![]() ![]() He wouldn't speculate on when his team could expect conclusive data, nor how long until fully actuated warp travel might be possible, but he remains convinced that it's only a matter of time.Faster-than-light travel: Is warp drive really possible? White is now working on recalibrating the laser for the new location. "But the system hadn't been (activated) for a while so part of the process was, we had the system inspected and tested." "The lab is seismically isolated, so the whole floor can be floated," White told TechNewsDaily. ![]() When we talked to White, he was in the process of moving the test equipment to a building on the Johnson Space Center campus that was originally built for the Apollo space program. The problem is that the field of negative energy is so small, the laser so precise, that even the smallest seismic motion of the Earth can throw off the results. White and his team have been at work for a few months now, but they have yet to get a satisfactory reading. redshifted, in any way, they'll know that it passed through a warp bubble. The researchers will then compare the two beams, and if the wavelength of the one going through the vacuum is lengthened, i.e. To see if space-time distortion has occurred in a lab experiment, the researchers shine two highly targeted lasers: one through the site of the vacuum and one through regular space. Distorting these waves creates negative energy, which possibly distorts space-time, creating a warp bubble. This process relies on the Casimir effect, which states that a vacuum is not actually a void instead, a vacuum is actually full of fluctuating electromagnetic waves. The ship itself remains in what Alcubierre termed a "warp bubble" and, within that bubble, never goes faster than the speed of light.Īccording to Alcubierre's theory, one could create a warp bubble by applying negative energy, or energy created in a vacuum. Īlcubierre used this knowledge to exploit a loophole in the "universal speed limit." In his theory, the ship never goes faster than the speed of light - instead, space in front of the ship is contracted while space behind it is expanded, allowing the ship to travel distances in less time than light would take. So we know from observing redshifted light that the fabric of space is movable. We know this from observing the light of distant stars - over time, the wavelength of the stars' light as it reaches Earth is lengthened in a process called "redshifting." According to the Doppler effect, this means that the source of the wavelength is moving farther away from the observer - i.e. And we know that it's flexible: space has been expanding at a measurable rate ever since the Big Bang. But what if, instead of the ship moving through space, the space was moving around the ship? Things with mass can't move faster than the speed of light. It just wouldn't work quite the way "Star Trek" thought it did. Nevertheless, it's thanks to "Star Trek" that the word "warp" is now practically synonymous with faster-than-light travel.ĭecades after the original "Star Trek" show had gone off the air, pioneering physicist and avowed Trek fan Miguel Alcubierre argued that maybe a warp drive is possible after all. ![]() In other words, matter-antimatter collision is a potentially powerful source of energy and fuel, but even that wouldn't be enough to propel a starship to faster-than-light speeds. ![]() When matter and antimatter collide, their mass is converted to kinetic energy in keeping with Einstein's mass-energy equivalence formula, E=mc 2. Antimatter was a popular field of study in the 1960s, when creator Gene Roddenberry was first writing the series. They tried to explain the ship's faster-than-light capabilities by powering the warp engine with a "matter-antimatter" engine. The original " Star Trek" series ignored this "universal speed limit" in favor of a ship that could zip around the galaxy in a matter of days instead of decades. Īccording to Einstein's theory, an object with mass cannot go as fast or faster than the speed of light. Maybe the warp drive on "Star Trek" is possible after all. In fact, scientists at NASA are right now working on the first practical field test toward proving the possibility of warp drives and faster-than-light travel. ![]()
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