinner you make the bubble. Stretching out the donut (as I’ve done) will reduce the tidal forces when you are in the meniscus of the bubble.”
Per physicist S. V. Krasnikov, you have to place matter en route, sort of like laying down railroad tracks.
“If you’ve seen the PowerPoint graphic, a little football inside the center of a donut that goes around the spacecraft, that’s where all that negative vacuum energy, negative pressure is distributed around the spacecraft. What the field equations require is an equatorial belt around the spacecraft. It’s not like you are spitting stuff out in front of you. So you do not need anything laid out in advance. You can see that when you look at the analytic models and the canonical form I published in the General Relativity and Gravitation Journal in 2003.”
Warp drive means backwards time travel, because you are effectively traveling faster than the speed of light.
“I don’t agree with that. I don’t believe in time travel. You can expand and contract space at any speed you want, but it doesn’t enable time travel.”
Finally, according to physicist Lawrence Ford of Tufts University, there’s a limit to how much negative energy can exist at any place over any length of time. And physicists Carlos Barceló, Stefano Finazzi, and Stefano Liberati argue that at faster-than-light speeds, Hawking radiation would produce extremely high temperatures and fry everything inside the warp bubble.
“We haven’t really started to try and address the feasibility (of warp drive). We’re at the plausible point at this time, which is why the scientific endeavor is in the lab.”
Obviously, NASA’s warp drive is in its infancy and still highly speculative. NASA’s meager funding of the project confirms this. Still, I applaud NASA’s support for very high risk of failure, very high potential payoff projects like this one. Who can say what new discoveries await us in this basic research effort at the very frontiers of science?
“Beam me up, Scotty.”
I utterly agree with scourge.
It seems that no one has actually performed the experiments Dr White is undertaking before (please correct me if I am wrong!). As such we shouldn’t just say “it won’t work because what we already know says it probably won’t”. The cost it miniscule and IF they do produce positive results it may hint at something incredibly valuable. The experiment would then be performed hundreds of times over and over again by other parties with even more sensitive equipment to validate the results before it was taken seriously. But maybe….. Just maybe…
All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)
Don’ the UFO’s get energy from our storms now? haha I have no idea. Hope it works out for the best for all of us though.
Cheers,
RR
This whole project is meaningless.By the time anything like this gets off the ground,the human race will be no existent yrs max.
I think it’s sad that you think we’ve only got another century and a half left. I mean, we got through the Cold War okay, and that was pretty bad. Nothing we’re doing right now is as bad as the stupid MAD thing.
All we need is strong general AI and then we’re basically set as a race for life. Conservative esteemates put strong general AI at developing way before your 150 years are over.
I can’t make any sense out of your comment so I am unable to answer it.
Remember to talk to others and not just yourself. Remember that it’s good manners to define your key terms. It does not compromise your ideas to bridge your concepts over to others who are not like you, on the contrary, it serves your ideas, and the world.
“Concerning Meteorites:… This was a very controversial statement at that time (please care to read Williams, Henry Smith (1904). “5”. A history of scienc 3. Harper. p. 168ff. ISBN 0-250-40142-8. )”
Everything was a very controversial statement at some point in time. That doesn’t mean squat, except that there are a lot of people who don’t care about the details… like you, when you cite single particle QM as a stand-in for a theory of the vacuum.
“(I’ve read about people saying to him “And who throws those rocks? Marcians?”)”
Then maybe you want to cite those people? “I’ve read” is not a proper citation.
“We must however agree that there is magnetic momentum comming out from this processe right?”
From what process? Spin is not a process but the invariant of an internal symmetry, which exists without any magnetic moment. If you apply that symmetry to a charged point particle that happens to have photons as its gauge particles, THEN you get the magnetic moment for the electron. You get a different magnetic moment for muons and we don’t know, yet, what it will be for neutrinos, which couple trough the weak force to electrons and muons, which should give them a very small magnetic moment trough this indirect interaction.
Magnetic moments are therefor a dynamic property, spin, however, is not, at least not in any theory that relies on Lorentz invariance being a fundamental property, rather than a dynamic one.
I am, however, at this moment not willing to bet on you understanding the difference.
“And if there is magnetic momentum, there is electric field displacement right?”
Only if you are stuck in 19th century physics, which is likely the case.
“Or perhpas shall we talk a little bit about the (1/2).hv energy in vaccum?”
Which is still an artifact of the wrong theoretical description, which you don’t seem to have grown beyond.
“Would you be kind enough to develop on this?”
Yes. Please go to the library and get yourself a book about quantum field theory that was written after 1990. Read it, study it, come back in five years. And then we can have a chat.
“I might know veryyy very little about the workings of our”
That is true.
“I know however that we ought to be much more carefull then what you’re showing, about what to discredit today.”
I haven’t discredited ANYTHING, I have discredited SOMEONE. Please learn the difference between things and man, particularly men with poor minds, like White.
“We might be overwhelmed by the physics of tomorow.”
The physics of tomorrow will be the same as the physics of today, with select refinements of what we know. Newtonian mechanics is about 300 years old now, and it is still the same. It won’t change 300 years from now, either. Why? Because it works. Lorentz symmetry works just as well (much better, actually). It, too, won’t be overthrown.
White’s ideas, which are simply plagiarizing the ideas of Alcubierre and others don’t work any more than the ideas of the alchemists to make gold from lead worked in their time. They won’t work three hundred years from now, either. There may be new ideas that will shed light on new, so far undiscovered phenomena, (just like making gold from lead can be done, at a great financial loss using nuclear physics, which has nothing to do with chemistry). But those new ideas will follow as consequences of new discoveries (like the properties of dark matter, if it exists). White, Alcubierre etc. don’t know anything about the undiscovered sectors of the physical wold. They are merely playing with a garbage-in-garbage-out variation of the known sectors.
For someone who thinks so highly of his achievements in science history and fundamentals, you seem to have a fairly poor grasp on these trivial observations. Why is that?
“And Nature never works as we want her”
That is especially true for Alcubierre, who needs a non-existing form of garbage for his garbage in. He can’t even make physics work the way he wants to without postulating something that is not even known physics.
“even Mathematics has the Gödel Theorem in it’s legs.”
Depends on what your expectations on mathematics were. Goedel doesn’t take away anything from mathematics, indeed, it adds an infinity of new life to it. We just haven’t explored that infinity, yet. We are still too busy cleaning up the mess made by 18th-20th century mathematicians. I would expect there to be a meta-theory of mathematical structures soon enough, I just haven’t looked into the latest results, yet.
“So… please, do not attack anyone.”
