Did NASA accidentally create a warp bubble? The NEW Warp Drive Possibilities

Did NASA accidentally create a warp bubble?

As space travel garners more attention scientists research teams and agencies are constantly searching for ways to improve technology and build fast and efficient spacecraft that can ferry people beyond planet earth but if there is one big thing that we still have to figure out it is beating the speed of light in a surprising turn of events a scientist and his team may have actually found a key element that could bring us closer to doing just that the warp drive pioneer and former nasa scientist Dr Harold Sunny White has now reported the discovery of an actual real-world warp bubble welcome the Factnomenal and in today's video we will be taking a closer look at this exciting new discovery and what it could possibly mean for the future of space travel the term warp bubble was first coined in the year 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre warp bubbles are quite a complicated notion involving a ton of math but in simple words it can be defined as a detached region of space-time which theoretically at least is capable of moving faster than the speed of light it is that bit of space that's contracted in the front and expanded in the back it is this contraction and expansion that in theory actually pushes the bubble including its contents forward at faster than light speed not to mention it's able to do all of this without violating the laws of physics think of it as moving through the cosmos while surfing a bubble of condensed space so what makes warp bubbles so important first and foremost they eliminate one of the most important problems when it comes to light speed travel and that is time dilation so say for example we succeeded building a spacecraft that is actually able to travel at the speed of light everything that is outside of your spacecraft would speed up as well so while it may have only taken you a couple of hours to reach your favorite planet it could have equated to years of time passing on earth the current known laws of physics at least will give you this outcome so if you're planning a trip at light speed into space it's going to be way longer outside of the craft than you actually think this is where warp bubbles are able to get around this problem because the space inside the said bubble remains unaffected it would be possible to actually take what should have been a 40 light year journey and shorten it and make it as though it were only a 0.5 light year journey which would mean that you could go on this journey into space and upon returning safely back to earth everything you know would have only aged a couple of years for a long time warp bubbles were considered to be mere science fiction up until Alcubierre came along and theorized his Alcubierre warp drive which maintained general relativity while also allowing for faster than light travel he made waves in the physics community when he first published his findings on the possibilities of warping interstellar space theoretically at least he was the first to make the bold proposal that it was possible to actually manipulate the fabric of space itself in order to travel faster than light by expanding space behind the starship and contracting the space in front of it thus reducing any intervening gaps between planets stars and more the idea created quite the buzz and was immediately called far-fetched and unrealistic by many the math used for the scene was relatively sound but it still posed a wide variety of problems the amount of energy that would be required for something like this to even be possible at least for now doesn't exist fast forward to the year 2012 when 

Dr White who was then working for nasa published his own paper with suggested changes to the original math and shape of the craft by Alcubierre which brought the energy required much lower the development of an actual warp bubble of warp drive has since only been mentioned through the years but with no more important contributions when Alcubierre first put in his original paper there was something fundamental that hadn't yet been realized the fact that the default amount of energy in space isn't just zero but rather some positive non-zero finite value keeping in mind that there is a finite amount of energy to the very fabric of space itself it's important to note the famous calculation that was made way back in 1940 back in the early days of quantum field theory Hendra Casimir made a very valuable contribution the Casimir Effect as we call it that has rather remarkable implications electromagnetic fields exist everywhere in space and they cannot be removed but he envisioned two parallel conducting plates for example as a result of which the energy inherent to the space outside the plates would be slightly greater than the energy inside causing them to attract this is significant because it does tie in with the fact that though this effect is not the same as a warp bubble in principle it could be used to warp space in the negative fashion that would be needed to create one now in 2021 Dr white and a team of researchers are conducting research funded by DARPA on objects called Casimir cavities stemming from that very same Casimir effect as a part of the research the team uses micron cake electrical conductors in a variety of shapes including pillars spheres plates and other such cavities to generate electrical potentials of a couple hundred microvolts which turned out to be exactly what previous experiments and many theorists ai predictions indicated the Casimir effect refers to the attractive force of a fluctuating magnetic field that tends to pull two objects like plates and mirrors as used in experiments together when inside a vacuum it was at the time of studying and carrying out experimental research that Dr white and his colleagues actually made a surprising discovery in a custom. 

