Experiments to examine the possibility of making a real-life warp drive may fail, but they teach us a lot more about the limits of the universe and the physics that describes it. Is there a way past the light barrier? The signs have not been good for more than a century. The experiments that led up to Einstein’s publication of …

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Wednesday 16th December 2015 18:39 GMT Destroy All Monsters

Theories of physics that attempt to reconcile the quantum world with relativity have postulated the existence of additional spatial dimensions: the mathematics of superstring theory gave spacetime a total of ten. However, these theories cause the extra dimensions to wrap themselves up in such a way that they are microscopic - which is not a great help to FTL travel.

Worse: these rather mythical because very-much undetected spatial dimensions do not help to travel FTL: There would just be additional spatial degrees of freedom at each point, but photons would still wander around at c in this more-freedomy micro-space or even, in case those dimensions are unrolled and our 4-D space is a subspace of a larger "bulk" space, in a more freedomy macro-space (though photons do not seem to leave the "brane").

But in any case, my money is on 4D and that's it. I mean, a 4D space with an infinite family of reference frames in each point depending only on relative velocity is already extravagant enough.

3 0 Reply
1. Saturday 19th December 2015 16:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  "(though photons do not seem to leave the "brane")."
  
  Maybe that's why my brane hurts so much now!
  
  0 0 Reply
Wednesday 16th December 2015 19:06 GMT Anonymous Coward

No theory

There is no "warp theory". Pretending it is science, when it is fiction, is pseudoscience.

4 18 Reply
1. Wednesday 16th December 2015 19:13 GMT chivo243
  
  Re: No theory
  
  but not prescience, the Guild Navigators will lead the way, now for the cloak of invisibility ...
  
  1 0 Reply
2. Wednesday 16th December 2015 19:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: No theory
  
  Harsh words indeed.
  
  Physics is a bit stuck at the moment. The experimentalists seem to spend their time confirming the Standard Model ever further out, and the theoreticians don't like it because of the implication that they are completely wasting their time speculating about branes and holographic universes before there are any anomalous results from the particle physicists that might give them a toe-hold on something new.
  
  10 0 Reply
  1. Wednesday 16th December 2015 19:44 GMT Gordon 10
    
    Re: No theory
    
    The latest news from CERN could be interesting though..... Hints of a bigger boson than the higgs let's just hope it isn't like the unstable end of the periodic table just bigger and bigger things that are less and less interesting.
    
    5 0 Reply
    1. Wednesday 16th December 2015 20:25 GMT chivo243
      
      Re: No theory
      
      I've wondered what would happen if we shipped every element we could to a foreign environment? Would they all endure intact? Or would some break down in an unexpected way? Would they change properties and become something "not of this world?"
      
      Yes, nOOb in physical sciences raises his hand. Just because sodium fizzes under water here doesn't mean it won't sprout flowers in space.
      
      3 6 Reply
      1. Wednesday 16th December 2015 20:39 GMT TheOtherHobbes
        
        Re: No theory
        
        >I've wondered what would happen if we shipped every element we could to a foreign environment?
        
        if you mean somewhere in the EU - I'm fairly sure physics is the same over there.
        
        If you mean the far side of an event horizon - matter doesn't matter there, so it's anyone's guess.
        
        1 0 Reply
      2. Wednesday 16th December 2015 20:39 GMT cray74
        
        Re: No theory
        
        "I've wondered what would happen if we shipped every element we could to a foreign environment? Would they all endure intact? Or would some break down in an unexpected way? Would they change properties and become something "not of this world?""
        
        That's a reasonable question that a lot of people have asked, albeit in slightly different ways. The basic chemical elements are pretty well evaluated in a wide range of environments. Just mapping out an element's phase diagram requires testing an element through wide combinations of pressure and temperature. We know what crystal, liquid, and gaseous forms an element will take from absolute zero in a vacuum to high pressure, superheated gases.
        