Not even clowns like White? Why not? He earned it. I didn’t attack Alcubierre, you may just have been too busy to notice. Alcubierre has done a useful thing for physicists, he is just misunderstood by the cranks. White, on the other hand, doesn’t care about physics, his end game are the cranks.
“…and I have been reading some good scientific literature well conventional one.”
But you seem to have missed out on pretty much everything that has been written in physics past 1930. Please catch up!
“This warp drive is a result of curiosity of Mankind, and we MUST be curious.”
You have seen a warp drive? I have not. I have seen a few papers describing a field configuration based on exotic matter, which does not exist. That’s the same as seeing a perpetual motion machine design based on a negative temperature bath: the absence of such machines gives you an experimental argument for the absence of negative temperatures. The absence of superluminal group velocities in nature gives you the same kind of argument for the absence of negative energy and exotic matter.
This reply I liked… you finally dared to explain things a little more.
Spin being rotation is something that always amused me, and I always wanted to discuss with someone with more physics insight. I will check further QFT to understand that phenomenon further.
I will call this an end, as you definitely bypass my present knowledge. I’m missing beyond conventional QM so indeed, anything you say about QFT and beyond I won’t discuss with you.
Haven’t checked meta-mathematics either… though a friend discussed that with me already.
Have a good life pointing crackpots out. I find that too aggressive anyway.
I know there are many out there… and we certainly all feel amused by some of the “science fiction” out there but… my feeling about it is more “we never know when we might see something outside the box”. (and I should emphasize “SEE” while talking with you)
“Spin being rotation is something that always amused me, ”
Spin isn’t exactly rotation, but it behaves like as if it were, because spinors transform very similar to vectors under rotation, with exception of a phase factor.
In general, whenever there is something conserved in physics, there is an underlying symmetry. The basis for that is Noether’s Theorem. Invariance under spatial translation leads to momentum conservation. Rotational invariance leads to angular momentum conservation. Invariance under time displacement leads to energy conservation. This holds across all physical theories, it works in classical mechanics as well as it does in quantum field theory. Some symmetries lead to “obvious” conservation laws, some others, like those observed in particle physics, do not. We did learn over the course of the last century, though, that much of the possible physics of a system is already given by its symmetries.
Do you know any lecture out there (online is preferable, since my public library is somewhat far away) that touches these topics?
Like… where could I find such in those?
Perhaps these “New Revolutions in Particle Physics” might make me aware of them.
For general relativity? Nothing that will really help you, unless you are willing to learn the entry level math. There is not much one can do with handwaving in differential geometry, because the relevant problems can’t be embedded, i.e. there is no three dimensional geometric structure, that depicts what’s going on. I remember to have read, that the lowest dimensional structure in a flat vector space that can do that, requires six dimensions just for the representation of a flat metric… if you wanted to “look” at curved spacetime, it would be even higher. So, no, that goes beyond the human ability to visualize. So then you have to develop a feel for what formulas “mean”. It takes years of calculations in tensor algebra to do that. I did three years of that in university and I sat trough two complete lecture series and I never got further than the most trivial problems. Highly gifted people are doing much better, of course…
That’s a very dark view of human genius.
Well… human spirit is a fascinating thing, and willingness is something that for some of us just pours out of it.
Well.. url’s do get eaten here.
I cannot spend hundreds of hours reading 1200 pages of stuff I will find difficult to stare at, while having no one to clear my doubts… so much of my effort consists on entry by lecture (Leonard Susskind lectures are really great to sail with) and then to find a book that helps me solidify the concept (normally consisting on really understanding the mathematical formalism), so yeah! Man spirit is tough… and mine just doesn’t want to dye dumb.
Regards BinaryStar
“I cannot spend hundreds of hours reading 1200 pages of stuff I will find difficult to stare at, while having no one to clear my doubts…”
And because I know that I didn’t tell you about the book. That’s considered an entry level textbook into GR. Like I said, you need quite a bit more than what’s in there for Alcubierre kind of stuff, but before you can get there, you have to cover the bases with something like MTW.
“so much of my effort consists on entry by lecture (Leonard Susskind lectures are really great to sail with) and then to find a book that helps me solidify the concept”
That won’t help with either GR or with QFT, both of which only live in the math. Concepts are useless at this level, if you can’t do at least some of the calculations.
Sorry… that’s just what it is. If it helps, I have forgotten most of the calculations, already. I have to look them up all the time.
Would you care to drop message on my fb or something? I would love to keep touch.
Has been some 2 years of quite lonely travel by myself (many stuff I had only read superficially before I really come to terms with the need to really dive into to have a barely sustainable grasp of what’s being done now-a-days), not that I won’t mind to continue quietly learning…
but… would be awesome to have someone that could point me where to continue to search for some precise issue.
I have the general curiosity for GR, Quantum Gravity, QM, and… well… qubits :) since I have a little knowledge on computer science and information theory (entropy quantification). I would love to know what’s being done in the vanguard of quantum computing (besides the headlines… yeah, that’s the real “foam” of our world: headlines! and it follows no math :) ).
That’s actually my aim for now: understand quantum computing.
It has been a quite interesting ride these two days. So, I appreciate that you actually considered discussing these with me.
keep touch.
“Are you aware that in the eighteen century, people that supported the idea that meteors were rocks from the sky were mockered?”
They were? I am sure you have full citations for that?
Now, let’s assume that they were, how, exactly, does that change the fact that White’s papers look like that of a plagiarist without ideas of his own?
“Also… would you care to explain me how does an electron spin for 14 billion years and hasn’t lost any angular momentum?”
I can’t explain something to you that hasn’t happened. I could suggest that you read a physics textbook on relativistic quantum mechanics and that you try to understand what spin really is, though. It’s a (an at least quasi-) conserved quantity that’s a consequence of an (at least almost perfect) symmetry of the physical vacuum at low energy. Since that symmetry has a very similar mathematical form to a rotation, spin behaves very similar to angular momentum. There has, of course, not been a single electron in the universe, that had an independent existence for the lifetime of the universe. So, in essence, your question is a misunderstanding of what the words mean, that you use to express it.
“Perhaps you’ve just found your first perpetual motion device… yes… and if allows you to exist…”
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Do you?
“Shall we please continue be let alone from those kind of claims you support?”
That White is a fool? That won’t change, whether I spell it out, or not.
“Or perhpas shall we talk a little bit about the (1/2).hv energy in vaccum?”
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, either. The vacuum doesn’t have an energy term like that. It has an energy density that depends on time and boundary conditions.
