Warp drive science

[Ninshub]

The Scientists Who Won't Give Up on the Warp Drive

Rahul Rao, gizmodo.com, April 30, 2020

For most of us, traveling faster than the cosmic speed limit—the speed of light—is a science-fiction fantasy that breaks the very foundation of modern physics. But in the eyes of an engineering undergrad at the University of Alabama in Huntsville named Joseph Agnew, it’s a theory worthy of study. (...)

“It is technically sound,” says Gerald Cleaver, a theoretical physicist at Baylor University, “but there have been issues that have come up on almost every level.”

The field of warp drive studies is less than 30 years old. In 1994, a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre, then a doctoral student at Cardiff University in Wales, proposed something remarkable: a way to travel faster than the speed of light—in the eyes of an outside observer—without flaunting the laws of physics.

Alcubierre’s warp drive theory works not by pushing anything faster than light. Instead, his warp drive creates a bubble that literally warps space: compressing it in front and stretching it out behind. If you were in a spaceship traveling inside such a bubble, you’d still be moving under the speed of light, but you’d essentially be traveling through distances that have been squeezed shorter, as if you were riding the crest of a wave through space-time.

“Negative mass exotic matter” (a.k.a. antimatter) is incredibly difficult to gather/contain and absurdly dangerous. Alcubierre’s vision is untenable from a practical standpoint. Woodward’s ideas about inertia and “benign” wormholes seem much easier to enact... If the effect is real, that is.