        On a daily basis, elements get put through wide ranges of conditions. Look at what water goes through in a thermal power plant: supercritical conditions, gaseous conditions, liquid conditions, high pressure, and near-vacuum in the condenser. (Sorry, not an element, but you get the point.) Industrial equipment for element extraction often entails a wide range of environments.
        
        Just about every element has been taken into space for one reason or another - satellites and spacecraft are complicated machines that dabbled with the breadth of the periodic table of elements, from hydrogen to xenon to plutonium to americium.
        
        Just because sodium fizzes under water here doesn't mean it won't sprout flowers in space.
        
        Sodium has been evaluated in a vacuum at varying temperatures to build up a profile of its vapor pressure. It's also been evaluated in nuclear reactors, which provide a gamut of temperatures (solid to vapor), pressures (vacuum to tens of bars), and radiation levels (none to a lot).
        
        If you're curious about an element's behavior through varying environments, look up its phase diagram. That'll get you started on predicting its behavior. If you want to step up your game on elemental behavioral prediction, look at the predictions made for the composition of gas giants like Jupiter and ice giants like Neptune - simulations, lab experiments (key word: diamond anvil), and space probe visits all help put together estimates of how elements behave in the extreme conditions of planetary interiors.
        
        6 0 Reply
        
        Thursday 17th December 2015 15:03 GMT DropBear
        
        Re: No theory
        
        "...every element we could to a foreign environment? Would they all endure intact?"
        
        Considering what you specifically seem have in mind is not at all a foreign but _the native_ environment of ALL elements, I don't see what about them do you expect to change. We only have all those elements at all because at some point a fusion reactor floating around in space (also known as "a star") kindly constructed industrial amounts of them before they got to stick together into this huge ball of dirt we live on and call a "normal environment". That "we are all made of stardust" is not a figure of speech in the slightest you know. What exactly are you thinking of that would qualify as "more extreme" than that, barring the very singularity of a black hole...?
        
        4 0 Reply
      3. Wednesday 16th December 2015 20:43 GMT Ugotta B. Kiddingme
        
        Re: "Just because sodium fizzes under water here doesn't mean it won't sprout flowers in space"
        
        so the bowl of Petunias was a transformation of sodium? Fascinating theory. What then, according to this theory, became the whale?
        
        5 0 Reply
      4. Wednesday 16th December 2015 22:22 GMT Chemist
        
        Re: No theory
        
        "Just because sodium fizzes under water here doesn't mean it won't sprout flowers in space."
        
        That's NOT science that's mere idle speculation
        
        4 0 Reply
        
        Thursday 17th December 2015 10:20 GMT Paul Shirley
        
        Re: No theory
        
        Science is speculation, backed by sanity checking.
        
        7 3 Reply
      5. Thursday 17th December 2015 12:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
        
        Re: No theory
        
        @Chivo243
        
        The short answer is that the chemical elements are made up of electrons, protons and neutrons, and the protons and neutrons are made of quarks held together by gluons. The energies involved are such that machines like the LHC (or stars) are needed to break them down "in an unexpected way", and that in fact is what particle physics research is all about. Electrons are pulled off easily (that's chemistry), protons and neutrons can be separated with a lot more effort (and the result still ends up as known atoms), and quarks are extremely difficult to separate as the force between them increases with separation, as if they were held together with almost infintely strong springs.
        
        The force of gravity is so weak compared to the forces that hold atomic nuclei together that any foreign environment outside atom smashers or stars (or inside black holes, where we can't really look) is insignificantly different from our own.
        
        I am sure someone will come along and qualify this but I think that from 10kM up, that's about the story.
        
        4 0 Reply
        
        Thursday 17th December 2015 19:53 GMT Michael Wojcik
        
        Re: No theory
        
        The force of gravity is so weak compared to the forces that hold atomic nuclei together that any foreign environment outside atom smashers or stars (or inside black holes, where we can't really look) is insignificantly different from our own.
        
