Brains
The above photo looks like it’s from Star Wars, but it ain’t. It a sketch up of what NASA physicist think a possible warp speed (faster than light) spaceship might look like in the future.
According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than light, right? Dr. Harold White thinks there’s a way around that speed limit.
“Remember, nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed.” – Dr. White
White and his team are trying to design a spaceship that could create a warp bubble. By creating a warp bubble, this ship would compress the space (space is a physical entity) in front of it and the space behind the ship would expand. The could potentially result in space-time moving around the ship, effectively repositioning the ship without it actually traveling.
This warp bubble is a sort of loophole.
“This loophole in general relativity would allow us to go places really fast as measured by both Earth observers, and observers on the ship — trips measured in weeks or months as opposed to decades and centuries” – Dr. White
Dr. White’s design ends up looking like:
“a sleek ship nestled at the center of two enormous rings, which create the warp bubble,” 3D artist Mark Rademark
Dr. White has already been working on creating a warp bubble. He’s using an instrument he calls a White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer to attempt to create and record very small warp bubbles.
“We’re utilizing a modified Michelson-Morley interferometer — that allows us to measure microscopic perturbations in space time, In our case, we’re attempting to make one of the legs of the interferometer appear to be a different length when we energize our test devices.” – Dr. White
“Our initial test device is implementing a ring of large potential energy — what we observe as blue shifted relative to the lab frame — by utilizing a ring of ceramic capacitors that are charged to tens of thousands of volts,” he told us. “We will increase the fidelity of our test devices and continue to enhance the sensitivity of the warp field interferometer — eventually using devices to directly generate negative vacuum energy.” – Dr. White
Just think if they figure this thing out. Warp speed? The possibilities are difficult to comprehend. It would definitely put us on the map. Humanity, that is.
“Mathematically, the field equations predict that this is possible, but it remains to be seen if we could ever reduce this to practice.” – Dr. White
That’s pretty neat!