From: Gina Miller (nanogirl@halcyon.com)
Date: Wed Jun 09 1999 - 14:53:53 MDT
By BBC News Online Science Editor Dr David Whitehouse
In Star Trek, the USS Enterprise is powered by what is called a "warp drive"
and at the moment only Paramount Pictures know its secrets.
But new, highly mathematical research may have brought us one step closer to
being able to explore the Universe in a starship capable of travelling
faster than the speed of light.
The analysis of the concept of a warp drive by Chris Van Den Broeck of the
Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium means that building a starship
Enterprise is a little closer.
The fabric of space
Dr Van Den Broeck was reanalysing ground-breaking calculations made five
years ago by Mexican mathematician Miguel Alcubierre.
Alcubierre said that it was possible to imagine how a warp drive would work
by distorting the fabric of space. Starships would ride along waves in
so-called spacetime, like surfers do along waves in the sea.
The idea relies on the concept that, to physicists, space is not empty.
Strange as it may seem, space has a shape that can be distorted by matter.
In fact the force of gravity is actually due to the curvature of space -
recognising that was the greatest triumph of Albert Einstein's career.
So you could use matter to distort the space around a starship to create a
"ripple" in spacetime.
'Warp bubble'
Miguel Alcubierre came up with the idea of expanding the space behind a
starship and contracting it in front of it. The starship would rest in a
"warp bubble" between the two spacetime distortions. The result would be a
wave in spacetime along which the starship would surf.
It was a fantastic idea. There would be no limit to the velocity that a
starship could attain. It could travel faster than the speed of light
because the starship would, strictly speaking, be stationary in the space of
its warp bubble.
Also, the starship and its crew would be weightless and would therefore not
be crushed by the enormous G-forces of acceleration and deceleration.
What's more, the passage of time inside the warp bubble would be the same as
that outside it. The crew would not suffer from Einstein's "time dilation"
effect where time passes at different rates for people travelling at
different speeds.
The time dilation effect means that anyone travelling to the stars at speeds
approaching that of light would experience a journey of a few years. But
when they came back to Earth they would find that thousands of years had
passed and all their friends were long dead.
Massive energies
Alcubierre's idea was a good one, but his work seemed to suggest that
building a warp bubble would be impossible in practice. More energy than the
entire universe could supply would be needed to create the spacetime
distortions.
However, Dr Van Den Broeck's analysis suggests a far lower amount of energy
is required, reduced by a factor of one followed by 62 zeros.
This is not to say that it is time to go out and start building a warp
drive. As Dr Van Den Broeck says in his forthcoming paper in General
Relativity and Quantum Cosmology: "This does not mean that the proposal is
realistic."
Building a warp drive is currently far beyond our technological abilities
and there are severe theoretical arguments that say it may never be
possible.
But it just might be. Dr Van Den Broeck concludes his analysis by saying,
"The first warp drive is still a long way off but maybe it has now become
slightly less improbable."
Gina "Nanogirl" Miller
Nanotechnology Industries
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