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. Warp Drives Might Be More Realistic Than Thought NASA scientists now think that the famous warp drive concept is a realistic possibility, and that in the far future humans could regularly. Inside that bubble would be an inertial reference frame where explorers would feel no proper acceleration. Then, an American scientist named Guido Fetta constructed his own device, which he calls the 'Cannae Drive,' and convinced the NASA team which included warp drive researcher Sonny White 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 Alcubierre drive conforms to Einstein’s theory of general relativity to achieve superluminal travel. 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. 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. THE results of a NASA test into warp drive technology were leaked on the internet, before being quickly removed by the space agency. 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.A new paper proposes a fully physically realized model for warp drive.
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