Faster-than-light ‘warp training’ might be possible, scientists say

A Star Trek-like “ warp drive ” has been moved into the realms of physical possibility thanks to new scientific research.

If fully realized, warp training could help humanity reach distant stars and planets in months, weeks, or days – unlike the thousands of years it would take humans at current speeds.

Previous ideas for a warp drive, a motor that can move faster than light, only worked with nearly impossible physical concepts, like massive amounts of “negative” energy.

But scientists believe they have come up with a design, at least in theory, that is based only on known physical concepts.

What are Warp Players?

The warp drive, although an object of science fiction for decades, was not seriously proposed by the physicist Miguel Alcubierre until 1994.

Alcubierre had to make his idea of ​​distortion training consistent with Einstein’s theory of relativity – one of the strongest and most widely proven scientific theories.

A central principle of general relativity is that the speed of light is the maximum speed that anything can travel in the universe.

To get around this problem – to make something travel faster than light when nothing supposedly can – Alcubierre proposed the equivalent of a scientific sleight of hand.

By “inflating” space-time behind a ship and “contracting” it in front, the ship would be in a space-time “bubble”, capable of moving over distances (and speeds) not available to them. regular bodies in space.

But this trick relied on a huge amount of “negative energy” to twist and bend space-time – something that had not been observed before by scientists.

While scientists weren’t deterred by this restriction – NASA has reportedly explored the concept for decades – it created a big stumbling block to any realistic possibility of a real-world warp drive.

What does the new research say?

Two separate papers, independently of each other, coincidentally suggested that warp drives might be possible.

Astrophysicist Eric Lentz and physicists Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire, both writing in Classical and Quantum Gravity, have suggested that the drives may well be achievable.

While the new research is still in the “ ideas ” stage, it suggests that warp workouts might not need as much (if at all) negative energy – positive energy that is abundant and easy to create. , could do the trick.

While both articles suggest slightly different ways to create Alcubierre’s Distortion Reader, they are both improvements over previous models that are physically unfeasible.

Lentz believes that a kind of particle called solitons (waves in space-time that act like a particle) could travel faster than light and be “created as conductive plasma and classical electromagnetic fields”, both of which are fine. understood by modern science.

Bobrick and Martire, on the other hand, get around the problem of negative energy by using the concept of space-time “floating bubbles”, instead of making the spacecraft themselves float in space-time. .

This physical model uses almost no negative energy and was endorsed by Alcubierre himself, the original inventor of the chain drive.

The concepts behind the two warp drives are hard to grasp, so here’s Sabine Hossenfelder, professor and researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Frankfurt, to help you explain.

While both suggestions for Warp readers are exciting things, they still come very close to scientific possibilities – many of the suggested structures that scientists don’t fully understand.

But moving the problem to a problem in the fields of physics is still a huge step forward.

“While the mass requirements necessary for such modifications are still enormous today,” write Bobrick and Martire, “our work suggests a method of constructing such objects based on fully understood laws of physics”.

We may not have warp training tomorrow, or even a decade from now, but maybe a hundred years from now we will be visiting alien planets at the same time it takes to fly to New York.

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