“Or perhaps those might be also outrageous calims for you…”
I never found the claims of fools to be outrageous. At most, I find them amusing.
“The vacuum doesn’t have an energy term like that.”
E(atomic system) = (hv)/ [ e ^ ([h.v] / [ k.T] ) -1 ] . ((hv)/2)
– 1900 Max Plank’s formula improved in 1913 by Albert Einstein and Otto Stern’s paper. Actually, they just inserted the (1/2).hv term in Plank’s equation. So… this term was the FIRST assumption that there ought to exist some energy independent of k.T
So… at absolute zero, there is still residual energy of (1/2).hv that all oscilators have (aka particles or whatever! since it apears everything oscilates).
Well, for us to speak about “energy density” we must agree on a common ground about certain concepts such as “what is energy” in the first place… because, if you sum all of this term’s energy in all points of space, you will be handeling infinity values. This ought to be the density of vacuum energy – infinity.
So I do follow your “energy density” concept being constrained by time, and indeed v is a quantity with time units. However, as for boundary conditions, one should be more precise and understand precisely which boundary conditions the other is mentioning for there are some as far as I can see, but none seam to have been the cause of a suspension in that (1/2)hv term that experiments made on Nature reproduce as far as I see. And we must understand that this (1/2)hv term was just one “fix” for the matematics to fit experimental data. Yes, things can be more well understood in the future, and perhaps some constant merged with other or some fundamental insight might apear that can bring us access to a more fundamental analysis of reality. However, so far, we only know that there exists a certain amount of enery permeating the space time everywhere, that, taking the sum of all plank’s lenght points on a cubic meter, will make such an osbcene number that we would easily be swimming in infinity. So, we only agree on changes of energy, and consider that the vaccuum has zero energy. However, there is an ocean that goes deep underneed the waves (analogy).
So what boundary conditions are you talking about? Care to present me the arguments please (or sources)?
I would love to see your sources about that thing electrons have not being a fourth degree of freedom… there would be certainly plenty of books to send back to the printer machine if that’s not ture.
I’ll call my day here and proceed in way more efficient activities with my time, until you give me some material to meditate about for a while.
There are a lot of consequences in fairly simple theories out there – provided you just read them twice and fully apreciate the concequences of some unorthodox solutions they embrace.
Are these solutions to be thrown away just because they don’t fit our intuition? You might exist in Nature, but Nature certainly overwhelms your existence. For I and everyone else exist in her as well.
So far our present scientific knowledge goes…
“So… at absolute zero, there is still residual energy of (1/2).hv”
That’s not a vacuum energy term, since the theory you refer to is not a theory of the vacuum, but merely an ad-hoc theory of non-relativistic single particles. Such particles do not exist in nature, hence artifacts of their theoretical description in the low energy limit are also not relevant.
I would suggest you get yourself a modern book about quantum field theory before trying to make statements about the vacuum.
“Well, for us to speak about “energy density” we must agree on a common ground about certain concepts such as “what is energy” in the first place”
That has already been well defined in Newtonian mechanics and the definition has never changed after that. Are you telling me, that you don’t know the definition?
“… because, if you sum all of this term’s energy in all points of space, you will be handeling infinity values.”
Which is an artifact of the way we handle the math by discretizing operators on infinite dimensional spaces in ways that make the problems in the low energy limit easier to handle. It has absolutely nothing to do with real physics, but merely says, that we can not use the same procedures in the high energy limit (i.e. near the Planck scale).
“This ought to be the density of vacuum energy – infinity.”
Only if you don’t know the difference between actual physical reality and mathematical artifacts of your incomplete descriptions of it.
“However, as for boundary conditions,”
The boundary conditions of your experiment, of course. YOU set the boundary conditions under which you want to evaluate energy terms. If you make the boundary conditions that of a box, you get the energy spectrum of a box. If you use a spherical or ellipsoid shape, you get spectra that approximate those found in nuclear problems. Boundary conditions are just as arbitrary as potential energy terms. They represent YOUR choice of physical system and some (very few among all possible ones) approximate a few real physical systems reasonably well.
“I would love to see your sources about that thing electrons have not being a fourth degree of freedom…”
What thing? Please express yourself in a way that shows some knowledge of physics. “Thing” is not a term we use.
Me thinks, I am talking to person with the mind of a child.
Well, I never promised to know that much, in fact I did said I do not know enough. I am certainly not a physicist.
I liked that you pointed me some things – well… things as for arguments and possible descriptions of more advanced theories – that I am checking within my spare time. Yeah… “thing” above was spin, since you didn’t liked the name of it in the first place (read previous comments). But anyway… you seam that kind of person that bends discussions to your own amusement.
We should help each other in the process of learning, however, since you placed that last sentence… I will disregard everything you exposed.
That is not the way to engage in discussions. If you were my teacher, I would certainly cease to attend your classes based on the assumption you are someone who… well… discredit people on the basis that “they might have the mind of a child”.
One note though: I never saw a source or quotation from you. And although I didn’t recall where on Earth I’ve read about those “Marcian quotations related with meteorites” since I wasn’t registering everything I’ve read, I did indeed posed some quotation to solidify my position. Sad we had to discuss like this.
So “Me” ceases this hostile discussion, before you bend this any further and I might get confused of anything exposed here.
I apologize for being abrasive. After a lifetime of listening to cranks p****ing at my field as if it was their birthright, I do not have much patience with anyone who sounds like a physics wannabe.
Let me say this: physicists have been doing this thing for over 300 years. We have become very good at it. The layman can not possibly imagine just how good the best of the best are in physics. The level of intellectual achievement boggles the mind, including mine. You can not wipe that off the table with the “And they said that man can never fly…” crap, which comes up every single time that laymen with big egos are trying to play amateur physicist. You are not going to get a “reasonable” response from any physicist after that. Truthfully, most colleagues are simply ignoring anything that looks like a crank or an amateur who hasn’t, at leas, tried to take a professional course.
We do have plenty of problems in physics, but there is nothing there that one can hope to solve with a trivial argument of any sorts. We have been sifting trough any conceivable easy solution to the data for centuries and there are none.
I just pointed out, that Einstein’s insights into relativity have led to 130 years of extremely intensive research by tens of thousands of very smart people, who have done this professionally for years, if not decades. We are still nowhere close to an understanding of what relativity really does. The one thing that it does not do, however, is to produce superluminal phenomena. That’s by design, just as classical mechanics does not lead to perpetual motion machines by design. It doesn’t matter how you re-arrange the elements of the theory, free energy is just not in there. It’s not in there for good reasons: one of them is the stability of the universe.
