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Warp Engines In Development?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i'm-giving-her-all-she's-got-captain dept.

Toloran writes "Although a staple of Sci-Fi space travel, it is often deemed to be just that: Fiction. However, it seems that one is currently in development. "The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft. Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.""

31 of 1,016 comments (clear)

  1. This is SO neat! by ackthpt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It reminds me of the experiments with the first atomic bombs: they didn't know that the chain reaction wouldn't ignite the atmosphere. Who knows what considerations they've given it. Will it jerk the earth out of it's orbit? Will it open a wormhole that sucks out the earth's atmosphere? Will it end life as we know it? I was under the impression that extreme magnetic fields were fatal to humans, to say nothing of throwing birds off of their migration patterns.

    I wonder who they will bestow the honor of first flight on...

    Like the WB Gophers:

    "After you!"
    "I wouldn't think of it, after you!"
    "Oh, but I insist you go first!"
    "I am most undeserving of that honour, you go first!"
    "I couldn't live with myself it I did, you first!"
    etc.
    Latest news: Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott still dead.

    wwgd: what would google do?

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    1. Re:This is SO neat! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It reminds me of the experiments with the first atomic bombs: they didn't know that the chain reaction wouldn't ignite the atmosphere.

      And what of those poor army lads who stood there gazing into the light of a million suns and standing but a few mere miles away from the nuclear blasts? You know, just like the guys on the navy boats who drank fallout until they got home? I can see something similar happening here.

    2. Re:This is SO neat! by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This is mostly a myth. Virtually every physicist associated with the Manhattan Project came independently to the conclusion that a nuclear bomb would not ignite the atmosphere, based on what was known about the nuclear cross-sections of atmospheric atoms (which was a lot).

      Having had one of said people as mathematics instructor; he said it was about 1/3 of the team members who thought it would probably kill us all via igniting the atmosphere, or jettisoning a significant amount of it into space.

    3. Re:This is SO neat! by ackthpt · · Score: 3, Interesting
      And what of those poor army lads who stood there gazing into the light of a million suns and standing but a few mere miles away from the nuclear blasts? You know, just like the guys on the navy boats who drank fallout until they got home? I can see something similar happening here.

      A story was related to me by a friend:

      His father was working a classified site back in the 40's where several technicians, engineers and so on, were working on things in a lab. At a desk was an engineer, poking at a small pile of uranium in granuals with a pencil. Suddenly there was a brilliant flash as if a photo flash went off. The pressure or friction of prodding the granuals had caused some of it to go critical.

      A security guard was sent to get my friend's father who came in (I don't honestly know what his position was) and he asked everyone who had been in the room when it happened to go to the exact position they were standing when it happened. Their shoes were spray painted to create a silhouette and their location and distance from the desk were noted. These people were all tracked and died within two years of the event. Those closest to the desk died within weeks, including the engineer who had been pushing the dust around, those furthest died later. It's probably in a declassified study somewhere but I wouldn't have the first idea where to look.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    4. Re:This is SO neat! by monopole · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Supposedly, when Fermi ran an office pool allowing the staff to guess the yield of the Trinity device, "ignite the atmosphere" was a side bet.

    5. Re:This is SO neat! by Sabaki · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Virtually every physicist associated with the Manhattan Project came independently to the conclusion that a nuclear bomb would not ignite the atmosphere

      Maybe eventually, but only after several came to the scary conclusion that it might. Whereupon they re-ran the numbers until pretty sure it wouldn't. Then they crossed their fingers. I think Feynman talks about this in his book.

      And it does make sense to worry about it in those cases where someone has their finger on the button of the possible atmosphere-igniter in question.

    6. Re:This is SO neat! by AxemRed · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Are extreme magnetic fields fatal? I remember watching a show on magnetic fields on TV one time, and some European scientists were levitating a living frog in a machine that could produce enormous magnetic fields. I can't remember anything other than that, but it was pretty cool. And the frog didn't die.

    7. Re:This is SO neat! by JesseL · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm pretty sure that assembling a critical mass doesn't require any significant energy expenditure. It's just a matter of putting a suffient quantity of suitably fissile material into close enough proximity to provide the escaping neutrons enough chances to interact with enough nuclei to create a self sustaining reaction. Usually the reaction that results from a criticality accident will scatter the fissile material before a significant quantity of the material has reacted.

