Introducing the Warpship

astroengine writes "Dr. Richard Obousy, a guy who has put modern science into the warp drive, has designed his very own warpship. Now, for the first time, he's shared it with the world. It might not be the sleek Starship Enterprise, but its structure has been optimized to harness local 'dark energy,' generating a warp bubble so faster-than-light velocities are possible." Now, the only question is: will the ship achieve faster-than-light travel ... or will the company hit those speeds once it has enough money from investors?

Comments

Re:Is it powered by bovine excretions?

[The_Wilschon]

I actually know this guy (he was a grad student where/when I was an undergrad). He's not crazy and at least mostly not a crank (I only say mostly because it's never possible to judge that sort of thing perfectly). The article, like most crappy science journalism, doesn't really go into details, so I'll try to recall for you all the contents of a talk I heard him give to a small group once.

The basic idea, which you can probably get from the article, is to construct an Alcubierre bubble or Alcubierre warp drive. The Alcubierre bubble is a genuine solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity; it is a spacetime metric which could conceivably exist. Part of the trouble with making one is that you (at least naively) need exotic matter of some sort (tachyons, negative mass, etc) in order to do it, but we obviously don't know of any exotic matter at all presently. What you really want is to make spacetime contract ahead of you and expand behind you. Well, we do know of something that makes spacetime expand: dark energy! So, if we had some way of manipulating the local strength of dark energy, then we could make spacetime expand behind us faster than normal and expand in front of us slower than normal (or maybe contract, I can't remember exactly how far that side of things went). There are apparently some suggestive features of superstring theory that indicate that we might be able to use the Casimir effect and/or cause an expansion or contraction of string theory's predicted extra compact dimensions to affect the local strength of dark energy. Here's another failure in memory, as I remember that the Casimir effect and extra dimensions were both involved, but don't remember which one was supposed to affect the other and which was supposed to affect dark energy. This is about all I can remember. My apologies that it is not more complete.

Now, all this is of course very speculative. It depends on some things being true which might or might not be true. The existence of dark energy is at least strongly indicated by astrophysical data, whether or not it has a local strength is not known at all. The Casimir effect is quite well established. Compact extra dimensions and the rest of string theory remain a very good candidate for physics, but are of course notoriously difficult to test. If all of these things eventually work out, then Richard's ideas should work quite nicely. If any of them don't, then all bets are off; I don't know how his analysis would change then.

Of course, even a few years ago when I heard all this presented, it was much more thoroughly developed. You have my poor memory to blame for a very incomplete and fuzzy account. I have no doubt he's been developing it further in the last couple of years.