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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday March 08 2016, @08:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the boldly-going-somewhere dept.

From the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/06/11/this-is-the-amazing-design-for-nasas-star-trek-style-space-ship-the-ixs-enterprise/:

NASA engineer and physicist Harold White announced a few years ago that he was working on a potentially groundbreaking idea that could allow space travel faster than the speed of light.

Yes, like in "Star Trek." http://techland.time.com/2012/09/19/nasa-actually-working-on-faster-than-light-warp-drive/

An over-simplified explanation is that the concept seeks to exploit a "loophole" in Albert Einstein's theory of relativity that allows travel faster than the speed of light by expanding space-time behind the object and contracting space-time front of it. Essentially, the empty space behind a starship would be made to expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction — passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration. White speculates that such a drive could result in "speeds" that could take a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks — even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.

So how quickly can this all become a reality? According to White, in an interview with i09 http://io9.gizmodo.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive, proving that the math can become a reality in the lab is the first and probably most important step in the process:

What White is waiting for is existence of proof — what he's calling a "Chicago Pile" moment — a reference to a great practical example.

..."In late 1942, humanity activated the first nuclear reactor in Chicago generating a whopping half Watt — not enough to power a light bulb," he said. "However, just under one year later, we activated a ~4MW reactor which is enough to power a small town. Existence proof is important."

White explains in great detail the science behind his quest in this lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M8yht_ofHc&feature=youtu.be


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  • (Score: 1) by raattgift on Thursday March 10 2016, @05:15AM

    by raattgift (4407) on Thursday March 10 2016, @05:15AM (#316425)

    You don't know what you're talking about.

    You use lots of passive voice to advance your own ideas as if they have contact with actual tested physical theory ("it is believed"; really, by whom? citation needed), and you drop in lots of buzzwords that either are irrelevant ("arrow of time") or are from purely pop sci treatments and fiction ("fabric of space and time", "bubble in space and time"), or are used wholly inappropriately (e.g. CTCs, Hawking Radiation).

    It is believed that moving through space has this speed barrier because to accelerate an object beyond the speed of light requires an infinite amount of energy.

    c is the speed of any massless particle in Minkowski space, and massive particles can only asymptotically reach that from below; but "reaching that" is done by Lorentz boosts, not by acceleration. If you try to treat acceleration as an integration of Lorentz transformations, the isometry group theory breaks down, so you are stuck fixing a privileged inertial reference frame. (as an example, see sec 6.7 @/http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/stcs/courses/dynamics/lecturenotes/section6.pdf )

    For actual acceleration you need General Relativity.

    In SR you are only mathematically safe when each particle has uniform linear motion.

    the lightspeed barrier ... doesn't apply to space itself

    Minkowski space, the space of SR, is always flat. So there is no curvature and thus no propagation of changes in curvature. SR is simply not a framework in which you can talk about spacetime curvature, because by definition its background has none.

    If you want that not-everywhere-flat spacetime, you pretty much have to do GR.

    The second you do GR you get a one-two punch. The first punch is that you can only compare speeds locally, where locally is very local, technically in the local section of the fibre bundle, or alternatively in the limit where the extent of the region of spacetime goes to zero.

    So you can only compare a photon's speed with a non-photon's speed when the two are at exactly the same point in spacetime. (see for example the third paragraph here http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/einstein/node2.html [ucr.edu] )

    Any relativist seriously wanting to compare speeds outside that limit has to rely on approximately flat spacetime allowing the use of SR; this can involve playing tricks with pseudo-gravitational fields when (for example) test particles are not always in uniform linear motion, which returns us to approaches like in the lecture notes linked above.

    One of the limitations of that sort of approach is that you can't abuse coordinate freedom enough to make transitions across causal cone boundaries vanish. In other words, if you try to incorporate objects that exit the causal cone (e.g. due to the metric expansion of space), you get nonsense results. So the approach is only useful in a local region of spacetime. Introducing objects that are actually moving spacelike also ruins this approach.

    This is the tachyon / bradyon principle and lightspeed is a barrier that cannot be crossed from either side. But that doesn't mean it can't be tunneled across in a manner similar to quantum tunneling.

    There is no tachyon/bradyon principle in SR (there are only massless particles, which travel at "c", and massive particles which travel slower) or in General Relativity (where only can only talk about whether a particle's worldline is always interior to the nonempty, open, convex cone of tangent vectors at some fixed point on the manifold, or always on its boundary, or always outside, or crossing the boundary; in the presence of a metric expansion of space, a "bradyon"'s worldline is likely to evolve from the first to the last of those, crossing the boundary to the outside for a "bradyon" observer coincident at the (same) fixed point).

    Quantum anything doesn't change this. GR's unremovable background is classical. A quantum theory of gravity will have to reproduce GR in excruciatingly exact detail everywhere far from strong curvature, so appealing to quantum anything there is also not going to change that.

    The rest of your post has even less contact with well-tested physical theory.