        Well, there are other such "extreme" environments. For example, any time a "cosmic ray" (high-energy extraterrestrial particle) hits an atom in the atmosphere, you have a very high-energy event - higher than what we can create in any of our colliders. And then there are things like Gamma-Ray Bursts and such, which are caused by (collapsing) stars but certainly produce rather extreme conditions in their neighborhood.
        
        And then there are hypothetical events like false vacuum collapse. After one of those, and given a little while for matter to recondense from a quark soup, if it can, sodium - that is, the element with 11 protons in its nucleus - would indeed do something quite different, if it was capable of existing at all. Because after the vacuum decays to a lower zero-point energy state, chemistry is different. But again, we won't be around to observe it. No one will, according to Coleman and de Luccia: "However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated."
        
        2 0 Reply
      6. Thursday 17th December 2015 16:17 GMT chivo243
        
        Re: No theory
        
        Looks like I need a course on punctuation?
        
        "Just because sodium fizzes under water here doesn't mean it won't sprout flowers in space."
        
        Just because sodium fizzes under water here doesn't mean it won't sprout flowers in space (does it)?
        
        Should have had a question mark! Mea Culpa?
        
        1 0 Reply
Wednesday 16th December 2015 20:12 GMT PleebSmasher

"Telescopes such as the BICEP2 instrument close to the South Pole have been built to watch for the remnants of massive gravitational waves."

Fortunate or unfortunate wording?

0 0 Reply
Wednesday 16th December 2015 20:18 GMT Anonymous Coward

Re. CERN

OK, so it looks like they intend to use metamaterials to simulate properties of exotic matter.

This isn't completely implausible, the trick would be designing such a material in the first place.

0 0 Reply
Wednesday 16th December 2015 21:22 GMT Anonymous Coward

... 1887 experiment performed by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley that failed to obtain the results anyone at the time expected.

The thing is that there was a variation in the results although it wasn't the calculated value and no one has a satisfactory explanation for it. That discrepancy was confirmed later by repeating the experiment at the US naval observatory.

3 0 Reply
1. Thursday 17th December 2015 15:20 GMT DropBear
  
  "there was a variation in the results"
  
  Considering only the two facts of a) how long it took for mankind to come up with anything that could actually experimentally measure the speed of light at all and that b) the kind of equipment used to finally make that measurement was multiple orders of magnitude too imprecise to measure _variations_ in the speed of light which is why Michelson and Morley had to come up with something much, much more sensitive, it's not hard to imagine that the measurements they took had, you know, a non-zero precision error. The whole interferometer had to be floating on mercury to make the measurement at all, FFS!
  
  "That discrepancy was confirmed later" [Citation needed] - also, clarification whether that was _the exact same_ discrepancy (now that would be something...) or just some discrepancy again, due to instruments inexplicably _still_ not measuring the speed of light with absolute precision (go figure...).
  
  3 0 Reply
Wednesday 16th December 2015 22:24 GMT Anonymous Coward

I thought...

Dr Sam Carter (rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr) solved all of this with the help of the Asgard - all we need are a few stargates is all ^_^

0 0 Reply
Wednesday 16th December 2015 22:55 GMT Ian Michael Gumby

What no Dr. Who connection or Douglas Adams?

"Alcubierre’s idea was to consider how the expansion and collapse of space could be harnessed by a craft trying to travel to a distant star. His ‘warp bubble’ concept puts the craft in a region of normal spacetime that has, in front of it, some way of collapsing space. Behind it, a reverse process re-expands space behind the craft. The craft itself does not move across space at all - it is the space in which it sits that moves."

-=-

When I read that paragraph, why did I think to Dr. Who and how the Tardis moved through space and time, as well as how the improbability drive worked?

Is it just me? Am I a pint low? (Beer that is)

3 0 Reply
Wednesday 16th December 2015 23:04 GMT Kaltern

Powered flight was impossible 163 years ago.

Space flight was impossible 58 years ago.

The Higgs Boson wasn't proven 3 years ago.

We can't travel FTL, or use any form of spacetime compression drive.

Yet.

How about we stop saying it isn't possible, and make it so it is? It worked for the last few thousand years.