      An atomic bomb is just a device for assembling a critical mass quickly enough that a lot of the material will undergo fission before it gets blown apart. The simplest ones just use a "gun" to shoot one sub-critical mass at another sub-critical mass.

      --
      "Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
    8. Re:This is SO neat! by nickull · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Unfortunately, he cannot write anything new: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/inmem oriam/KennethRossMacKenzie.htm but he is well published in scientific circles. Atmopsheric hydrogen ignition is a sustained chained reaction in theory. It does not work due to the lack of control over the initial energy release. Yeah - I guess no one *really* knew until they pushed the button but since then it has been discredited.http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Smyt hReport/smyth_appendix_4.shtml

      --
      "Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
    9. Re:This is SO neat! by VAXcat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Teller's one of my heroes! He spoke at Rice University, circa 1975 or so. I was in the audience. A Greenie type got up during the question and answer period and accused him of encouraging the US government to increase the number of H-bombs in our nuclear arsenal. He hotly denied that he wanted the US government to make more H-bombs! He then smiled, and said it was his goal to have the US government make BETTER H-bombs instead! Teller was not at all ashamed of the role he played.

      --
      There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
  2. I call shenanigans! by Progman3K · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sounds like a half-baked Star Trek explanation.
    Just doesn't sound realistic to me.
    YMMV

    --
    I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
    1. Re:I call shenanigans! by chill · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ...(who was blind, mostly deaf, and was born without hands)...

      Actually, a footnote to the article says he had his forearm blown off in the same accident that cost him his hearing and most of his sight -- fiddling with high explosives. It also mentions he developed a photographic memory. Absolutely amazing stuff.

      --
      Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    2. Re:I call shenanigans! by floki · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The whole article is about the U.S. being interested in *testing* the theory. To do this, you build a big-ass torroid (6M) and get it spinning fast (> 700m/s) and then energize a big-ass magnetic field (>37 T) and measure to see if the effect occurs. The effect in this case measuring something like 3 newtons.

      This sounds a whole lot like the weird Podkletnov Antigravity machine. Torroid ... check, magnetic field ... check, strange force ... check! I'm no physicist, what do you think?

      --
      from the to-stupid-for-words dept.
  3. Come again, please? by slavemowgli · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.

    OK - so far, so good.

    Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.""

    Err, what? I hope this is a joke...

    --
    quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
  4. How do you test this? by cli_man · · Score: 1, Interesting

    After reading the article I am confused as to how you would test such a thing? Do you build a super ship, arm it with a magnet that will probably draw the moon into the earth and then blast off into space going faster than your body can handle thus exploding?

    --
    The nice thing about Windows is - It does not just crash, it displays a dialog box and lets you press 'OK' first. Reg
  5. Philadelphia Experiment by Iphtashu+Fitz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My first thought in reading about huge magnetic fields was that this is the modern-day equivilant of The "Philadelphia Experiment". If you've seen the move by the same name you know the basics. Supposedly the US Navy tested using huge magnetic fields around a ship in the 1940's to see if it would make it invisible. The story goes that the ship disappeared but also phase-shifted and some sailors on board ended up partially embedded within the hull of the ship when it finally re-appeared.

  6. Nutjob or not? by clem · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Here's how to determine if you're dealing with complete scientific quackery or not. Let's examine a quote from the linked article:
    "But this thing is not around the corner; we first have to prove the basic science is correct and there are quite a few physicists who have a different opinion.
    "It's our job to prove we are right and we are working on that."
    Now let's take the typical nutjob quote:
    "Naysayers! My contemporaries conspire against me in refusing to acknowledge my genius!"
    This doesn't mean that the physicist is right, but merely an indicator that this is a controversial theory rather than the workings of a complete and utter looney. For more information on loonies, see http://www.timecube.com/
    --
    Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
  7. Re:Slower Dimension by kfg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Classic short story published in Analog, lo, these many years ago.

    FTL

    It describes the meeting between a young hotshot applying for money to develop his surefire warp drive and the institute director who has to break the news to him that they've secretly had a functional warp drive for ages . . .

    But c is slower in hyperspace.

    Reading it as a youth woke me up to the fact that you have to be careful what you wish for, because you might not get it.

