Now, I’m more than a little skeptical of this, but at least it looks like serious people are studying it. My physics education is 20 years old, which is an eternity these days, so I don’t have a clue if this is plausible or not. Any current physics types want to weigh in on this?
Also, if it were possible to travel faster than light, then wouldn’t that mean that either today’s cosmology is wrong, or that we are truly alone in the universe? From what I understand, current theories say the universe is infinitely big, but we will never be able to interact with anything beyond the ‘light bubble’ measured by the distance light has traveled since the beginning of the universe. But if hyperspace is possible, then this limit doesn’t exist, and if the universe truly is infinite, then wouldn’t it be swarming with creatures flitting around in their hyperships?
It is this part that throws me off. They start wild but maybe believable and then start throwing in everything but black holes. It kind of makes the whole thing suspect especially since in sounds like a Popular Mechanics cover story that I have heard 1001 times.
How would people (or many machines) be about to withstand those forces. This is being discussed in MPSIMS as well.
This is evidently the lead story in the latest issue of New Scientist. Every issue of New Scientist is full of articles that revolve around hypothetical devices, theories, or conceptions. They sell magazines, but seldom rate a second mention.
As linked to in the other thread, the New Scientist story is online.
I can’t say I’ve ever heard of Burkhard Heim before, though judging from the story I’m not alone in that. As for the success attributed to his theory, a quick Google threw up this site which has some details of the formula that supposedly predicts the masses of subatomic particles. To be honest, I’m not immediately impressed. If one isn’t constrained by wanting a link to actual physics, it’s actually not that hard to cook up complicated formulae that fit sets of known particle masses and that’s been done often enough that another version of the same isn’t terribly interesting in itself. Of course, his results supposedly follow from his theory, but it appears that the only available derivation is in German so I’m personally unable to judge its validity. I’m not holding my breath in the meantime.
So it’s a case of a hyperdrive being possible just so long as an unproven theory that depends on the existance of hitherto unobserved fundamental forces is true. If wishes were discoveries like that, beggars would ride to the stars.
I think for some time now NASA has had programs working on various radical ideas for space flight using what ideas of the not-known-to-be-physically-impossible type. The idea being to poke around with them every decade or so to see if they are at all feasible.
See here: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/index.htm , for NASA’s breakthrough propulsion program overview, although apparently it ended in 2002. I assume this is along the same lines - invest modest amounts in high risk, high reward possibilities.
Not necessarily, IMHO. First of all, I think prevailing thought is that the universe is finite.
And even if the technology is possible (for the sake of argument lets assume it is), and life is abundent in the universe (also for the sake of argument, let’s assume it is), there would have to be several conditions met for alien craft to be seen by us, and these conditions might all be rare.
The life would have to develop technology, in general
The life would have to have some reason to develop and use warp drive technology. Perhaps curiosity is a very rare thing in life in the universe, and the vast majority of civilizations simply don’t care what is in the rest of the universe?
They would have to visit here, out of all the other (likely) billions and billions of planets in the solar system. Just because you have a car that could conceivable visit every city on the North American continent, have you visited all of them?
They have to not use technology to stay hidden from us and our likely relatively primitive tech
Even if warp drive is relatively easy to develop, and even if there’s lots of life in the universe, it still might be very unlikely any of it visits here, ever.
You really wouldn’t be traveling faster than the speed of light if I understand this correctly. Just because you can’t break a law doesn’t mean you can’t get around it. What you would be doing essentially is not traveling in a straight line like light does, you would be travelling directly from point to point. I guess you could look at it like:
I have two chairs in my office. How fast can I get from one to the other? Speed of light? That still takes some time (very very stupidly little, but there is some time involved for light to travel 10 feet.) The fastest you could get there is instantly, by popping out of the dimension you are currently in and showing up there. Hopefully…
You should check out the movie Event Horizon… Sam Neil, Lawrence Fishborne, Gravity Drive, scary stuff…
“If it’s in the papers it must be true!” – Dudley Do-Right!
It wouldn’t be travelling faster than c through normal space, to be certain, but you would be transiting into “forbidden spacetime”, i.e. outside the Minkowski space defined by the subject’s present location and velocity, i.e. the lightcone of future possible space. Even though we aren’t violating the “lightspeed limit” imposed by the apparently invariant velocity of light (which would require a violation of mass-energy conservation), you are violating temporal causality, and while there is no hard and fast reason why this can’t be true (and in fact, on the quantum level, causality is violated with the same regularity than it rains in London), the general consensus among cosmologists and relativity physicists is that causality holds on the macro scale.
What is meant by violating causality is that you are able to observe an event that occurs at a position in spacetime before the information could transit through space to the obsever’s nominal position; for instance, someone who could travel faster than light could go to the race track, sit up close to the track, observe the ending of the race, zip up to the observation deck and make a last minute side bet with another viewer before the photons have reached the sucker. This, of course, would result in much unhappiness (fortunately our con man is also able to zip away literally faster than the speeding bullet heading for his brain), and would definitely cause problems when ordering a pizza, as the pie would arrive complete before you’ve managed to select the toppings.
In effect, violations of causality represent a place where spacetime can become discontinuous and loop over itself. We don’t know that this doesn’t happen–in fact, even in general relativity there is the suggestion, near intense rotating gravitational fields, that disconinuities and distortions could (theoretically) permit causality violations, but the conditions are so intense that it is unlikely that they could be put to any practical use; in any case, most cosmologists seem to advocate some kind of Law of Cosmic Censorship that prevents such problems, partially because it is so counterintuitive, but mostly because it makes the math so ugly. (This is the same kind of rationale by which Richard Feynman won a Nobel Prize in describing particle interactions via perturbation, so don’t knock it.)
So, there is an argument against any method that permits transmission of information or mass between two points in spacetime at an average rate faster than c. It is, however, possible to describe the distortion of spacetime itself such that the plenum in which a mass is embedded itself moves faster than c via the Alcubierre metric in General Relativity. However, it is unclear how or even if one could turn the mathematics into a physical possibility; it is certainly possible to describe a model with legitimate mathematics that could not be realized physically. It would be extremely cool if something liked this worked, but as of the current time, all theories are highly speculative and not just slightly in contradiction of some part of the body of modern physics.
As for the system described in the OP, there aren’t enough details to provided to say (the new issue of New Scientist wasn’t at B&N as of last night), but it sounds like highly speculative hokum to me. “…the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached…”? So far, we can’t even demonstrate evidence that different dimensions exist (mathobabble M-Theory models aside), much less that a large magnetic field would affect a way to transit into them.
Is there some reason in this new theory (or total wild-ass moonshine, as the case may be) why specifically it would take 80 days to go 11 light years? That works out to about 50 c; not to be greedy or anything, but why not “11 light years in 12 seconds”? Would 50 c and change be the new cosmic speed limit?
Erm, Around the World in 80 Days? But it’s not so much the “80 days”, it’s the “11 light years” I’m asking about. Why is the limit ~50 c, and not, say, 127 c. ("…and journey to a star nearly 28 light years away in just 80 days…")
But it’s not so much the “80 days”, it’s the “11 light years” I’m asking about. Why is the limit ~50 c, and not, say, 127 c. ("…and journey to a star nearly 28 light years away in just 80 days…")