Although the universe imposes a natural speed limit of 300,000 kilometers (or 186,000 miles) per second—the speed of light—on everything in it, there are hypothetical shortcuts that could get a traveler around the cosmos in a reasonable amount of time: Einstein-Rosen bridges (better known as wormholes) that create shortcuts between two points in space; and spacetime-bending Alcubierre drives, popularized in fiction through devices like Star Trek’s warp drive.
Over the last few decades a great deal of attention has been put on developing theories around how a potential warp drive might work, especially since theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre applied some real-world mathematics to the otherwise-fictitious device in 1994. Although theoretical physicists are well acquainted with space-warping effect such a drive would need to generate to propel a spacecraft, such a device would need to generate energies that are negative in density in order to compress spacetime, a property that is considered to be impossible in our reality.
However, a group of scientists and engineers with Applied Physics, an international group of scientists and engineers that tackle a wide range of scientific problems, may have found a way to bring the Alcubierre drive off of the shelf of the impossible and into the hands of the possible, by eliminating such a device’s need for impossible energies. In a paper titled Constant Velocity Warp Drive, the group explains that by using “a stable shell of ordinary matter” instead of exotic, negative-density energies, an Alcubierre drive could achieve the same effect.
“This study changes the conversation about warp drives,” remarked Applied Physics physicist Jared Fuchs, PhD. “By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we’ve shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction.”
Barring whatever the phenomenon known as dark matter is, mass and the curvature of spacetime—we experience the effect of this curvature as gravity—appear to go hand-in-hand, without exception, with the gravity generated by an object being directly proportional to its mass and density. It’s this concept that is at the heart of the team’s proposal: use the spacetime-curving effects of ordinary mass to generate the propulsion field.
Ordinary mass exhibits a gravitational field that is symmetrical, so although a given mass, such as a planet, can be attracted to another, it is unable to propel itself through space of its own accord. However, if its gravitational field was asymmetrical, it would essentially seem to be continually be “falling” through space, despite not being attracted toward another massive body, an effect described in the team’s paper as “a shift vector distribution” similar to what is required from an Alcubierre drive.
“Although such a design would still require a considerable amount of energy, it demonstrates that warp effects can be achieved without exotic forms of matter,” explains study co-author Christopher Helmerich, a graduate student of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Although the Applied Physics team has essentially removed the physics hurdle that that was seemingly impossible to clear, the practical reality of such a warp drive is still a long ways off: the methods that would be needed to manipulate these energies into an asymmetrical field are still beyond our understanding, along with a way to scale down the sheer amount of energy required still needs to be developed. However, this new discovery appears to “pave the way for future reductions in warp drive energy requirements,” according to Helmerich.
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