It’s the same here: as long as you want to keep a physical system locally Lorentz invariant, nothing will ever go faster than light. Globally you may have phenomena that imply numerical velocities greater than c, but those are integrals which do not have physical meaning in the sense of a simple velocity vector in flat space-time.
Are we sure that nature has made local Lorentz invariance a hard law? Yes, as sure as we can be. We did not observe a violation once. What lay people usually do not know, and what may surprise them is this: every experiment that could possibly detect violations of Lorentz invariance has been analyzed for them or is being analyzed for them as we speak. This is true for x-ray satellites, optical data from space telescopes as it is for LHC. We are looking and we are looking very carefully. Why? Because the guy or gal who discovers any deviation from relativity will be the second most famous physicist after Einstein. Nobody who has a chance to take a stab at it wants to miss that.
“If you were my teacher,”
I am not here as a teacher. I am commenting on a very poorly written article about a very poorly executed line of pseudo-research. This is not good physics and somebody who knows that it isn’t needs to speak up. I took the liberty to do so. If you want a confirmation from a “nice” teacher, try to find a specialist on relativity at a real university. If that professor is willing to deal with you, at all, and assuming that you ASK a question, rather than pitching this a fact, you will hear a similar answer to mine. Nice, short, and negative.
“I never saw a source or quotation from you.”
I can give you links to papers and books, but they would be useless, unless you are willing to spend years of your life on the subject. Personally, I was getting all the entry level stuff that I know about GR from Misner, Thorne, Wheeler “Gravitation”. That’s 1200 of some of the most beautiful pages of graphs and mathematics ever written in physics, all of which assume, that you are good with concepts of advanced geometry like tensors, already. A second book for beginners (which in this case usually means graduate students in physics) is Weinberg’s “Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity”. Both books are about $200 retail, I believe, so better get a copy from the library.
These books are from the early 1970s and will give you a classical introduction to GR, which I find useful, because the more modern approaches are much harder to visualize still. Both books stop a little short of the techniques you would need to actually understand the work of Alcubierre in detail.
“And although I didn’t recall where on Earth I’ve read about those “Marcian quotations related with meteorites” since I wasn’t registering everything I’ve read, I did indeed posed some quotation to solidify my position. Sad we had to discuss like this.”
I liked the citation, but it really doesn’t do anything to illuminate the subject. Every great idea was ridiculed by someone, at some time. But that is meaningless, unless you can put it in context. Let me put a modern case in context for you: about 30 years ago, a man named Shechtman discovered quasi-crystals with icosahedral symmetry. The only thing the world knows about that case is how much ridicule he was supposed to have gotten from fellow physicists. That’s a wonderful sob story, it’s just not true. Here is what really happened:
Linus Pauling, who at the time was way past his prime and who has a very abrasive personality to begin with (he never believed anything not discovered by him, which makes some sense, since he has discovered an incredible amount of A+ stuff) wrote a couple of dismissive notes and articles. Pauling was well known to the public and got a lot of publicity with his negative reviews. But at the same time there were dozens of young, highly active physicists at the top of their careers who almost immediately picked up on Shechtman’s discovery and who verified it independently in a quickly growing number of experiments and theoretical calculations. Just two years after the original discovery, Shechtman’s work was taught as standard material in a class on solid state physics at my university and graduate students were doing active research on quasi-crystals. I could tell you a dozen names of physicists who took Shechman’s work seriously… and you wouldn’t know a single one of them. Pauling’s name you may know.
The public memory is very selective. It remembers the scandalous and the outrageous. It remembers the musings of old men with big names close to death. But if you wanted to find the truth, you would have to mine the citation indexes of the journals and plot graphs with the growing number of secondary discoveries. You would have to ask former students at schools where the discoveries were taught shortly after they were made if they remember their teachers talking about them in class and if that was dismissive or interested/affirmative.
Nobody does that but maybe the best of science historians. And centuries after the fact, most of the affirmative voices may have been erased by time, because they weren’t as loud as the critics. And that’s when selection bias sets in and science looks really bad to a lay audience who has never been there when one of these things actually happened.
That’s just my first hand experience with science proper. You can take it for what it is. It may, at least, explain why I am not particularly impressed by meteorites and human flight skeptics stories.
Apology accepted. Please, also consider my apology for throwing those bones out in the beginning.
It was in fact my first physics discussion in a sense (thou for you was rather… hum… something else I bet). I have however noted those books and some concepts you’v thrown at me. I’ll look them up as I sail through topics :)
Thank you for your time. There are many other issues I would love to get a hold of, or to at least step my foot into… but… one lifetime is not enough for some of us these days and age…. so much for polymaths. They’re running extinct by the year.
Anyway… was fun!
Awesome ;
I am not from a science background but I do firmly believe there is much much more than the present day science. The so called latest scientific developments is just the tip of an iceberg. One aspect ignored by the scientific family is to make a very serious research on Concious Astral Travelling.I believe this technique will enable to travel to distant Galaxies,Stars and planets,including travelling/traversing the different Dimensions of existance.There may be techniques to tune in to the desired vibration and to communicate through Telepathy and other means which are not known or perceived in our 3D menifestation.
You are right about one thing: you definitely don’t have a science background.
Why isn’t billions being given to projects like this one in funding? If they produce a breakthrough, it will change the future for all humanity and open the galaxy to us. Why is it okay to spend trillions in war and meagre amounts for stuff like this? Some seriously misplaced priorities for humans.
Because this is a fool with a NASA badge talking nonsense. None of what he claims stands up to even cursory review.
Nope.
my next question would be, how many cc would be realistically needed to travel back and forth to the nearest habitable planet?
One. Realistically, the only way for “humans” to travel to other stars is in form of a stream of molecular information encoded in a beam of light that is reassembled into a living being at the “other end”. Transferring macroscopic amounts of matter anywhere close to the speed of light is a near hopeless undertaking.
We do not know what is going to happen in the future until the future becomes the present.
You may not, but science does know what is not going to happen, and this one is simply one of those things that won’t.
Why do you say that? The Physics community at this stage doesn’t agree with you that it can’t work in any absolute sort of sense. Why is your insight better than that of NASA’s wonks?
The physics community agrees completely, that there are absolutely no observations, that anything (causal) in nature can go locally faster than the speed of light.
That is as good as “it is known” in science. It doesn’t get better than that. If you think it does, then you don’t understand what the word “science” means.