Casimir cavity they noticed in their calculations something that looks suspiciously like a warp bubble he and his team released a paper in July 2021 about what they are calling the possible structure of the energy density present in a Casimir cavity they accidentally created a microscopic experiment all while researching how energy is distributed around wavelengths the experiment resulted in enough theoretical energy to achieve warp speed just like the concept that was theorized by physicist Miguel Alcubierre the main reason his entire findings were downplayed was due to the mathematical drawbacks and the amount of energy that was needed but the latest DARPA funded research released by Dr white and his team actually indicates that the energy requirements are far lesser than previously believed this of course is great news and if they are proven right then white's team has possibly discovered the first warp bubble and all this without even meaning to do so in his own words Dr white says to my knowledge this is the first paper in the peer-reviewed literature that proposes a real sizable nano structure that is predicted to manifest a real albeit humble warp bubble he cautioned that this doesn't necessarily mean we are near building a fully functioning warp drive but the detailed numerical analysis of the Casimir cavities helped the team identify a very real and manufacturable nanostructure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density that it would manifest a real nano scale warp bubble not just in theory but the real thing the finding not only confirms the predicted toroidal structure and negative energy aspects of a war bubble but has also given rise to pathways that he and other researchers can now use to follow and design and perhaps one day even construct a real-world spaceship that will warp through time to further evaluate the groundbreaking discovery the team has even come up with a proposed design for a testable nano scale warp drive craft in the future one thing's for sure. 

When Dr white began his research project under DARPA the last thing he expected was to stumble upon such a historical finding especially when it ties in so closely with everything he has ever believed and the big claims he made in his warp drive proposal whether by pure coincidence or personal destiny he and his team seem to be at the right place at the right time and if proven it might change the future of space travel forever the million dollar question though is this a real warp bubble the simple answer is that it sure has the potential to be if it is experimentally validated and as always not everyone seems entirely convinced by the idea seeing as no experiments or evidence can be shown for the same and what lies in theory may not actually be possible in real life also many are considering the fact that the findings come from the team led by Dr white who is famous for his big bold claims which some say have yet to amount to anything on the other hand some strongly agree that this new discovery is potentially groundbreaking and with more in-depth study and experiments it could bring us closer to actually beating the speed of light while it's easy to jump to conclusions and get excited dr white himself reminds us not to get ahead of ourselves science is a slow and arduous process testing and experiments will need to be carried out before any further plans can be made in his own words he rightly states that though dreaming is important he personally emphasizes the importance of doing in-depth research and finding new and additional applications that are practical dr white and his team plan on conducting many more experiments in smaller models to better understand the opportunities of a prospective warp drive but as of now they are said to be laser focused on the research around the Casimir cavities so while some are already asking when we will be seeing scientists make something like this actually fly Dr white's motto remains the same crawl walk run in short baby steps only time will tell what the serendipitous discovery might mean for the future but for the time being we know that it's a monumental step in the right direction what are your thoughts on the discovery and do you think we will ever achieve faster than light travel let us know in the comments 

The NEW Warp Drive Possibilities

 