9 12 Reply
1. Wednesday 16th December 2015 23:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  thicko amused by ftl boffins
  
  Man could always see birds could fly so it was not impossible and only a matter of time before we found a way to get aloft.
  
  Space flight followed on from that.
  
  FTL was just dreamed up in various fictional books and films once someone done the
  
  measurments and realised how far away everything is.
  
  The only exploration of space will be telescopes and robots and time delays for a long time to come. Or maybe never.
  
  Whats the difference in a robot picking a rock or some poor sod in a thick suit he dare not take off for fear on instant death?
  
  No need for a spaceship full of food and toilet paper either.
  
  I do like watching excited boffins spouting their bollox on the telly though.
  
  6 12 Reply
  1. Thursday 17th December 2015 02:56 GMT Kaltern
    
    Re: thicko amused by ftl boffins
    
    I assume your ability to read must cloud your openmindedness.
    
    I said powered flight. As in humans powering their own flight. I think you'll find Pterodactyls and it's ilk were flying before birds. Not very well, but they got the job done.
    
    Flight for humans required knowledge of physics. And engineering. And determination. And a belief that it could be done.
    
    It's no wonder we're stuck where we are right now with people like you and your 'It's impossible because we know it to be so' attitude.
    
    6 14 Reply
    1. Thursday 17th December 2015 06:46 GMT Chemist
      
      Re: thicko amused by ftl boffins
      
      "It's no wonder we're stuck where we are right now with people like you and your 'It's impossible because we know it to be so' attitude."
      
      To be fair the skepticism is due to a lack of any theoretical framework to give any hint as to how this all might be achieved. Idle speculation can only achieve so much.
      
      9 0 Reply
      1. Thursday 17th December 2015 07:21 GMT Chemist
        
        Re: thicko amused by ftl boffins
        
        I might add that personally I'd be delighted if there was some evidence for potential mechanisms for distant travel but realistically it may be that the physics of this universe don't allow for such things.
        
        Wishing for something may drive technology but not science.
        
        9 0 Reply
        
        Thursday 17th December 2015 10:53 GMT annodomini2
        
        Re: thicko amused by ftl boffins
        
        @Chemist, there are plenty of mechanisms for getting to distant places, only a matter of time.
        
        1 1 Reply
        
        Thursday 17th December 2015 15:56 GMT Chemist
        
        Re: thicko amused by ftl boffins
        
        "@Chemist, there are plenty of mechanisms for getting to distant places, only a matter of time."
        
        That is so obvious it wasn't worth mentioning. I assumed people wanted to travel to the stars within their own lifetime.
        
        2 0 Reply
        
        Thursday 17th December 2015 21:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
        
        Re: thicko amused by ftl boffins
        
        " I assumed people wanted to travel to the stars within their own lifetime."
        
        If we're not limited to our own lifetimes the atoms of which we are made may eventually orbit other stars, unless cosmic expansion speeds up. So the assumption is unnecessary.
        
        2 1 Reply
        
        Monday 21st December 2015 01:37 GMT Martin Budden
        
        Re: thicko amused by ftl boffins
        
        Indeed, we are all made of stars.
        
        0 0 Reply
    2. Thursday 17th December 2015 10:10 GMT Alfred
      
      Re: thicko amused by ftl boffins
      
      "I said powered flight."
      
      Yes you did.
      
      " As in humans powering their own flight."
      
      No you fucking didn't. You said "powered flight", which is exactly what an aeroplane does. For example, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#First_powered_flight
      
      If you *meant* to say "humans powering their own flight" and you accidentally misspoke, be adult enough to admit you misspoke and correct yourself. Pretending that actually you're using the correct definition and everyone else is wrong so you were totally correct all along is the action of a little child.
      