We had the same situation since the 19th century with regards to perpetual motion machines. The cranks still think they can find an exception to the conservation of energy in nature. Physicists know better and, unlike the cranks, real physicists are actively trying to find the potentially still open loopholes in the laws of nature with regards to that. This is no different. Physicists know very well how relativity could be violated and where to look for such violations and it’s nowhere close to where the FTL crowd is looking.
This doesn’t involve faster than light travel nor any contravention of relativity, or in fact anything that would violate causality. The spacecraft remains *stationary* whilst the section of space is moved via warping space in front and behind it. Thus the local frame at no point moves anywhere close to C. We know this is allowed in relativity as more than just a loophole because cosmic expansion works like this. Much of the universe is moving away from us at a rate faster than the speed of light from our frame of reference (And will eventually appear to just vanish as a result) but not because anything is actually moving along at that speed, remember motion is constrained at the local frame, but because the space between them is expanding. Because this happens without breaking causality we also know physics permits this.
Assuming this all to be observed reality, why would physicists object on first principles to a drive that (A)Does not go faster than light at the local frame of reference (B)Does not violate causality and (C)Does nothing the observed universe doesn’t do naturally?
Remember, the people your accusing of being cranks here are well respected physicists working for NASA and in the universities, publishing their results in reputable journals and having other respected physicists reviewing that work.
“The spacecraft remains *stationary* whilst the section of space is moved via warping space in front and behind it.”
That’s only correct in the configuration during the travel. Before the spacecraft begins to travel and at the end of the journey, it has to (re-)connect with flat space-time. There is some speculation about the transitions wiping out all the “gains” made by spacecraft and erasing the relativistic causality violation caused by the effective FTL travel, but IMHO that’s a complicated way to explain a simple case of GIGO away. Since one can’t get the warped space-time configuration to begin with, one does not have to worry about its causality effects.
“Thus the local frame at no point moves anywhere close to C.”
That doesn’t matter, since you still claim to have a net FTL effect and thus relativistic causality violations.
“We know this is allowed in relativity as more than just a loophole because cosmic expansion works like this.”
Inflation does not violate causality, quite the contrary, it removes it. Neither does it cause the kind of localized warp that the Acubierre drive tries to achieve. It’s more of a phase transition effect, than anything, and those can move at any velocity, since that would be a phase and not a group velocity.
“Much of the universe is moving away from us at a rate faster than the speed of light”
That’s a hypothesis, by the way, not confirmed physics. Inflation is a convenient hypothesis to explain some aspects of cosmology, but that’s all it is, right now, and it opens up more problems, than it actually answers.
“from our frame of reference (And will eventually appear to just vanish as a result) but not because anything is actually moving along at that speed,”
But even that’s because you have a HOMOGENEOUS solution, which the Alcubierre warp is not. Moreover, it’s a solution that only requires positive mass-energy. You can stay positive all the way, simply by “sliding down” a variable coupling constant between mass-energy and metric.
“Think “dots on an expanding balloon” metaphor.”
That’s a metaphor, which we use to explain something to laymen that they can’t experience directly, because they don’t have the math background. The real geometry of the universe is nothing like that of an inflating balloon. Indeed, one can show, that any visualization of a flat 3+1 space-time trough a global embedding requires, at least, a six dimensional vector space with positive definite metric. If you were a being living in six or more spatial dimensions, you could perceive relativistic 4+1 space-time as a complex multi-dimensional surface with a saddle point. But since you are not, we can only give you approximations that visualize SOME properties at a time.
“Because this happens without breaking causality we also know physics permits this.”
You are talking about two different metric configurations, which can not be connected trough a smooth coordinate transformation.
“Assuming this all to be observed reality,…”
Most of what you are assuming is NOT observed reality. Inflation is not observed, but only theoretically postulated and even inflationary space-time can not be deformed into Alcubierre’s metric.
“why would physicists object on first principles to a drive that (A)Does not go faster than light”
Because that’s not true for the connection between the initial and final states.
“(B)Does not violate causality”
The final state does violate causality, so your only way to escape that is to either assume that causality can be violated OR that the Alcubierre configuration will restore causality somewhere between its start and end points e.g. by trapping you inside a distorted bubble, that will take exactly as much time to escape as sub-c travel would have required.
Like I said, the easiest way to “explain” all of this is to call a GIGO a GIGO. We had the same thing with wormhole solutions, which basically turned out to be useless for FTL travel, just as well.
“(C)Does nothing the observed universe doesn’t do naturally?”
Have you seen a natural Alcubierre drive? I have not. All I am seeing, right now, is someone who fails to understand the solution theory of Einstein’s equations. That’s not your fault. It’s an extremely complex subject and no amount of hand waving can removes the complexity of it.
“Remember, the people your accusing of being cranks here are well respected physicists working for NASA”
Just because someone works for NASA, does not make them a well respected physicist. Just because someone is interested in negative mass-energy solutions of Einstein’s equations, does not make them a crank. Just because there are negative mass-energy solutions of Einstein’s equations, does not make FTL travel possible. You are interpreting way too much into my comment.
Please remember, I can trivially make a perpetual motion machine by violating the third law of thermodynamics. That does not make me a crank, but someone who understands why the third law exists. How do you think did Alcubierre come up with his idea? He understood, that in order to make FTL solutions, he had to violate something fundamental. He picked positive mass-energy and, lo and behold, he was right. That does not mean that nature lets us violate positive mass-energy. It only means, that, if she would, we could, possibly, travel in warp bubbles. And not even that is clear, since, as I have pointed out, the transition from inside the bubble to the outside seems to be fraught with difficulties.
Now, as long as we haven’t found negative temperatures experimentally, there will be no perpetual motion machines. As long as we don’t have a stash of negative mass-energy, there will be no Alcubierre spacecraft.
The crank aspect doesn’t lie in any of this. It lies in the misunderstanding of the public in general, and cranks in special, of how theoretical physicists work. Theoretical physicists take a good hard look at the math of known physical phenomena, and then try to tweak it any which way they can. Some of the tweaks, very few, actually, will later be identified as actual natural phenomena. Most of them will stay intellectual nonsense forever. That is perfectly fine for the physics community. It’s the crank community, which believes that ALL theoretical tweaks have to lead to observable natural phenomena. If that was the case, we wouldn’t need experiments, to decide which tweaks are the right ones, and which are not.
“It’s the crank community, which believes that ALL theoretical tweaks
have to lead to observable natural phenomena. If that was the case, we
wouldn’t need experiments, to decide which tweaks are the right ones,
and which are not.”
Uhm…that’s why they’re running this experiment.
Y’know, it’s kinda cranky to claim that you know what the result of a legitimate physics experiment will be, before it happens. Just sayin’…
“Uhm…that’s why they’re running this experiment.”
