A NASA physicist called Harold White suggests that if he tweaks the design of an ‘Alcubierre Drive’, extremely fast space travel is possible. It bends spacetime around itself, apparently. I don’t know enough about physics to be able to call ‘shenanigans’ - what do other people think?
IANAPhysicist, but what seem to me to be the main points:
The Wikipedia article seems to be a fairly good description of problems. Briefly: The warp bubble is a possible state of the universe solely considering the equations of general relativity. We don’t yet know whether it is compatible with the rest of physics.
The Alcubierre drive requires a region of space with negative energy density; we don’t know any way to produce this, but if there is it would involve some currently-unknown form of matter (which is referred to as “exotic matter”, which is just a catch-all label, not something specific).
The work described in the article consists of two things:
Refining the possible state to have less extreme requirements while still being FTL.
Conducting experiments which study an, ah, extremely sub-FTL state which is similar in some sense to the warp bubble. This part seems to me to have a high chance of being just more confirmation of what we already know about general relativity.
The Alcubierre drive requires a region of space with negative energy density; we don’t know any way to produce this, but if there is it would involve some currently-unknown form of matter (which is referred to as “exotic matter”, which is just a catch-all label, not something specific).
I’ve read and been told that this is not entirely accurate; apparently, tiny pockets with effectively this effect have been created in labs by abusing things I don’t understand.
However, it’s apparently still under question whether these can be aggregated and scaled up at all, or if they are isolated events that can only be made under specific one-off circumstances.
This article is fascinating: http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive
A NASA physicist called Harold White suggests that if he tweaks the design of an ‘Alcubierre Drive’, extremely fast space travel is possible. It bends spacetime around itself, apparently. I don’t know enough about physics to be able to call ‘shenanigans’ - what do other people think?
IANAPhysicist, but what seem to me to be the main points:
The Wikipedia article seems to be a fairly good description of problems. Briefly: The warp bubble is a possible state of the universe solely considering the equations of general relativity. We don’t yet know whether it is compatible with the rest of physics.
The Alcubierre drive requires a region of space with negative energy density; we don’t know any way to produce this, but if there is it would involve some currently-unknown form of matter (which is referred to as “exotic matter”, which is just a catch-all label, not something specific).
The work described in the article consists of two things:
Refining the possible state to have less extreme requirements while still being FTL.
Conducting experiments which study an, ah, extremely sub-FTL state which is similar in some sense to the warp bubble. This part seems to me to have a high chance of being just more confirmation of what we already know about general relativity.
I’ve read and been told that this is not entirely accurate; apparently, tiny pockets with effectively this effect have been created in labs by abusing things I don’t understand.
However, it’s apparently still under question whether these can be aggregated and scaled up at all, or if they are isolated events that can only be made under specific one-off circumstances.