      7 2 Reply
2. Wednesday 16th December 2015 23:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  false equivalency
  
  there were no theoretical frameworks at the time worth a rip that could predict anything at higher energy levels than nature. Space flight was never "impossible" to any basic observational researcher. Powered flight was also never scientifically impossible. the Higgs Boson was never predicted as impossible, we only got *confirmation* of the theory that said it WAS possible a few years ago.
  
  the frameworks we have give no indication whatsoever that there is an end run around lightspeed. No experimental evidence whatsoever showing any possibility of reality.
  
  it's like the BS saying "if we can put a man on the moon why can't we.." and then whatever the questioner's pet peeve or project is.
  
  10 5 Reply
  1. Thursday 17th December 2015 19:59 GMT Michael Wojcik
    
    Re: false equivalency
    
    there were no theoretical frameworks at the time worth a rip that could predict anything at higher energy levels than nature
    
    What's a "higher energy level than nature" supposed to be? Supernatural?
    
    "At the time", whenever that was, people were pretty damn familiar with some high energy levels. Like lightning, for example. And volcanoes.¹ Humans have always lived with evidence of ample energy.
    
    ¹Here I'm talking about energetic events that are phenomenologically obvious to human observers with no special equipment or theoretical foundation. Obviously the sun is hella more energetic at the source than surface events here on Earth, and obviously we have in nature fissioning compounds and the like which are quite energetic. But when pre-scientific peoples think of a big boom, they think of immediately-impressive meteorological and geological events.
    
    2 0 Reply
3. Thursday 17th December 2015 20:07 GMT Michael Wojcik
  
  How about we stop saying it isn't possible, and make it so it is?
  
  Sigh.
  
  We get this sophomoric strutting in every article that mentions FTL. (Of course it doesn't help that this particular article was pretty lousy.)
  
  Look, it's one thing to say "I don't understand why people who know a lot about this subject say it's impossible". It's another to wave your dick around and claim that the "nay-sayers" are just intellectually lazy, particularly since that's the sin you are guilty of yourself.
  
  Humans considered powered flight long before they were able to achieve it, and many understood the basic problem - increasingly well, until they were able to see how it could be overcome, and what sort of technology would be required.
  
  We understand the problems with FTL quite well, and they're of a different order entirely. Besides the relativistic issues, which are quite enough on their own, there's the little problem of breaking god-damned causality.
  
  Personally, I'd rather live in a causally-consistent world than one where I could (assuming an absurd energy budget and a thousand other unlikely-to-be-satisfied requirements) travel to another inconsistent one. If you want to live in an entirely incomprehensible universe there are plenty of ways to impair your cognitive processes. (Refusing to try to understand problems is a good start.)
  
  8 1 Reply
  1. Thursday 16th June 2016 09:34 GMT deconstructionist
    
    what is this common sense in a reg forum post
    
    Well said, the article is just a cut paste which I dislike and there is no validity here only assumptions and in parts based on faith , it is not even a conjecture. it is akin to Victorian sciences attitude towards basic space travel , quaint and charming but more based on want than on Science.
    
    Theory is great , discussion on theories are better ...but "what if's" I will leave to Disney and hollywood.
    
    0 0 Reply
Wednesday 16th December 2015 23:50 GMT Rick Brasche

Yay we discovered a dimension where FTL is possible!

but water freezes at 30 degrees centigrade and time passes roughly 5x faster.

so you get there in 1/5 the time according to the outside universe, but it took you the same amount of time relative, and your biological life processes don't work.

Dammit! :P

4 0 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 01:13 GMT Anonymous Coward

A real-life warp drive may fail

But my mind has just been warped...

1 0 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 02:32 GMT Anonymous Coward

Never trust an article that calls Poincaré "Jules Henri".

1 0 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 04:51 GMT x 7

Space Kitties

they look cute. Where can I buy one for my son? He likes cats. And space travel

1 1 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 08:02 GMT tony2heads

Gravitational Waves

To move through space-time surf the wave, dude.

I'm just hanging out around here waiting for a tube.

1 0 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 09:38 GMT DocJames

FTL travel is easy...

if you're powered by bad news. Makes you unpopular when you arrive...

0 0 Reply
1. Thursday 17th December 2015 10:19 GMT Aqua Marina
  
  Re: FTL travel is easy...
  
