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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)."
Or is it *both* Impossible and not Impossible?
is this where the improbability drive comes in?
yeah, someone had to say it.
The SCI-FI buff in me holds out hope that physics will uncover a trick to FTL, but...
It doesn't really matter if we cannot travel faster than the speed of light so long as we can live long enough to get there.
Who cares if it takes 50 years to fly to Alpha Centauri if we can engineer ourselves to live for a thousand!
This is my sig.
Just do what the Planet Express Ship does and use a Dark Matter drive to move the Universe around us instead... :)
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
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.
=cjs
Faster-than-light travel always causes causality paradoxes, so a priori, FTL drives are impossible unless special relativity is wrong. (That's is a bit like saying that perpetual motion machines are impossible unless thermodynamics is wrong.) The proposed mechanism behind the FTL drive doesn't matter -- it'll still cause a time paradox.
Just like we know any proposed perpetual motion machine must have a flaw, any proposed FTL drive must also have a flaw. They belong to the same class of impossible device, and deserve the same degree of consideration.
Please note the submission date:
Semiclassical instability of dynamical warp drives
Heck, after 8 weeks of army basic training none of the 50 or so people in my company were strangers.
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That's it, cancel the Star Trek Movie. Now that I know it's all fake it just ruined it for me.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
Right. At about one G acceleration you can reach any point in the universe in a few years of ship time.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It's a shame they're both 3.5"
Zing!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
That doesn't work. You can't transmit information faster than light; contrary to popular conception, quantum entanglement does not involve classical information transfer.
If you have one of a pair of dice, and the other is a thousand light-years away, one way to think of entanglement is to imagine that whatever number you roll is the number that shows up on the other die the next time it is rolled. Even if the two dice are linked, you can't control which number shows up, so you can't use the dice to communicate information.
That's just silly...No one would mate with Kate Mullgrue...
Unless...
Go East
You have been molested by a Mullgrue
-=Bang Bang=-
That doesn't work either because Joe doesn't know if you have rolled the dice or not.
Entangled particles are like dice that are already rolling, and they stop rolling the moment that either particle is observed.
So you and Joe each have a dice that, say, always roll the same number as each other. You look at your dice to cause it to stop rolling, and see that it rolled a 6. Joe can look at his dice too, and will also see a 6, but he doesn't know if he was the one that caused the dice to stop, or whether it was you who stopped it.
You both see a 6, but no actual information was transferred.