A Star Trek-like ‘warp drive’ has been moved to the realm of physical possibility by new research from scientists.
If fully realized, a warp could help mankind reach distant stars and planets in months, weeks, or days – unlike the thousands of years it would take humans at current speeds.
Previous ideas for a chain drive, an engine that can move faster than light, have only worked with almost impossible physical concepts, such as large amounts of ‘negative’ energy.
But scientists believe that at least in theory they have come up with a design that relies solely on known physical concepts.
What is warp drift?
The skewed force, an object of science fiction for decades, was first proposed in 1994 by the physicist Miguel Alcubierre.
Alcubierre had to match his warp drive idea with Einstein’s theory of relativity – one of the most solid and widely tested scientific theories.
A central principle of general relativity is that the speed of light is the maximum speed over which anything in the universe can move.
To circumvent this problem – to make something travel faster than light than nothing presumably can, Alcubierre suggested the equivalent of a scientific handle.
By inflating a space-time behind a ship and ‘contracting’ it in front, the ship would be in a ‘space-time’ bubble, which could reduce the distances (and velocities) not available to ordinary bodies in space. does not move.
But this trick relied on a large amount of ‘negative energy’ to rotate and bend space-time – something scientists had not observed before.
Although scientists have not been deterred by this self-control – Nasa has been researching the concept for decades – it has created a major obstacle to any realistic possibility of an actual warp drive.
What does the new research say?
Two separate papers, independent of each other, coincidentally suggested that warp stations would be possible.
Astrophysicist Eric Lentz, and physicists Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire, who both write in Classical and Quantum Gravity, suggested that the driving force might be feasible.
Although the new research is still in the ‘idea stage’, it suggests that warp drives do not need as much (or even any) negative energy at all – positive energy, abundant and easy to create, can do.
Although both papers suggest slightly different ways of creating Alcubierre’s warp drive, they are both improvements over the previous physically unworkable models.
Lentz thinks that a kind of particle called solitons (waves in space-time that work like a particle) can move faster than light and “create a conductive plasma and classical electromagnetic fields”, both of which are well understood by modern science. word.
Bobrick and Martire, on the other hand, circumvent the problem of negative energy by using the concept of ‘floating bubbles’ of space-time, instead of allowing the spaceships themselves to float in space-time.
This physical model uses almost no negative energy and was endorsed by Alcubierre himself, the original inventor of the warp.
The concepts behind both warp drives are difficult to understand, so here is Sabine Hossenfelder, a professor and research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, to help explain.
Although both proposals for warp drives are exciting things, they are still very scientifically possible – many of the proposed structures that scientists do not fully understand.
But shifting the problem within the field of physics is still a major advance.
“While the mass requirements required for such adaptations are still enormous at present,” Bobrick and Martire write, “our work suggests a method of constructing such objects based on the laws of physics.”
We may not have a warp tomorrow or even in a decade, but maybe we will visit alien planets over a hundred years in the same time it takes to fly to New York.
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