  I recall an episode of ST Voyager (maybe just a scene or two, it's some decades ago) about that very premise. Despite them travelling at FTL speeds, their reputation as a ship of death was always ahead of them resulting in a not too cheery welcome.
  
  So maybe we need to build a reputation powered drive!
  
  3 0 Reply
  1. Thursday 17th December 2015 12:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: FTL travel is easy...So maybe we need to build a reputation powered drive!
    
    That would be the reverse of HHGG - all the politicians and many of the journalists and celebrities would be stuck at home while the nice people colonised the universe.
    
    1 0 Reply
  2. Monday 21st December 2015 01:38 GMT Martin Budden
    
    Re: FTL travel is easy...
    
    So maybe we need to build a reputation powered drive!
    
    Ha! Your reputation precedes you. Very good.
    
    0 0 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 10:26 GMT Anonymous Coward

gravity waves from inflation?

If inflation was space expanding, everything caught in it would be stationary in own local frame. So what was accelerating to generate the waves?

1 0 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 10:59 GMT Alister

This article was originally published in the January 2016 edition...

WOW! Time Travel!

11 0 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 12:46 GMT druck

Physics vs Computing

Well this is the sort of thing that made me switch from a Physics Degree to a Computer Science degree. It's absolutely fascinating, but made my head hurt more than dealing with 0's and 1's, at least until Microsoft came along.

6 0 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 13:29 GMT PassiveSmoking

There's your warp bubble, Wesley.

0 0 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 15:33 GMT DropBear

I certainly do hope we don't live in a simulated universe though. I'm pretty sure we would find some interesting high-energy experiment that would manage to inadvertently segfault the whole thing sooner rather than later...

1 0 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 18:35 GMT captain veg

FTL is possible (but unprovable)

Einstein demonstrated the impossibliity of accelerating to c. There's nothing in relativiy that prohibits the existence of particles that are *always* moving at a speed higher than c. We wouldn't be able to observe or interact with them, though.

-A.

0 0 Reply
1. Thursday 17th December 2015 20:09 GMT Michael Wojcik
  
  Re: FTL is possible (but unprovable)
  
  There's nothing that prohibits anything we can't interact with. That's what we call "the supernatural", and it's outside the domain of scientific epistemology.
  
  3 0 Reply
  1. Friday 18th December 2015 11:26 GMT captain veg
    
    Re: FTL is possible (but unprovable)
    
    > That's what we call "the supernatural"
    
    You mean like spooky action at a distance, a.k.a. quantum entanglement?
    
    -A.
    
    2 1 Reply
2. Friday 18th December 2015 09:14 GMT OwlSanctuary
  
  Re: FTL is possible (but unprovable)
  
  He also said, and was proven to be correct, that gravity bends space and time, so you just need an intense directed gravitational field to bend space, et voila, no need to travel at c.
  
  0 1 Reply
  1. Saturday 19th December 2015 16:47 GMT mosw
    
    Re: FTL is possible (but unprovable)
    
    "He also said, and was proven to be correct, that gravity bends space and time, so you just need an intense directed gravitational field to bend space, et voila, no need to travel at c."
    
    Even if you could control the massive amounts of mass and energy needed to bend space you could not distort space without distorting time. So when you transported yourself across the galaxy you will likely find yourself in the distant future with no way back to the preset time. Anything else would violate causality creating a unstable universe - at least to human perception.
    
    2 0 Reply
Thursday 17th December 2015 21:42 GMT swm

The Current State of Physics

I was always struck by the similarity of solid-state quantum mechanics to high-energy physics. There are even relativistic effects in the motion of solitons. There are several theories that maybe the universe is a crystal and what we observe are dislocations or "sound" waves in this crystal. Many of these theories can duplicate the observed universe and theories at low energies. Until we get a new theory about this underlying "crystal" or some other fundamental theory and experimentally verify it there is no hope of anti-gravity and warp drives. Throwing money at the problem won't work - what is needed is a new theory that can be tested and has effects different from the current theories.