What experiment? He has a meaninglessly naive optical setup that was obviously built by someone without any experience in precision physics. Whatever he will claim to come out of that experiment will not pass any critical review (which he will not seek).
And with this I am done heating your basement.
Excuse, me – I didn’t realize I was speaking with Nostradamus…lol.
Yeah you definitely seem to have a personal issue with Dr. Sonny White – you just prognosticated fraud, BS34. Did the man steal your wife or something, sheesh…
Anyway – sure, his coils could been wound better – but it still seems pretty spiteful and unscientific to discredit the man’s work without even reading his papers.
But if I were a professional prognosticator, I’d put my money on someone figuring out a spacetime propulsion concept – and proving it, at least in principle. And as long as pioneering concepts like this are being funded, I’d bet sooner, rather than later…
What’s with all the physics envy? Did you fail in high school science? Are you trying to make up for it on the internet now?
scourge (well chosen name, by the way)
Seriously… you don’t know what’s wrong with White’s nonsense? That would be proof that you are clueless about physics.
Not that I needed any.
So we are back to the physics envy part. What’s up with that? It’s not like it’s hard to actually study physics. You just have to do it.
@BS34
“Seriously…you don’t know what’s wrong with White’s nonsense?”
Apparently you don’t either, because every argument you’ve made against it so far has been utterly misinformed (i.e. the negative mass argument which I showed was wrong previously, and the incorrect assertion that FTL warp field travel invokes a Lorentz violation – which demonstrates your complete ignorance of Alcubierre’s original principle). And the rest of your rubbish amounts to deflecting and infantile ad hominem trolling. In fact, it would be achievement to have offered so little substance amid the ponderous scope of verbiage you’ve deposited in this thread, if this were a BS competition.
So yes, Seriously – I’m waiting for an actual, relevant theoretical objection, from you. But I expect to wait quite awhile, given your demonstrated illiteracy with these concepts, so go ahead…take your time…maybe even try reading the papers…tap, tap, tap…
Seriously:
You didn’t study physics and you are afraid to start now. Instead, you like to believe in your comic book versions of interstellar spaceships and you will believe any guy who will give you some sort of religious hope in these comics becoming reality one day.
Why would I want to waste my time on a comic book physics guy? Where is my upside in that?
Well, you’ve already wasted an astonishing amount of time soiling the comments section of this article: expecting you to provide an actual physical argument, rather than more of this ludiscrous ad hominem blustering, hardly seems like an imposition at this point.
So take your best shot, slugger. Or are you afraid that anything you have to say about the physics of this concept will only further demonstrate that you’re just another socially maladapted online science poseur? I know where I’m putting my money ;
I am afraid you are wasting your time, my lonely friend of the deep basement. I had no intentions of trying to educate a troll when you got started, and I have no intentions now. I am curious, though, how long you will continue your desperate attempts to appear like a person that I would want to have a real “discussion” with.
My bet is, that I can keep you responding for another dozen times, or so. Let’s go!
^This, folks, in an admission of defeat. Thanks for playing BS34. And next time you want to try to refute a physics proposal, try reading the papers ;
And yet, there’s absolutely NO requirement to “go faster than the speed of light”.if space is warped. There’s absolutely NO violation of SR involved here.
FTL is a misnomer, warp drive is not.
Yet, there are also absolutely no experiments or observations that prove that space can actually be warped this way.
If you can build a device that traverses a distance in flat space faster than light, then you have built an FTL device, by definition. How you do it, is irrelevant for the definition of FTL. Your argument, that the capsule will never go faster in its local system of reference than c is irrelevant, since it will go faster in the global geometry and that is what counts.
Please, do supply the math to verify that space is flat, as THAT would qualify as falsification of SR. The hand-waving involved in this warp-drive model is precisely the same utilized by the team that came up with a fictitious boson without spin or charge (or color), a completely unverifiable entity in 1964 like the neutrino was decades earlier.
You don’t prove with math, that space is flat, but with measurements. Your ignorance of physics is showing.
Space is not flat. It’s almost flat almost everywhere. If it weren’t, you would be exposed to gravity so strong, that it would rip you apart and spaghettify you in an instant. Matter would be flying around at near the speed of light almost everywhere, there wouldn’t be any stars and planets, only black holes and x-ray emitting plasma falling into them.
“The hand-waving involved in this warp-drive model is precisely the same utilized by the team that came up with a fictitious boson without spin or charge (or color), a completely unverifiable entity in 1964 like the neutrino was decades earlier.”
And until the discovery of the Higgs boson, every physicist, everywhere in the world has treated the Higgs as one likely, but completely fictitious solution to the electroweak hierarchy problem (and little else). The reason why the Higgs had some popularity among physicists was simple: it didn’t require ANY IMPOSSIBLE FORM OF MATTER, that would destabilize the entire universe, if it existed. Indeed, all other models to solve the electroweak hierarchy problem were theoretically less straight forward and pretty.
Having said that, the Higgs hasn’t solved a single serious problem in high energy physics. We haven’t really learned one new thing about the universe by confirming it. It’s the equivalent of putting a cap stone on a very ugly building that nobody really likes, because one can’t live in it comfortably.
If you knew anything about physics, you would know when to stop making inappropriate comparisons.
“The physics community agrees completely, that there are absolutely no observations, that anything (causal) in nature can go locally faster than the speed of light.”
Warp field theory is intrinsically nonlocal – it’s general relativisitic, not special relativistic. The region within the warp bubble is locally stationary, which is why there’s no time dilation between the observer at the origin and the traveler within the field.
Read more, write less ;
Your ideas about non-locality are wrong and have nothing
to do with the actual meaning of that word in general relativity. “FTL effects” in GR don’t change the limits set by local Lorentz invariance. The Alcubierre paradox is simply resolved by warp bubbles not existing, to begin with. And even if Warp bubbles did exist, an observer could not enter them or escape from them, so they are no more helpful than wormholes, which also do not exist but suffer from very similar problems even if we force them into the theory.
Beyond that, I know that your basement is cold, dear. But there is an easy way out: just start your free energy oven and it will heat up in no time.
You said: “there are absolutely no observations, that anything (causal) in nature can go locally faster than the speed of light.”
But a craft within the proposed warp field is in fact stationary wrt the spacetime within the bubble (which is commonly referred to as the “comoving local reference frame” in this context). Any region moving >C wrt the bubble is, by definition, non-local, because it’s outside the light cone of that reference frame. The situation is similar to distant galaxies receding >C…there is no “paradox,” there is no causality violation.
