Image Credit: Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White

I read an article the other day that awoke my inner geek (and made me wonder, yet again, where my Buck Rogers’ ray gun and Starship Troopers’ space cadet cap got to).

Warp drive, the faster-than-light-travel I first heard about in the original Star Trek series, may be more realistic than I ever imagined. The ‘real-life’ spacecraft design is quite different, but the general concept is the same… 

In 1994, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a real-world design for a warp drive. The proposed spacecraft was football-shaped and was attached to a flattened ring that encircled it (the ring was to provide the warp-drive phenomenon). Unfortunately, when Alcubierre did his calculations, the energy required to power his ship was enormous  (equal to the mass-energy of Jupiter). Recently, however, Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White (of NASA) reworked the design — replacing the flattened ring with a rounded doughnut — and the recalculated energy requirement is comparable to the mass-energy of NASA’s Voyager 1 probe (Dr. White suggests that further energy reductions are possible with the integration of oscillating space-warps). This may bring the idea of faster-than-light-travel out of the pages of the science fiction books of my teenage years and into reality!

The proposed warp drive does not contravene the theoretical universal speed-limit (as per Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity); rather, the manipulation of space-time provides an escape clause.

The encircling doughnut-shaped ring produces a warp in space-time around the spacecraft: space in front of the craft contracts, and space behind expands, but the spacecraft remains within a cocoon of non-warped, ‘flat’ space-time and surfs the wave within the warp field. Apparently, the spaceship could theoretically approach a ‘virtual’ speed ten times faster than the speed of light. The math is impenetrable (at least to my thirty-years-in-the-past university calculus, which is, alas, not powerful enough to probe the magic); nevertheless, the important concept is that matter cannot go faster than the speed of light, but the fabric of space — space-time — can, and the spacecraft-cocoon will travel within warped space-time, which will deliver the craft to its destination faster than light can travel.

The ring that creates the warp field will probably require exotic matter (uncommon states of matter that have unusual properties, but are within the sphere of conventional physics). The generation of sufficient amounts of exotic matter to create and sustain the ring for the warp drive is currently speculative, but future advances in quantum mechanics may resolve this issue.

Dr. White, and associates, have set up an experiment — the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer  (note: this link contains a lot of information on warp mechanics: for the experimental set-up, see p.8 of the pdf) — in an attempt to “…perturb space-time by one part in ten million.” Dr. White admits it’s a humble experiment, but is an important test of principles.

According to the Star Trek canon, warp drive was (will be) invented in 2063. Only time will tell if the prediction comes true…

Warp seven, Scotty; and Sulu, plot a course toward the “…second star to the right, straight on ’til morning.”.

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