Working toward a warp drive: In his garage lab, Omahan aims to bend fabric of space

[n2doc]

David Pares points to the Faraday cage that he uses in his warp drive experiments in the garage of his Aksarben-area home. “It is so far out there, he’s not going to get funding to do it,” says Jack Kasher, a retired UNO physics professor. “If it’s going to be done, it’s going to be done in his garage.”


You might not believe any of this stuff. But suspend your disbelief for a moment and make space for something incredible.

Let’s start this past summer, when a NASA scientist named Harold “Sonny” White unveiled an artist’s rendering of a spacecraft capable of shooting across the galaxy.

The spacecraft was theoretical, but the research behind it was real. For years White has been exploring the possibilities of actual “Star Trek”-like travel. He even named his ship the IXS Enterprise.

There are obstacles, such as forms of energy that might not exist. That’s a problem.

more

http://www.omaha.com/news/metro/working-toward-a-warp-drive-in-his-garage-lab-omahan/article_b6489acf-5622-5419-ac18-0c44474da9c9.html

[House of Roberts]

1. Never say never.

When I was a kid, Diet Smith and Dick Tracy had two way wrist radios, then two way wrist TVs.

[Daemonaquila]

4. I'd so like to believe he might be on to something...

But I can't. But I wish him well anyway. And who knows.

[NaturalHigh]

2. This is pretty cool...

but I hope he doesn't pull us all into a wormhole through his garage.

[Mnemosyne]

3. Ya never know... nt

[1StrongBlackMan]

5. I wish I understood the science enough to understand what ...

he is talking about.

But what we do know is scientists have placed barriers beyond which we cannot travel, e.g., into the 1950s, scientists were absolutely sure that the human body could not sustain levels of blood flow and oxygen to the muscles, in the sufficient quantities and duration, that would allow a human to run a sub-4 minute mile.

It seems that Einstein has placed a similar restriction.

[phantom power]

7. Warp drives do not violate Einsteinian physics

The lightspeed limit implied by Einsteinian physics is for objects moving through spacetime. A warp drive moves a bit of spacetime itself. The physical objects inside it go along for the ride, and are not violating the lightspeed limit.

[1StrongBlackMan]

8. I have no doubt about that ...

(I've seen a bunch of Star Trek episodes)

My question has to do with the Einsteinian physics itself ... where he applied the limit. Would that limit have been conjecture?

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

10. Basically, Einstein showed that it would take an infinite amount of energy

To get an object with mass up to the speed of light. I will spare you the math.

[DetlefK]

18. Relativistic mass doesn't matter with a warp-drive.

Look up "Alcubierre Warp-Drive". The velocity of the ship stays slower-than-light, but the warpfield creates a spacetime-bubble that moves faster-than-light.

[phantom power]

11. It is not conjecture - actually you can prove it with middle school math

The key observation is that electromagnetic waves (light) travels at the same speed regardless of the observer, or how fast they are moving. This also is not conjecture - it comes out of the wave equations and has also been verified experimentally.

I wish I could find this on the web, but the easiest way to demonstrate it that I ever saw starts with imagining a "clock" created by a single photon bouncing between two mirrors. As you increase the speed of that clock, the distance the photon is seen to travel (from the point of view of a stationary observer) grows between each bounce. That distance is in fact the hypotenuse of a right triangle. The length of that hypotenuse grows with the speed of the clock. But.... the speed of that photon never changes. So the clock ticks slower and slower (again, from the point of view of the observer.

(you can see that this is just the pythagorean theorem)

That is relativistic time dilation. From there, you can re-arrange the equations to also show the other famous special relativity conclusions. The light-speed limit, increasing mass as speed increases, e = mc^2, etc.

Note that this is an intrinsic property of the physics of light and spacetime. It is not just some guy making a conjecture. It is not like somebody speculating "I don't think we can build a plane that breaks the sound barrier" and it is not like somebody speculating that humans can't break a 4 minute mile. It is very very different.

[phantom power]

12. Here is one...

http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109/lectures/srelwhat.html

[1StrongBlackMan]

14. Now see? ...

This is going to lead me to spending way too much time at that site!

Things I don't really understand fascinate me.

[1StrongBlackMan]

13. Thank you ...

You've explained it in a way, even this science-phobic pedestrian, can understand.

In my next life, I want to come back as a physicist!

[phantom power]

16. People don't realize how accessible special relativity is

My next life would have to give me like another 30 IQ points to be a real physicist, but the core of special relativity didn't require any advanced math. Einstein's genius there was more of the lateral-thinking kind, saying "None of these facts are adding up, so I'll just remove the previously unquestioned assumption that time moves the same for all observers."

Developing and verifying the preceding insight that light travels at the same speed for all observers took more work, actually.

General relativity is where they started examining the curvature of spacetime, which *did* involve advanced math. There, Einstein started with sort of conjecture: "if I'm accelerating, then I see the paths of light bend relative to me. It would be pleasing if acceleration due to a gravity field also looked exactly the same." However, starting from that conjecture, he worked through the math, and generated testable predictions (the prediction of non-Newtonian deviations in Mercury's orbit being the famous original success). Today the designs for our GPS systems use those equations to account for the fact that satellite clocks run faster than clocks on earth's surface. It's become one of the most tested and successful physical models in human history.

Bonus pop-culture fact, gravitational time dilation is a plot device in the movie Interstellar, which I thought was kind of neat.

[3catwoman3]

6. Thgat would be sooooooooooo cool.

I hope he succeeds, and that a food replicator is next on his list. It would make meal planning so much easier.

"Earl Grey, hot."

[pa28]

9. Here is his web site.

http://www.paresspacewarpresearch.org/

Interesting stuff. I hope he really is onto something.

[Orsino]

15. Uh, Bermuda Triangle anecdote on first page?

I really, really wanted to believe there was serious research going on. Now I can't.

[Posteritatis]

17. Crackpot who buys into "electric fog" silliness. (nt)

[hunter]

19. Nope. Not in my universe where EVERYTHING is moving at "the speed of light."

You, me, the fastest spaceship, and the photons from your flashlight. I'm fairly certain we can throw away time as any sort of "fourth" dimension. Neither the future nor the past are fixed, both exist as probabilities related to now.

Since I'm not a "distinguished but elderly scientist " who claims something is impossible, I'm not in conflict with Arthur C. Clarke's three laws.

So far as my own most distant travels go those are merely "the magic" of unknown sciences possibly related to the instabilities of my mind. The dark, ugly universes are always nearby, the brighter universes a little further beyond. Sometimes it's my privilege to exist in the brighter places.

The fun thing about life as a mad scientist is that sometimes practical things are discovered as you seek the highly improbable. If I'm unable to wish David Pares impossible warp drive success, I do wish him great serendipity.