![]() ![]() It might help to think of an Alcubierre drive like the classic “tablecloth and dishes” party trick: The spaceship sits atop the tablecloth of spacetime, the drive pulls the fabric around it, and the ship is situated in a new place relative to the fabric. ![]() The rules of physics would still apply within the bubble, but the ship would be localized outside of space. Inside that bubble would be an inertial reference frame where explorers would feel no proper acceleration. Traveling faster than the speed of light, you should arrive to. “By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it,” Alcubierre wrote in his paper’s abstract, “motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible.”Įssentially, an Alcubierre drive would expend a tremendous amount of energy-likely more than what’s available within the universe-to contract and twist space-time in front of it and create a bubble. The captain adjusts the ships warp drive appropriately, and you settle in for warp speed. The Alcubierre drive conforms to Einstein’s theory of general relativity to achieve superluminal travel. Instead, a warp drive bends space itself. Our current understanding of warp speed dates back to 1994, when a now-iconic theoretical physicist named Miguel Alcubierre first proposed what we’ve called the Alcubierre drive ever since. Like an Einstein-Rosen bridge, warp technology skirts around the impossibility of accelerating a ship past the speed of light. The closest such trip is still four years long at light speed. One major reason for our interest is pure pragmatism: without warp drive, we’re probably never making it to a neighboring star system. Scientists have been studying and theorizing about faster-than-light space travel for decades. Star Trek suggests that this extraordinary power alone pushes the ship at faster-than-light speeds. The faster-than-light warp drive of the Federation works by colliding matter and antimatter and converting the explosive energy to propulsion. The colloquial term “warp drive” comes from science fiction, most famously Star Trek. To best understand what the breakthrough means, you’ll need a quick crash course on the far-out idea of traveling through folded space. In a surprising new paper, scientists say they’ve nailed down a physical model for a warp drive, which flies in the face of what we’ve long thought about the crazy concept of warp speed travel: that it requires exotic, negative forces. The new model is exciting, but warp speed is still probably decades or centuries away.This builds on an existing model that requires negative energy-an impossibility. Harold G Sonny White, a former NASA warp drive expert and the team leader at LSI, has emphasized the significance of this discovery as the creation of a real, albeit tiny, warp bubble.A new paper proposes a fully physically realized model for warp drive. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |