Arvin Ash

Alcubierre Drive: Warp Speed - Star Trek fantasy or plausible? (2019x36)

Udgivelsesdato: Jul 27, 2019

Alcubierre warp drive - faster than light travel? Is Warp speed possible? Enterprise from Star Trek can go 9000 times the speed of light. By comparison, the fastest manmade object, the Juno probe goes 0.0002 times the speed of light. At this rate, it would take 20,000 years to reach the nearest alien planet, which with the Enterprise, would take only 4.5 hours. But isn’t faster than light travel forbidden by Einstein’s special theory of relativity? There is a loophole. Mexican physicist, and Star Trek fan, Miguel Alcubierre published a paper on “The warp drive”. He manipulated Einstein’s equations of general relativity to make a warp field emerge - regardless of whether other laws of physics would allow it. But his equations are mathematically consistent solutions to Einstein’s equations. And this is how Alcubierre’s warp drive would work: Take a space ship and put a bubble of space around it. If you can compress space in front of the bubble, and expand space behind the bubble, then you can make the bubble of space along with the space ship, move. This would be like riding a wave on a surfboard. This is where the loophole is in Einstein’s speed limit, that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. This speed limit only applies to objects traveling within space, not the movement of space itself. Space can move at any speed. So that bubble of space in Alcubierre’s geometric solution can move at any arbitrary speed, theoretically, even 9000 times the speed of light. But Can space really move at faster than light speed? Yes. Space is being expanded in the back of our spaceship, and being contracted in front of it. Can space expand and contract like this? Yes, Space is allowed to do both. Space is contracting around you and earth right now. That’s what gravity is. Similarly, Space can expand too. It is expanding right now on a cosmological scale. Alcubeirre’s warp drive, creates a bubble around the ship, which is like the surfboard.