How to Make a Warp Drive A Theoretical

How to Make a Warp Drive A Theoretical Exercise

Light travels fast • Light can go around the earth 7 times in 1 second.

Light from the Sun • Light takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to Earth.

Light to Mars • Light takes 4 minutes to get from Earth to Mars

Light to Pluto • Light takes 5 hours to get from Earth to Pluto

Light to Epsilon Eridani • Light takes 10. 5 years to get from Earth to epsilon eridani, another star.

Six Months to get to Mars • With current technology, it takes 6 months to get to Mars. • At this speed, it would take thousands of years to get to another star. • A warp drive, although purely hypothetical at this point, would be a way to get there faster. • With a warp drive, conceivably you could travel faster than light or at least near the speed of light.

Bowling Ball • A bowling ball deforms a mattress.

Golf ball on a mattress • If you roll a golf ball on a mattress near the bowling ball, it will “orbit” the bowling ball if there is no friction.

Earth deforms spacetime • Earth deforms the fabric of spacetime

Moon near Earth • The moon “orbits” the Earth because it is near the Earth and there is no friction.

Falling into a Gravity Well • If the moon had no tangential velocity, it would fall right into the Earth.

Falling Into Mass • The idea behind a warp drive is to have the spacecraft continuously “falling” into a source of mass at the front of the ship and/or being “pushed” by a source of negative mass behind the spacecraft. • Since gravity only travels at the speed of light, it may not be possible to exceed the speed of light by this method.

Warp Drive • The idea behind a warp drive is to make a spacecraft “fall” forward. Remember, you need mass in front of the spacecraft. The ship will “fall” by gravity forward.

Warp drive • According to Alcubierre (1994), you would want the front of the ship falling into a gravity well and the back of the ship being pushed into a gravity well. Again, gravity does the pushing.

Physical Limitations • In order to actually have a warp drive, you would need negative mass behind the ship and something like a black hole in front of the ship.

Limitations • We don’t know how to make negative mass in those quantities • We don’t know how to make a black hole

Possibility for Negative Mass: Vacuum Energy • There may be lots of energy in a vacuum because of wavelets of light

Possibilities • Casimir Effect makes a small amount of negative mass

Casimir Effect • In the Casimir Effect, there is less energy between the two metal plates than outside of them because certain wavelengths cannot exist in the small space between the plates. • Hence it can be a source of negative mass or negative energy. • This effect would need to be multiplied somehow.

Particle Accelerators • It was hypothesized that a black hole could be made for a very small amount of time at a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider, for the black hole in front of the ship.

Need for a Warp Drive to Work • If one could obtain some very dense source of mass and keep it in front of the spacecraft and/or a source of negative mass behind the spacecraft, the spacecraft could theoretically continuously accelerate until it was near the speed of light.

Overcoming Limitations • If we could figure those things out, going to another star would be much easier!

References • Alcubierre, M. (1994) The warp drive: hyperfast travel within general relativity. Classical and Quantum Gravity 11(5): L 73 -L 77.