    KFG

  8. Was Burkhard Heim a crackpot? by hcg50a · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Do a Google search on "Burkhard Heim".

    Read some of the entries. Or simply look at the domain names of the pages found.

    Then take the following test to see if he's actually a revolutionary physicist of Gallileo's, Newton's, Einstein's or Feynmann's stature, or merely just another 2-bit crackpot.

    --
    HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
    11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
  9. Unnecessary by brian0918 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why do people think that it is necessary to go faster than the speed of light "to go faster"? You can go arbitrarily fast by simply getting closer and closer to the speed of light. If you could reach the speed of light (which is impossible), you would be able to traverse the entire universe in no time (from your reference frame). "Warp" speed is not necessary.

    1. Re:Unnecessary by Planesdragon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You need a basic lesson in relativity.

      Point A: All motion is relative. If I walk down the asile of a plane, I'm not suddenly walking at 202 mph; I'm walking 2mph in a 200 mph plane, so long as that plane is around me and at a steady flight.

      Point B: The speed of light is NOT relative. It's always c. Always, always, always.

      Point C: When you move relative to an object, the speed of light stays constant both for you and that object.

      Point D: The only way to have a constant c with different relative speeds is to change the other side of a speed equation -- that is, time.

      Conclusion: As you go faster, you travel through time faster.

      (Bad) Example: Imagine you have ten identically sized strings ("time"), and you have to stretch them from one line on the ground to another line in the ground. The space between the two lines is the speed of light -- a constant. Normally, exactly ten strings reach from one line to the other. But if the line became further apart (as if you were moving faster through space), you'd still have to stretch those ten strings between the lines, but you'd have gaps -- time would be dilated, or slowed.

  10. Re:Oh, *come* on, now... by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 3, Interesting

    the theoretical process works by imbuing heavy metals - such as lead - with the essence of the sun's emanatory spirit, resulting in the lead taking on a yellowish hue.

    I remember reading once about how every now and again someone finds a pile of platinum hidden somewhere. It was believed by some gold prospectors that platinum was gold that had not yet turned yellow, thus they hid it so they could come back later and see if it had become valuable gold yet. That has nothing to do with anything, but I find it amusing.

  11. Re:Nonsense by Merlyn_3k · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No, the engine is based on a physical theory that was written in GERMAN.
    Getting science out of Germany in the 50's was a little difficult, and Heim never got the wilder parts of his theory printed, so nobody ever heard about it.

    However He did get a paper printed with some of his theory, which predicts accurately the masses of elementary particles based on physical characteristics. This is why his theory has a shot, because so far it is the ONLY theory which can do this.

    Again, the main reason no one ever heard of this is that the theory is in German, written by a man who did not want his theory to get beyond his country or control, and who has never been able to get the money together to test the theory.

  12. Frog Levitation Movies by douglips · · Score: 2, Interesting

    http://www.hfml.ru.nl/levitation-movies.html

    --
    My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
  13. Re:Psuedoscience by 31415926535897 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They already create antimatter here in the US. At FermiLab, they routinely create antimatter (antiprotons) for smashing with regular matter. This is how they found all of the quarks they did.

    See: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/inquiring/matter/smallest/ index.html

    Also, I don't know if antimatter is the ultimate energy source. They use way more energy to produce the antiprotons than they get out of them smashing them with regular protons. It's the same problem that we see with hydrogen fuel cells. You still have to put the energy into the system before you can get it back out. If you can find a plentiful source of pure hydrogen or pure antimatter, then you do have a great energy source. Also, antimatter is difficult to store (a lot more difficult than hydrogen gas).

    If you're ever near Batavia, IL, go through their tour at Fermi, or contact me and I'll help you hook up with one of their top physicists (though I have to warn you, I feel like this guy can be a bit demeaning at time).

  14. My attempt at explanation by speedy.carr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Certain kinds of smart people tend to ignore things that they don't find relevant. Not to imply that I am in any way a genius, just a smarter-than-average guy, but I can do a lot of smart things, yet I often leave my articles of clothing in other people's rooms and forget all sorts of everyday information. I am aware of where my clothes are, but my mind usually doesn't find it important enough to remember.

    --
    Surrealism: You have two giraffes. The government pays you to take harmonica lessons.
  15. Re:Warp drive? by Thuktun · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We could've had interplanetary ships by the 70s if Kennedy hadn't killed Orion.

