7/20/2023 0 Comments Warp bubbleEinstein proved that E=MC², which means energy and mass are interchangeable. The main reason warp speed probably isn’t possible is because it would require a currently impossible amount of energy. “And in the classic Voyager episode of Star Trek, you evolve into lizard people.” Harnessing Negative Energy At that point, “you’ve broken all the laws of infinity and you experience all time at all moments,” Macdonald says. In some shows, this is arbitrarily called warp factor 10, which is when all of spacetime is wrapped around the spaceship. ![]() Spacetime as we know it is finite, and as such, there is a limit to the number of warp bubbles, or level of warp speed one could theoretically reach. Then if you want to exponentially increase your speed, you build another bubble around that bubble, which in the world of Star Trek is referred to as warp factor two, and then warp factor three, Macdonald says. Physicists Are Pretty Sure We Can Reach Warp SpeedĪ spaceship traveling at warp speed wouldn’t be firing its engines to travel that fast it’s just being carried by a spacetime bubble.“But nothing says that spacetime itself can’t go faster than the speed of light,” Macdonald says, “and that’s the warp bubble.” That’s currently the limit to how fast anything can travel, because as soon as you introduce mass-and something like a spaceship definitely has mass-it physically can’t travel faster than a certain speed because it’s bending spacetime. And you just coast in a straight line at this fixed speed, which is the speed of light, because light doesn’t have any mass.” “Then eventually, if you have no mass, you’re not tipping down at all. The lighter something is, the easier it can move across the fabric. When items with significant mass need to move, the fabric of spacetime limits their speed. “Put a bowling ball on that trampoline, and it’s going to dip spacetime down, and that’s like what the mass of a sun or a planet or anything like those do to spacetime,” she tells Popular Mechanics. The easiest way to understand the warp bubble is to picture spacetime as a trampoline, explains Erin Macdonald, an astrophysicist and the current science advisor for the Star Trek franchise. “I always just call it warp drive,” he says.Ī two-dimensional visualization of an Alcubierre drive. In other words, a warp bubble.Īlcubierre explained his theory in a famous 1994 paper that describes what’s now called the Alcubierre drive. ![]() “The basic idea is just to create an expansion of space behind, say, a spaceship, or whatever object you want to move, and an opposite contraction of space in front of you,” he explains. And if it can expand, then it must be able to contract. Alcubierre figured that if all of spacetime itself can expand, then it should also be able to expand in a small, regional space. His solution is based on the fact that the universe is expanding-something scientists have known for about 100 years. So Alcubierre came up with a way to modify the geometry of space “that in principle would allow us to travel faster than light,” and at the same time, doesn’t violate the laws of physics. In the early 90s, while studying gravitational physics for his doctorate degree, an episode of Star Trek inspired him to look into the theoretical possibility of warp speed.Īt that time, the show “never actually explained how works, it was just a name for whatever they do to travel faster than light,” he says. It’s not one of these things that physics just straight up says that can never ever happen.”Īlcubierre is a longtime sci-fi fan and an accomplished astrophysicist.
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