Quantum Setback For Warp Drives

KentuckyFC writes "Warp drives were generally considered impossible by mainstream scientists until 1994 when the physicist Michael Alcubierre worked out how to build a faster-than-light drive using the principles of general relativity. His thinking was that while relativity prevents faster-than-light travel relative to the fabric of spacetime, it places no restriction on the speed at which regions of spacetime may move relative to each other. So a small bubble of spacetime containing a spacecraft could travel faster than the speed of light, at least in principle. But one unanswered question was what happens to the bubble when quantum mechanics is taken into account. Now, a team of physicists have worked it out, and it's bad news: the bubble becomes unstable at superluminal speeds, making warp drives impossible (probably)."

Comments

Re:Longer lifetimes is the answer

[SnapShot]

Depends on whether we can engineer ourselves to live 50 years in a tiny spacecraft with a bunch of strangers.

Proof!

[cjstaples]

From the article... "strongly implies that such a bubble would be unstable." Sounds like proof to me! Right. Just like it was proved impossible for planes to fly. It might indeed - eventually - prove to be impossible, or impossible to do meaningfully / reliably, but it's pretty unlikely we're in a position to make that call at this time. That's why we do research.

Paper was submitted 1. April

[49152]

Please note the submission date:
Semiclassical instability of dynamical warp drives