Every Star Trek fan is familiar with the Warp Engine, which allows spacecraft to travel through space at speeds seemingly above light. Now, two physicists have announced how to do this outside the world of fiction and without conflicting with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
The idea of building a “Warp Engine” is not so recent, it was conceived by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, but only in theory.
Alcubierre proposed a scheme to build a warp drive that is not specifically an engine, but a bubble that would make the fabric of the universe fold in such a way that a ship installed inside this bubble could “glide” forward, advancing through space without actually moving out of place.
Masses of immense magnitude can deform space-time, this is called in science a “gravitational well”, responsible for bending light.
The problem is that to build this ship would require a type of exotic matter, with negative energy, which made most physicists discard the theory because there is no proof that such material exists outside the quantum world.
However, two physicists have published the first warp drive model that does not violate any concept of physics, does not require any exotic matter and no ingredient that is not already included in the physical theories accepted by the scientific community.
“Many people in the field of science are aware of the Alcubierre motor and believe that warp drives are not possible by physics because of the need for negative energy. This, however, is no longer correct, we are heading in a different direction than NASA and other researchers, and our research has shown that there are actually several other classes of warp drives possible in General Relativity. In particular, we have formulated new classes of warp drive solutions that do not require negative energy and thus become possible by physics,” said one of the authors of the research, astrophysicist Alexey Bobrick of Lund University in Sweden.
Alexey Bobrick and co-author Gianni Martire, physicist, are part of Applied Physics, an independent group of scientists, engineers and inventors that advises companies and governments on science and technology for humanitarian and commercial applications.
The Theory of Relativity prohibits anything from traveling above the speed of light, but this does not hold true for the fabric of space-time itself, which can bend at any speed. Thus, the proposal is to build a ship with a density sufficient to make space-time bend. The thinner the front of the spacecraft, the less mass it will take to achieve this.
The model suggested by the pair of researchers would be that of a disk-shaped ship, built of ordinary matter that would glide through the Universe pushed by inertia, after reaching a certain speed, but the fact that it is mathematically and physically possible does not mean that it has now become easy to build a warp drive.
The new theory makes this possible, but it will require the use of materials with a density that is still unattainable by the technological means currently available, due to the mass required to build this “ship-engine”.
This, however, does not take away the enthusiasm of scientists: “Although we cannot yet break the speed of light, we do not need to do so to become an interstellar species. Our warp drive research has the potential to unite everyone,” said proposal co-author Gianni Martire.
