Warp speed

The Current Status of Warp Drive

In 1994 a scientific paper was written by Miguel Alcubierre entitled "The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity." It was a short "Letter to the Editor" and was published in the scientific journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. In that paper Alcubierre showed that within the confines of the currently understood theory of General Relativity that:

. . . without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the "warp drive" of science fiction.

Alcubierre went on to show that there was no reason to believe that such a warp drive would be impossible. That point has been the topic of debate at many conferences since then. The contraction of space required in front of the spaceship is nothing more than a gravity well. On the other hand, the expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship is an inverted gravity well, which to date has not been observed anywhere in the universe as far as we understand it. The problem with the expansion in spacetime can be explained simply. What causes a contraction in spacetime or in other words what causes a gravity well? The answer is matter. Massive objects cause gravity wells. Okay, we understand how that part works. Then what could cause an inverted gravity well? The answer could be negative matter? What the hell is negative matter? There in lies the rub! Then is it over with for warp drive?

No. Matter is also energy and vice versa. Energy can be portrayed in many forms: matter, electricity, magnetism, and possibly other more strange quantum phenomena. The equation Anson talks about in this story that I like to call the Warp Equation describes this very well. That equation in laymen's terms is written as:

Curvature or Warp of Spacetime = Energy per Volume

This equation is actually known as the Einstein equation and each side of it represents a God-awful set of matrices (tensors) and some things to account or discount for the expansion of spacetime, but this is basically how to think of it. The point here is that it might be possible to create some form of energy per volume that would cause an expansion in spacetime rather than a contraction. Many of the world's theoretical physicists are trying to figure this out. Oh and by the way, the amount of energy per volume required on the right hand side of the equation is enormous with a very big E, much larger than all of the energy the human race has ever generated. This brings us to the Casimir Effect.

The Casimir Effect is a phenomena that has been shown theoretically to exist in which two very closely spaced parallel plane conductors are actually pushed toward each other by the vacuum energy of spacetime itself! It turns out that the spacetime between these two very closely spaced plates should theoretically expand!! The theory predicts that the speed of light between the plates is slightly higher than that in a vacuum due to the expansion, in other words light travels faster than light due to the Casimir Effect.

Also, the Casimir Effect expansion between the plates will cause the plates to attract toward each other or be pushed together by the spacetime outside them depending on your point of view. If a clever scientist were to arrange several of these parallel plates in the right configuration and connect them with springs of some sort it might be possible that as one set of plates pull together another set gets pulled apart. Then the set that gets pulled apart would get pushed together thus pulling the others back apart. This motion could be set up to generate electricity in a generator and therefore allow us to extract power right out of spacetime itself damn near perpetually and for free. Imagine that!

Interestingly enough, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA has been looking for novel new ways to power small sensors and unmanned vehicles for various defense applications. NASA also has a similar requirement for small space probes. In late May 2003, I went to DARPA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia and presented an idea much like the Clemons Dumbbells to them. The possibility of extracting energy right out of spacetime intrigued them. It is quite possible that one day in the not too distant future we will be developing and maybe even testing a Casimir Effect energy supply. That would be cool. And a little further down the road from that, say ten to fifty years, we might have solved the Warp Equation correctly, developed a big enough power supply, and be testing a Warp Drive. Now that would be real cool!

—Travis S. Taylor

THE END

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