That Einstein guy was a real bummer for our hopes of a star-hopping, science-fiction-y future. His whole “nothing travels faster than light” rule seems to ensure that exploration of even the local part of our galaxy will be an excruciating slow. But Einstein also gave us a glimmer of hope. He showed us that space and time can be warped - and so the warp drive was conceived. Just recently, a couple of papers contend that this is not pure science fiction. In 1915, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity revealed that the fabric of space and time is mutable and dynamic. It can, in fact, be warped. You can’t travel through space at faster than the speed of light - but there’s no speed limit for the fabric of space itself. This hints at a possibility for faster than light, or superluminal travel. And only 15 years after general relativity’s debut, the warp drive was invented, propelling humanity on its first journeys to the stars. That “invention” and those journeys were in the 1931 spring edition of Amazing Stories. In Islands of Space, its authorJohn Cambell talks about increasing the cosmic speed limit by curving the fabric of space. The idea caught on. According to the wonderful historical dictionary of science fiction, the first mention of a “space-warp” as a propulsion mechanism was in J. Williamson’s 1936 story The Cometeers. Space-warp drives, time-warp drives, and eventually just warp drives became an increasingly popular way of breaking Einstein’s rules. The pretend technology really took off with Star Trek in the 60s - and Star Trek inspired the very first real warp field solution to the Einstein field equations. That’s the Alcubierre warp field, derived by Mexican physicist and star trek aficionado Miguel Alcubierre. Now, we covered Alcubierre’s idea 5 years ago. Back then the warp field solution looked like a very rigorous, carefully calculated work of pure fiction - it broke the laws of physics in ways that I’ll come back to. Subsequent studies have tried to fix this.

And a very recent paper claims to have solved the worst deal breaker in Alcubierre’s proposal. Today we’re going to pull them apart two new papers on warp drives and see if it’s really time to don our Star Trek cosplay and warp out of here. Before we get to the new work, let’s talk light speed and warp drives. Einstein’s speed limit doesn’t directly say that nothing can travel faster than light. His special theory of relativity just says that it takes infinite energy to accelerate anything with positive mass all the way to light speed. That effectively means that it’s impossible to observe a massive object cross this speed barrier. But there are loopholes. In certain circumstances we can think of space itself as moving - and there’s no limit to the relative motion of two patches of space - and so objects in those patches could have superluminal speeds relative to each other. For example inside black holes where we can think of space as flowing downwards faster than light. Or beyond the cosmic horizon, the expanding universe is carrying galaxies away from us faster than light. The warp drive takes advantage of this loophole by accelerating a patch of space relative to its surroundings. Objects in that warp bubble move with that patch without themselves ever feeling any acceleration. This is what the Alcubierre drive is supposed to do. It’s a sp acetime geometry that is a valid solution to the equations general theory of relativity. The Einstein Field Equation. It includes a comfortable, flat region of space surrounded by a region of extreme spatial curvature. The space behind this bubble is expanded, while the space in front is contracted. The resulting push-pull propels the bubble and any spaceship that it contains. The Alcubierre warp field may be a valid solution to the Einstein field equations, but that doesn’t mean it’s physically possible. Normally, to solve these equations we input a physically possible distribution of mass, energy, on the right side and it spits out the spacetime geometry on the left. 

Alcubierre instead solved the equations backwards - he figured out the geometry of a warp bubble, and then ran it backwards through the equations to see what distribution of matter and energy would be required. You can do this with any geometry, but almost every geometry will produce an impossible mass-energy distribution. To combat this, we have a set of energy conditions that go alongside the Einstein field equations that are meant to restrict the allowable energy distributions to what is physically possible Alcubierre’s field breaks all of these energy conditions, and he’s upfront about that fact. We can summarize this by saying that it requires a negative energy density, which should be impossible except perhaps on the tiniest, quantum scales. Sometimes people talk about the drive requiring negative mass - also called exotic matter - and yeah, that would do the trick too - and is also probably impossible. So that sounds like a dealbreaker. The other minor hiccup is that Alcubierre’s original field required more energy than is contained in all the matter in the visible universe to move a moderate-sized starship. Subsequent studies improved on Alcubierre’s warp design and brought down the energy requirement to less insane levels - although they typically remained somewhat insane. But the requirement of exotic matter didn’t go away, and in fact subsequent studies demonstrated that any superluminal warp drive MUST use negative energy densities. 

