Just FYI, the SciShow video embedded on that page links to a Google Doc with a bunch of references.
Plus everyone should be subscribed to SciShow anyway.
[shrug] The first practical application of the steam engine was to pump water out of flooded coal mines. Nobody knew where it would lead.
Does anyone else feel there’s a bit of an odd undertone to these threads, as if some posters are afraid of a slippery slope where if they admit there could be some theoretical possibility that something like a warp drive could, maybe centuries hence, be technologically feasible, suddenly we’re giving ground to UFO nutjob conspiracy theorists? Or something. Just seems weird that for this particular topic, people are so quick to dismiss it.
Nah, I just think they are being coldly realistic.
Most of the skeptics here know their science/engineering stuff, they are just not very… curious? Enterprising enough? Something like that.
Not me, really.
Managed expectations for the uninitiated or excitable layman, maybe. The Alcubierre Drive is really a hypothesis based on grounded theoretical science, and a lot of the tech we know now isn’t even close to being on the horizon, if at all, like the conjectured negative mass/energy.
It’s interesting stuff in its own right, though, whether or not anything at all comes from it.
It is down right heretical. 
The cold fusion experiments of a few years ago come to mind.
Is this just a way to keep the eggheads on the payroll until the next big project?
So this is what my philosophy professor (???) was talking about in 1995! Amidst his alien abduction fantasies, he showed us a film about how the best way to traverse space was to manipulate spacetime in such a manner as traveling from point A to point B was no longer necessarily linear, but rather you are folding the fabric of spacetime to bring the two points near or adjacent to one another.
Fascinating.
I’m hoping for the best with this one, but expected absolutely nothing.
If so, there’s nothing wrong with that.
It is more like that Ancient Greek toy that spun around when heated.
I don’t think that is “practical”.
Here’s the issue (or at least my issue) with an uncritical acceptance of research into revolutionary innovations which promise technomagical solutions to hard problems; they serve to misinform the public about what actually goes into scientific research and the expectations therefrom, and undermine support that is required to do the hard and often trial-and-mostly-error research that does–after decades of concernted effort–sometimes lead to true innovations. The general public regards scientific research as some kind of wizardry where breakthroughs “just happen” after a singular genius spends an extra-long day at the lab, and serves to provide them a better iPhone or color pictures of Saturn’s rings, and then they quickly loose interest as they discover that they still can’t get a true 3D image from their television or a flying car. The general public regards actual scientific research is being boring, tedious, without creativity or worthy of celebrity. This can certainly be true on a day to day basis, but it is just as true of many other highly venerated endeavors; that Derrick Rose shines on the court isn’t just a product of his natural athleticism; he spends hours every day doing training and physical conditioning and recovery which would be boring as shit to watch. But the fruits of scientific labor infuse our modern existance. Nearly everything we come into contact with on a daily basis is the product of scientific understanding of natural phenomena, to the point if you stop to think about it is fundamentally fucking amazing. But it’s not amazing because it is some sci-fi cantrips mixed up in a lab by a cohort of djinn; it’s amazing because of the long chain of individual innovations that are combined in the right order to make a smartphone or spacecraft. The idea that the ‘science’ that allows amazing innovations to “just occur” as one shot events is wrong, but with the pop sci of programs like these, the public impression is
[ol]
[li]Validate basic physical principle[/li][li]{some kind of magic}[/li][li]Boldly to where no grammaticians have gone before.[/li][/ol]
Even if that were true “keep[ing] the eggheads on the payroll” has significant merits. For instance, many have argued that the “eggheads” spending money by CERN on projects like the Large Hadron Collider is a waste because the information generated by such projects won’t make a better widget or directly improve the quality of life for the average schmoo. Only, this is an extremely short-sighted vision of the same kind that cancelled the Superconducting Supercollider in the United States in the early 'Nineties (a machine which could have made the same discoveries as the LHC earlier and at higher operating energies allowing a more rapid collection of data). In fact, not only have the “eggheads” advanced the state of fundamental science; as an offshoot of all of the problems in handling and munging the massive amounts of data required as well as coordinating work by scientists in over a hundred nations, they were largely responsible for developing the high performance and high throughput cluster computing systems which power all modern online logistical systems such as Amazon.com, the communications protocols that allow massive amount of data to be securely transmitted, the sophisticated visualization and virtualization capabilities that underly modern computer animation for films and gaming, and of course, the basic protocols which drive the World Wide Web as we know it today. Giving the “eggheads” time and budget to go work on interesting problems may not provide any particular technology, but it almost inevitibly produces something interesting and likely to become useful and profitable. And it is certainly a better use of such intellectual capacity than figuring out better ways to blow the ever-living shit out of our fellow human beings, which is the other general channel to technological developments which eventually make their way into the commercial venue.
Well, sort of. What your professor was talking about sounds like a non-simply connected manifold, e.g. a space in which has two or more distant points are connected. The Alcubierre metric (named after the physicist who formulated it as a hobby to give some basis for superluminal propulsion system) is still simply connected to local space, but the space directly in the front of the metric field is “compressed” to allow the space in which the vehicle resized to travel faster than it could through uncompressed space, and because the metric travels with the vessel it essentially allows the vehicle to transit between two distant points faster than light could normally travel, although the vehicle itself never moves faster than light as measured by any “local” (e.g. within the deformed metric) observer. However, as even Miguel Alcubierre is quick to admit, just because the math of the Alcubierre metric forms a legitimate and complete solution to the Einstein field equations (the basic set of equations which state how spacetime can be shaped) doesn’t mean that it can be physically realizable using any kind of real matter, and in fact creation of a metric field of useful size requires a type of energy that nobody has ever observed, in quantities which would require energies exceeding all of the energy produced by humanity throughout history to date, and that some physicists believe cannot even exist in stable or useable form. So even if effects of a field which is consistent with the predicted behavior of the Alcubierre metric are observed, we aren’t any closer to actually making a warp drive, which is not the impression conveyed by most of the pop sci articles on the topic.
Stranger