(Sorry, don’t have access to the full article, so there’s not much more than that one the linked page.) If travel through hyperspace is possible, that can only mean one thing: Earth is scheduled for demolition and we’ve got to make it to the planning office to find out when the exact date is, so we can at least rid ourselves of telephone sanitizers, network executives, and the like.
I just got home from work and my wife was on the computer. I said, “Let me check the Dope; there was a really cool story on Slashdot today and I want to see if Tuckerfan posted about it.”
I hope there is some substance to this. Unfortunately, the only stories I’ve been able to find are the two you link to, so either the media hasn’t gotten excited about this yet, or nobody is taking it seriously.
If this isn’t just a pile of poo (which it smells like, to me), then I’ll bet it’s going to be one of those “Of course it’s possible; all we have to do is build a perfectly rigid superconducting magnetic cylinder half the diameter of the solar system in length, then simply rotate it at half the speed of light, then just hit it with timed laser pulses equivalent in power to the output of all the stars in three average galaxies…” things
It’s probably along those lines. I just wish the military would keep out of it. Reminds me of that scene from The Rocketeer: “Your people in Washington want to turn anything that flies into a weapon!”
Should we expect the Vulcans to land at any minute?
I think that’s jumping the gun a bit; I used to take New Scientist on a regular basis and scarcely a week passed without them giving column space to some amazing perpetual motion machine or levitation device or other. The proof of the pudding is not in claiming that you can make a hyperdrive, it’s in doing it, or at the very least backing it up with some kind of real science - both of which have yet to happen here.
Just want to point out that this is not just radical new technology being hyped, but radical new science too. The operation of the hyperdrive depends upon Heim Theory, which is yet another proposed ‘Theory of Everything’, albeit one I’d never heard of until I looked at this New Scientist article (as opposed to the theory-plexes of superstrings and loop-quantum-gravity, which are all the rage in physics circles at the mo).
So whilst this is new hyperdrive is very cool if it works, we’re sort of in the position of reading a newly published ‘Principia’ by Newton and going, ‘oh wow, now we can build rockets to go to the moon’. Sure, we can, but there’s also the ‘groundbreaking new theory’ aspect of it, which encompasses so much more than just a new way to get from A to B.
… which is why it is so unpromising that this paper got a wow award from an institute of aerodynamics, whilst nothing has been heard from the theoretical science journals.
God I hope I don’t think of yet another thing after hitting submit.
OK, so Heim added two new dimensional “subspaces” onto the standard Einsteinian four dimensions. Is this pretty much the same thing as proposing a six-dimensional universe, or are “subspace” dimensions any different from six dimensions.
On the basis of fewer dimensions alone, this theory appeals to me. The string theorists are always going, "We need nine dimensions to explain the universe … no make that 27 dimensions … no, hold on a minutes … 12 oughtta do it … no, make that INFINITE dimensions!
I say, pick a number of dimensions and stick with it!