It is known that the current theories are wrong - when combining quantum mechanics and general relativity the equations blow up and cannot be reconciled. At the low energies we have tested quantum mechanics and general relativity seem to explain everything and seem to match the theories' exactly. Even at higher energies (colliding rotating black holes) there is astronomy data that seems to agree with the calculations.

This is why any anomaly at the LHC or in astronomy can be important.

2 0 Reply
1. Thursday 16th June 2016 09:57 GMT deconstructionist
  
  Re: The Current State of Physics
  
  I understand what you are saying, but the reason we can't reconcile the big with the small is we really don't understand either realm, even the land of the big we have so many "Dark" things Flow, Matter and Energy, dark really just means "we don't understand" and nothing to do with "we cant see it". and in the quantum world we have more theories than particles , so there is a long way to go before we can sit both of them at the same table.
  
  So we have a long way to go before we understand how to actually ask the Question, and that's the problem so jumping into FTL research is a like trying read a book when you don't know what words are , learn to read first.
  
  To much research these days is aimed at what is sexy and stir's wild imaginations, rather than the practical issues of things we know we don't understand that we know are real.
  
  0 0 Reply
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Friday 18th December 2015 09:14 GMT OwlSanctuary

Bob Lazar says the US Govt already has gravity amplifiers that are the propulsion system of a captured craft he worked on when hired to back engineer it. Fuel was element 115, which didn't "exist" in 1989 when he blew the whistle, it does now..

Why travel in a linear mode when you can just pull space towards you.

0 1 Reply
1. Monday 21st December 2015 01:45 GMT Martin Budden
  
  Pass the tin foil please...
  
  0 0 Reply
Friday 18th December 2015 11:54 GMT science

Space does not contract and warp, and time is not relative

The Lorentz coordinate tranformation (LCT) transforms the coordinates on an electromagnetic (EM) wavefront, emitted by a source that is stationary within an inertial reference frame (IRF), into other IRF's relative to which the source is moving. It does not traform the coordinates of the centres-of-mass of matter-objects. The latter are tranformed by the Galilean coordinate transformation (GCT).

If a wavefront is emitted at time t by such a stationary source, this wavefront instantaneously manifests at the position of the stationary source at the time t when it is emitted.

Within another IRF in which the source is moving away from the origin of the coordinate system, the same wavefront manifests at a later time T(+)>t. While within an IRF in which the source is moving towards the origin of the coordinate system, the same wavefront manifests at an earlier time T(-)<t. This must be so since the wavefront does not move within aether.

The times T(+), t and T(-) are DIFFERENT NON-SIMULTANEOUS times: However, T(+) is simultaneously valid within all possible IRF's: Similarly t is simultaneously valid within all possible IRF's: And similarly T(-) is simultaneously valid within all possible IRF's. Thus, time is NOT a fourth coordinate that can take on different values at the same SINGLE instant. The latter is obviously a contradiction in terms which must be rejected in terms of reductio ad absurdum.

Furthermore, space cannot contract or warp. Only a matter-object with rest-mass m(0) becomes longer with increasing speed along the direction it is moving. This increase in length is required since a matter object moves like an EM wave with a de Broglie wavelength; and it is also required to accommodate its increase in energy (kinetic energy T) which is given by T=m*c^2-m(0)*c^2.

Thus, there is no space-time manifold that can warp to propel a spacecraft through space at a speed that is faster than the speed of light.

There might, however, be another way, and that is to "entangle" the spacecraft within a SINGLE stationary electromagnetic wave. A single EM wave is in instantaneous contact with itself so the an entangled entity can teleport across this wave from one position in space to another position in space. Thus Captain Kirk will not just ask Scotty to beam him up, but also Mr Sulu to near-istantaneously beam the spaceship across space. But for this one needs a single stationary EM wave that fills the universe. Is this possible? Yes it might be opossible that the microwave background radiation (MBR) fundamentally consists of stationary EM waves that fill the volume of the whole universe.

Just a thought!

1 2 Reply