Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.

As you read this story, you will learn the following:

• A research paper proposes a fully physically implemented model of warp drive.

• This builds on existing models that require negative energy – which is impossible.

• New models are exciting, but warp speeds may still be decades or centuries away.

In a surprising paper, scientists say they’ve identified a physical model of warp drive that flies in the face of what we’ve long thought about the crazy notion of warp travel: It requires bizarre negative forces.

To better understand what this breakthrough means, you need a quick crash course in the far-flung idea of ​​traveling through folded space.

The colloquial term “warp drive” comes from science fiction novels, most notably Star Trek. The Federation’s hyperwarp drive works by colliding matter and antimatter and converting the energy of the explosion into propulsion. star trek Showing that this extraordinary force alone can propel a spacecraft to faster than light speeds.

Scientists have been studying and theorizing faster-than-light space travel for decades. One of the main reasons for our interest is pure pragmatism: without warp drive, we may never reach neighboring star systems. The closest such trip at the speed of light would still take four years.

Our current understanding of warp dates back to 1994, when a famous theoretical physicist named Miguel Alcubierre first proposed what we call the Alcubierre drive.

The Alcubierre Drive complies with Einstein’s general theory of relativity and enables faster-than-light travel. “Motion exceeding the speed of light is possible as seen by an observer outside the disturbed region, through a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spacecraft and an opposite contraction in front,” Alcubierre wrote in the abstract of his paper.

Essentially, the Alcubierre Drive consumes an enormous amount of energy (perhaps more than is available in the universe) to shrink and distort spacetime in front of it and create bubbles. There is an inertial reference frame inside the bubble, and the explorer will not feel proper acceleration. The rules of physics still apply inside the bubble, but the ship will be outside in space.

It might be helpful to think of the Alcubierre drive as the classic “tablecloth and plate” party trick: the spaceship sits on top of the space-time tablecloth, the drive pulls the fabric around it, and the ship takes a new position relative to the fabric.

Alcubierre describes how space-time expands on one side of the ship and contracts on the other due to the enormous energy and necessary amounts of exotic matter (in this case, negative energy).

However, some scientists have criticized the Alcubierre drive because it requires too much mass and negative energy for humans to seriously build a warp-based propulsion system. NASA has been trying to build a physical warp drive through its Eagleworks laboratory for the better part of a decade, but has yet to make any significant progress.

That brings us to a new study from scientists at the Advanced Propulsion Laboratory (APL) applied physics It has just been published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. In report, APL team unveils world’s first physical warp drive model No Negative energy is needed.

The study is understandably thick (read the full article here), but the gist of the model is this: while the existing paradigm uses negative energy—exotic matter that does not exist and cannot be generated in our current understanding of the universe—this new concept uses floating bubbles of spacetime instead of floating ship in space and time.

The physical model uses almost no negative energy and exploits the idea that bubbles of space-time can behave almost any way they want. And, APL scientists say, that’s not even the only other way warp speed works. Making a model that is at least physically understandable is a big step forward.

Plus, Alcubier himself endorsed the new model, which is like having Albert Einstein show up in your introductory physics class.

Here’s a helpful video in which Sabine Hossenfelder, professor and researcher at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study, details the findings:

Of course, there’s a huge caveat here: the concepts in this article are still in the realm of possibility of the “distant future,” consisting of ideas that scientists still don’t know how to construct in any sense.

“While the mass requirements required for such modifications currently remain enormous, our work suggests a way to build such objects based on fully understood physical laws,” APL scientists wrote.

While physical drives may not be a reality today, tomorrow, or even a century from now, let’s hope it doesn’t. That Long – With this exciting new model, warp travel is now more likely to take place in a shorter time than we previously thought.

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