    "God was knocking, and he wanted in bad." - Niven/Pournell describing the sound of an Orion spacecraft launching nearby in Footfall

  16. Don't be so quick to shrug it off by jgardn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There has been some remarkable ideas---ideas, mind you---of what possibilities might exist for the reality we haven't been able to test in laboratories yet. These are ideas that real physicists come up with as possibilities that don't violate too many laws of physics to be utterly implausible.

    We know that gravity bends space. We know that mass and energy are interchangeable. We know that mass creates a gravity field (that bends space.) What about massive energies? Does it have a gravity field? What if we took the equivalent energy in a 2 ton ball and stored that in a capacitor? Would its mass (as observed in relativity) increase by 2 tons? Incredibly, yes.

    That's pretty whacko. But consider the possibilities. Using only energy, you can BEND TIME AND SPACE.

    What can you do? Can you set up weird gravity fields that don't look like point sources? What about the acceleration due to gravity? Is that limited by relativity? What if we effectively cut out a region of space by surrounding that with a hollow black hole. What are the rules on whole regions of space as they travel through other regions of space? If it can move near the speed of light, and we are moving near the speed of light in that piece of space, are we moving 2x the speed of light compared to objects outside of that region of space? What if we had several layers of space each travelling within another region of space near the speed of light? Can we obtain infinite speed?

    What about taking a region of space and effectively patching it somewhere else in the universe. Isn't this a wormhole of sorts? And are those possible?

    String theory says that there may be more than 4 dimensions. If space is curved, then we can effectively travel from one spot to the other without covering as much ground as we would've in regular space. But what if there are different rules? What if with gravity we can put a kink in a strategic location in space thus making space curve in a way that makes this kind of travel easier?

    You see, there are a lot of possibilities, and they aren't all that unreasonable. Unfortunately, we can't perform these experiments with today's technologies. Or can we?

    Just remember how absurd people thought Einstein was for suggesting that light waves are really very tiny massless cannon balls. That earned him the Nobel Prize, and was the concept that gave birth to Quantum Mechanics, which Einstein himself thought was absolutely absurd. Physicists spend a great deal of time calling each other names when in the end, they end up proving the other guy correct by trying to disprove him.

    --
    The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
  17. Hawking Radiation: Z-Pinch vs Black Hole by sanman2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The article says that the intense magnetic field of the Z-pinch machine might be able to test the theory on whether these gravitophotons can be generated from split-up virtual electron pairs. If this gravitional force were to be observed under the extreme magnetic field of the Z-pinch, then it would be consistent with the Heim theory's claims. Somehow this reminds me of Hawking's radiation. Hawking said that the virtual photon pairs from Heisenberg's could be split up by the powerful gravity of a black hole's event horizon. So isn't this latest paper on Heim's theory then stating something analogous to that, only using extreme electromagnetism to split the virtual gravitophotons instead of using the extreme gravity to split the virtual photons? Could we say that "Heim Gravity" is a counterpart/cousin to Hawking radiation? Comments?

  18. Re:Paper this is based on by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    According to Heim theory, the magnetic field has to be rotating at high rates before any antigravity effect appears. Last I heard, MRI patients never spin at 700 rpm.

    However, I wonder what implications Heim theory would have for millisecond pulsars? That is where we see incredibly strong magnetic fields spinning at 1000 rpm or more.

  19. 3 of the six dimensions describe "meaning"? WTF? by Robotbeat · · Score: 2, Interesting
    This is really too bad, but I must admit that this HAS to be a crack-pot theory (or at LEAST it has DEFINITELY been infected by crack-pots)
    From Heim-theory website:
    (Speaking of the extra 3 dimensions in the six-dimensional theory):
    But they are not measurable by physical instruments and have an informational character, since they describe qualitative aspects (meanings) of material organisations. That is the reason why Heim in the last years of his life developed an extended formal logic, in order to describe quantitative as well as qualitative aspects uniformly. Only in this way it was possible to formalise biological and psychological processes (like consciousness) in a 6-dimensional manifold, and therefore also non-physical events; this will have exceptionally far-reaching consequences for all fields of science.

    (Emphasis mine)

    This is starting to remind me of that oft-referenced Timecube website.