And you talk as if the proposed warp shell can’t be turned off once it’s generated…but apparently you’re so committed to finding a reason that this won’t work, that you’ve checked reason at the door. It’s interesting that you dismiss the work of Kip Thorne though (a progenitor of wormhole theory). I guess that he and Stephen Hawking are in your crank category too. Well, at least I’m in good company ;
Actually science doesn’t know anything. Unless you’re an animist, endowing your creation with independent consciousness.
Now, scientists may know something. At one time they knew, absolutely, that electrons were strictly and unconditionally partitioned to energy levels, just as they knew that nucleons were the hard center to atoms that electrons orbited in fixed paths.
So, “science does know what is not going to happen” is not a particularly reasonable stance, as it precludes pursuing all hypothesis beyond current evidence.
It is pretty obvious, that you understood full well what I meant. I agree. Science is a method. Methods don’t know. But the people applying them do, which is, obviously, what I was referring to, and which you obviously understood.
“At one time they knew, absolutely, that electrons were strictly and unconditionally partitioned to energy levels, just as they knew that nucleons were the hard center to atoms that electrons orbited in fixed paths.”
That, of course, is not true. Physicists in the late 19th and early 20th century didn’t know that. What they did know, was that classical models of electrons and atoms simply didn’t work, which is quite the opposite of your statement.
So why would they even talk about classical atom models, then? Because that’s part of the methodology of science. When you know that you don’t know something, you try to apply everything you do know about other things systematically, and you evaluate how much of that works and what, specifically does not in the new case. And they did. And that led them to the correct solution.
“So, “science does know what is not going to happen” is not a particularly reasonable stance, as it precludes pursuing all hypothesis beyond current evidence.”
Nope, we do know that macroscopic violations of the law of conservation of energy, momentum and angular momentum ARE NOT going to happen. We do know that a trivial violation of relativity, like the one you are looking for, is NOT going to happen. These things we do know. What we don’t know is the spectrum of the vacuum beyond 1 TeV.
In other words: unlike lay people, we do know what we don’t know. We are looking systematically for exactly the things that we don’t know about. How do you think experiments like LHC come to be? Did you think someone woke up one morning and said:
“Wouldn’t it be a swell idea to build a 17km accelerator?”
Please. The LEP machine was built to answer very specific questions at the time. It did just that. The new LHC machine was built to answer other questions, and it did that, too. LEP produced a few surprises, LHC has, so far, not even produced one. That is both a testament for how well we understand nature, already, and, at the same time, how hard it is technically to advance beyond the point of our understanding.
What you are proposing here is, not even theoretically, within the reach of an advanced civilization, not even if the kind of negative mass energy state of matter should exist (which it can not, based on some fairly trivial stability arguments).
The sane person does not dream about FTL drives. They think about how to do space travel WITHIN the limits of physics.
Now, if you are interested, I can explain realistic ways of traveling to the stars in detail to you. The Alcubierre drive is not one of them.
“Nope, we do know that macroscopic violations of the law of conservation of energy, momentum and angular momentum ARE NOT going to happen. We do know that a trivial violation of relativity, like the one you are looking for, is NOT going to happen. These things we do know.”
Ok, first of all, White’s warp field theory doesn’t violate energy, momentum, or angular momentum. It also doesn’t violate special relativity, and it actually -depends- on general relativity…so all of these objections are rubbish. You seem to be conflating this concept with accelerating a body to >C through spacetime, like some kind of superluminal rocket (which is demonstrably impossible, but irrelevant to this concept).
A craft moving via a spacetime warp field would actually be locally stationary, so no laws of physics are broken. And we know that spacetime is dynamic, so it’s not a question of “if” this is possible, only “how.”
Unless of course this research pans out. Teleporters at this stage are even more unfeasible than warp drive because at least we have a theory as to how a warp drive would work. On the other hand a teleporter would involve so much more energy its petty much pointing a doomsday ray at a target and hoping you dont start world war III, because , well, E=MC2 turns out theres a *LOT* of energy involved with converting a humans worth of matter into energy (For reference a nuclear bomb only converts a few percent at best)
this could be possible in the future, all invenstions once were theories, look at nuclear physics in 1890
The problem with that argument is, that nuclear physics practically didn’t exist in 1890, therefor the theoretical possibilities were basically open. Interestingly, we already had all the relevant knowledge about relativity in 1890 to tell, that relativistic travel is near impossible and absolutely nothing about that knowledge has changed since then. It was impossible back then, and it is still impossible today. Nobody with a shred of physics knowledge believes, that anything about that will change in the future.
Yes you are very right as we know it today, but we do not know how the world is going to change in the coming years. Things happen out of the Norm all the time and the Norm for today may not be the Norm for 50 years in the fture, in the same sense, waht is deviant today may be the Norm in the future and we do not know untill the future comes up
We do know what limitations exist in the physical world. The Alcubierre drive and all of its variations basically assume, that one can create an impossible form of matter. It then makes a garbage-in-garbage-out argument, by which it arrives at the result, that FTL is possible.
By the very same kind of logical fallacy I can produce a perpetual motion machine by postulating that a heat bath with negative temperature exists. And unless my physical intuition is grossly wrong on this one, Alcubierre’s negative mass or energy is actually a very close relative of a negative temperature, because general relativity can actually be interpreted in thermodynamic terms.
Now, if you want to religiously believe in garbage-in-garbage-out arguments, nobody can help you. But if you do not believe in it, the only logical alternative is that FTL is, indeed, an impossibility.
Not everything tht is logic happens often the supernatural happens
You may want to prove that before expecting to be taken seriously.
Hold on a minute. Yes this might end up requiring unobtanium and that would put a stop to it eventually. But the casmir effect produces precisely the type of energy required and we see that effect on a regular basis. Now theres a catch in there that as a zero-point energy it might not be useable (at least in the casmir formulation), but (assuming its not just some whacky variation of van der waal forces), it would seem that not only is it possible, its real. This is independent of the question, “can we use it”? To which the answer is “We don’t know”.
See my earlier reply for why your completely wrong about violations of relativity, no need repeating them here.
“But the casmir effect produces precisely the type of energy required”
The Casimir effect is a tiny variation of the total energy of macroscopic bodies due to the quantum fields between them. So you have a tiny negative vacuum term on top of an extremely large positive term. Since the Casimir effect can not be extended to ever dominate the positive term, the net energy of any Casimir configuration stays positive… and that is not what is needed. For Alcubierre’s idea to work, we need something of truly negative mass-energy, not just something that is slightly less positive.
