Happened to see something about Heim theory’s warp drive premise. But ignore that, that was just the inspiration for this thread, and I don’t need any pro/cons about it.
Obviously there are a lot of things we haven’t quite pinned down about physics specifically and also about science in general. There are various methods to scientific insight including pure trial and error. But one method that often makes headway is finding anomalous data. When current theory and current observation do not coincide.
OK, so currently we don’t have any well engineered warp drive available. I see two general possible scenarios:
It’s part of the “is possible, but requires cleverness outside of natural phenomenon”. Can y’all give me other examples of this? Anything which is extremely useful, but requires some kind of convoluted engineering or chemistry or whatever, that wouldn’t be obviously possible by observation of natural phenomenon?
It’s part of the “is possible, and some kind of evidence or mere hint exists from observation of natural phenomenon”. So, assuming some kind of faster than light travel is possible in any way, surely the principles involved, would at some point happen naturally (assuming it doesn’t require the convolution of #1). What kind of astronomical natural phenomena should be looking for that would give evidence that FTL is possible by any kind of method? Or any specific method?
Well, there’s a third option: “isn’t possible.” Just sayin’.
That said, if I had to place a bet between these three options, I would probably bet on the first option. Serious physicists have looked at the possibility of making space & time behave like a Star Trek warp drive, and have actually come up with some respectible theoretical solutions that behave much the way you’d want. However, such solutions generally require things like “negative mass”, and are also rather hard to stop one they’ve started moving.
As far as other technology that doesn’t exist in nature but is extremely useful: superconductivity would be a good example.
It is believed that Neutron Stars are superconductors (and superfluids) that actually exist at very high temperatures. Not that this helps us much but would be an example of a superconductor in nature.
As to question #1 I’d say the global positioning system requires relativistic calculations to operate properly. This is not something we’d observe in nature (although once they knew to look for it that could test it in a laboratory).
Till Einstein the thought of time ticking along at anything other than a constant rate was madness.
As to #2 we have never witnessed any superluminal anything. That said not sure if something was superluminal if we’d know how to look for it. Perhaps quantum entanglement displays FTL action but no information can travel faster than C that we have ever seen.
There are things that could seem to have a superluminal velocity but then these things are not “things” as such (e.g. a shadow).
There are also some phenomena where real physical matter appears, through an optical illusion, to be moving faster than c. This is often observed in high-speed particle jets from active galactic nuclei, where the jet is aimed in close to our direction. Again, though, once you correct for the optical illusion, the actual velocity is less than c (though still pretty darned fast).
For examples of what the OP is looking for, I don’t think any temperature has ever been observed in nature less than the temperatures we can achieve in laboratories. In principle, a good-sized black hole (the hole itself, not the matter in the vicinity of the hole) should be considerably colder, but that’s never been observed.
One way of looking at the idea of a holographic universe is to regard the entire universe as a projection from a single virtually dimensionless point. That’s actually not such a strange idea since the big bang is supposed to have sprung from such a point.
If that happens to be true, then traveling through space would be akin to merely changing one’s perspective. Obviously it would be much more involved as to it’s implementation, but conceptually, traveling across a galaxy would be relatively trivial.
For your number 2, it might be possible that the hints occur under conditions we haven’t yet examined. If there were some way of clocks to travel at relativistic velocities in 1687, I suspect Newton would not assume the constancy of time.
Revolutions happen when there is an “uh-oh” moment, for instance if we had a handy black hole, took some measurements, and found they didn’t quite match theory. Some theory - either string or quantum gravity or both, says that gravity might leak between branes. If we can demonstrate this, who knows what we’d come up with.