“but (assuming its not just some whacky variation of van der waal forces)”
But that is exactly what it is. It is slightly counterintuitive but not particularly fundamental. It does, to the best of my knowledge, not dominate in any microscopic scenario over the electroweak or strong force.
“This is independent of the question, “can we use it”? To which the answer is “We don’t know”.”
Nope. The answer is that we do know. The Casimir force is tiny compared to electroweak and strong force, which do set the zero point energy of stable matter. Only when we go into a regime where the strong force does not matter, yet, but electromagnetic forces are time-averaged over macroscopic time scales (that’s what happens when we look at macroscopic plates positioned at a few atom diameters distance), only then does the Casimir effect build up to a measurable force. Compared to the forces needed to bind the rest mass of the plates into stable nuclear and atomic configurations, that next to nothing, though.
So which is it, a van der waal force or a negative vaccum. It can’t be both. If your going to argue a van der wall (An opinion held by a tiny minority of physicists at best) force, then it isn’t a negative vaccum. But your arguing both sides of the fence here, and thats illogical.
It’s neither. You can’t get truly negative mass-energy from either. You can get attractive forces from both, though, but that isn’t enough.
iNeedSpavce:
He isn’t trying to build a warp drive. He is building a model of one. That, of course can be done. Sorry that you didn’t catch that part.
Yeahh…no. Alcubierre’s original paper discussed negative mass aka “exotic matter,” and that paper is considered to be a toy model now. Dr. White’s papers explore an altogether different mechanism for generating the boost field – which requires only positive energy.
And your analogy to perpetual motion is specious at best – this research is based on established physics (general relativity, quantum theory, cosmology)…it’s not opposed to proven principles like the conservation of energy.
I don’t know why you’re so vociferously opposed to this exciting field of research, but the cosmos is calling, and it says that FTL is possible…in fact, you’re soaking in it: the bulk of the universe beyond the reach of our telescopes proves that FTL is possible…and the cosmological acceleration we observe is pushing more stars away from us at >C velocities every second.
Some of us think that if the universe can do it, so can we. We’re an audacious bunch, but we tend to get things done ;
Maybe you have seen papers from White which do not use the Alcubierre drive as the basis, I have not. Unlike Alcubierre, who is a capable theoretician, White is not. He is, at most, citing from other people’s works, but he didn’t bring anything substantially new to the table as far as I can see.
His experimental setups are, at best, shoddy undergraduate work and wouldn’t expect to see anything but hot air coming from him in the next years.
Now, he is certainly the kind of guy who will attract cranks like yourself, though.
Have a good one.
Lol – so people who don’t agree with you are cranks? At least I read all of his papers before commenting on his work.
By the way – how do you assess White’s capabilities without reading his work? Your misplaced outrage on this subject makes me wonder if you’ve got some kind of personal stake in this…a grudge, envy, what?
“Impossible” is an awfully big word…it was “impossible” to land a man on the Moon not too long ago, iirc. “Future” is a big word too – for some of us anyway. For others, it appears to span mere decades.
Mankind will reach the stars (if we don’t wipe out global civilization first). And if we make it, spacetime propulsion will be the method we use to get there.
Perhaps you’ll feel less cynical about it if you read the theoretical papers behind this research by Dr. White and Dr. Davis.
I’m reading this rather quickly at the moment, but found the discussion fascinating. I am a chemist, and I’ve had graduate level quantum mechanics and love all things technical. I’m going to mull over this piece at my leisure once again. Shades of Tunneling! A great read.
Quantum mechanics has absolutely nothing to do with this one. Alcubierre’s idea requires a classical form of negative mass-energy, which does not exist as postulated. The rest is a garbage-in-garbage-out argument.
I never meant to suggest QM had anything to do with it. It was more like a Robin expression to Batman, Shades of Quantum Mechanics, Batman! But I do find it interesting reading.
@BinaryStar34
After reading through all the comments here, I couldn’t help but notice a couple of things; 1.) you seem to have taken it upon yourself to discredit this research in the most patronizing manner possible (referring to people who support this concept as “cranks”), and 2.) you haven’t actually read any of Dr. White’s theoretical papers (which indicates to me that you’re not actually a scientist…or at least not a good scientist, since a good scientist wouldn’t be caught dead arguing from a position of ignorance).
First you say: “Quantum mechanics has absolutely nothing to do with this one.” But this is ludicrous – White and Davis explicitly relate the equation of state of the warp sphere to the equation of state of vacuum energy (which arises directly from the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics) in their 2006 Space Technology & Applications International Forum paper “The Alcubierre Warp Drive in Higher Dimensional Spacetime,” p1386:
“This provides us with the insight that if Ps (the energy density) of the original warp sphere is negative, then the corresponding ps (pressure) is positive. However, (9) shows that the converse is true, Ps is positive and so ps is negative. Recall that the spacetime expansion boost for the Alcubierre model could be made to be arbitrarily high depending on the choice of input variables. A high boost is clearly not an exclusive feature common only to negative energy densities and can be readily obtained in the lab provided powerful enough equipment. It should be further noted that (9) is the equation of state for the cosmological vacuum energy, and it is also the (astronomically measured) equation of state for dark energy.”
Note that the quote above also specifically refutes your second
assertion: “Alcubierre’s idea requires a classical form of negative mass-energy,” when they said “A high boost is clearly not an exclusive feature common only to negative energy densities and can be readily obtained in the lab provided powerful enough equipment.”
So your entire argument throughout these comments, which amounts to “negative mass is unphysical so the entire warp field concept is impossible,” is worthless, because a positive energy density yields negative pressure…which yields spacetime expansion via the lambdavacuum solution to the Einstein field equation…producing the observed cosmological acceleration aka dark energy that this research effort aims to harness for propulsion. Dr. White’s team is exploring the fascinating realm where quantum theory and general relativity overlap – and nobody can speak with authority about what they may or may not find there, because nobody has formulated a theory of everything yet. Which is why we need to perform experiments like these.
This is the scientific spirit at its best, precisely the kind of research that NASA should be funding if we ever hope to send a manned mission to an exosolar planet and back again: spacetime propulsion, i.e. metric engineering, is the future of spaceflight. Yes, Dr. White’s theoretical work and experimentation is speculative – but it arises directly from the most promising aspects of general relativity, quantum mechanics, and cosmological theory (inflation – which everyone but BinaryStar34 here seems to accept) and observation (the “dark energy” phenomenon).
Maybe the Eagleworks team will come up empty-handed…and maybe not. Either way, we’ll learn something about how nature works, or doesn’t work – and both findings will move us one step closer to the stars.