Other studies discovered new problems - for example, warp bubbles are un-steerable because the interior of the bubble is causally disconnected from parts of the front warp field. That inspired Sergey Krasnikov to come up with his Krasnikov tube - a sort of warp conveyor belt, which has the slightly useless property of only working if it’s a full return journey and you don’t get off at the destination. To me, one of the biggest deal-breakers is that any faster-than-light travel can be used to create closed time like curves, as we discussed previously. That leads to paradoxes - to contradictions and inconsistencies. And the appearance of inconsistencies is one of our most powerful indications that our theoretical musings are on the wrong track. So, yeah, warp fields became much better studied, but remained implausible - and probably impossible. But I guess the dreams of wannabe starship captains are strong - because the work continued, and just recently two papers have claimed breakthroughs. We’ll start with the paper entitled Introducing Physical Warp Drives by Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire. These guys propose a general definition for warp fields not tied to a particular solution to the Einstein field equations. To quote the authors: Warp drives are inertially moving shells of positive or negative energy material which enclose a `passenger' region with a flat metric. Let’s focus on that “inertially moving” part. Bobrick and Martire is that no past warp solution has in-built mode of acceleration. All of them, including Alcubierre’s, move with whatever velocity they started at. This isn’t exactly a new insight - in 2002, Jose Natario demonstrated that the whole expansion and contraction of space was only a side-effect of Alcubierre’s choice of warp field, and he constructed a warp field without that feature. Natario, and now Bobrick and Martire, define warp fields as bubbles that slide through space - potentially at superluminal speeds. 

But all these guys agree that superluminal bubbles are only possible if the warp field uses exotic matter. Bobrick and Martire also point out that there’s still no way to accelerate a warp bubble across the light speed limit. A superluminal warp bubble has to have started out superluminal. This seems in conflict with Alcubierre himself, who wrote that the warp bubble “pushes” the spaceship - accelerates it from rest. But this acceleration isn’t actually derived from his warp field solution. The velocity of the bubble is baked into the equation for the field geometry, but it’s not clear how you change that velocity. This isn’t necessarily a complete downer. As pointed out by Fransisco Lobo and Matt Visser, if sub-light-speed or subluminal warp bubbles can be a thing, these might be an example of a “reaction-less” drive - a propulsion method that doesn’t need any propellant - not stuff ejected from behind like in a rocket. But these researchers also note that even a subluminal reaction-less warp drive would still require negative energy and an enormous amount of it for any decent sized spaceship. OK, let’s move on to the second paper by Erik Lentz: “Breaking the Warp Barrier: Hyper-Fast Solitons in Einstein-Maxwell-Plasma Theory”. This one is a little more star trek friendly than, well, pretty much every prior effort. Lentz claims to have found an actual superluminal warp field solution that does NOT require the impossible negative energy densities.

 He does this by exploring a broader family of solutions to the Einstein field equations than previous studies. The details are technical to put it mildly - but let me try to give you a sense of the difference. We can think of the warp field as a special type of isolated wave moving through space - what we call a soliton. In previous work, this wave only waved in the direction of motion. That gave them an axial symmetry. For example in the Alcubierre field the warp is in front and behind the spaceship, while the exotic matter is in a ring around the direction of motion. When you calculate the total energy with only this component than it’s alway negative. Lentz found that by including components of the wave motion that were perpendicular to the direction of motion he could build a superluminal soliton in which the energy came out positive everywhere. He came up with this example - here projected onto a 2-D plane. Energy is distributed along these tracks, potentially as a plasma, in some places at some pretty insane temperatures. This would resulting in expansion and contraction of space in similar regions. The entire patch of spacetime would travel at superluminal speeds, carrying a spaceship with it. A couple of minor issues persist. The energy required to carry a 100-meter diameter bubble is about the rest-mass energy of a tenth of our Sun. It’s hard to see how packing that much mass into these strips would NOT create a black hole. Also, Lentz admits that this warp bubble is inertial just like Bobrick and Martire assert for Alcubierre’s bubble - it can exist at superluminal speeds in theory, but there’s no known way to get it to those speeds in the first place. Both of these papers are peer reviewed and published in the reputable journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, that doesn’t mean they’re right - it just means that a couple of respectable physicists refereed the works didn’t find any gigantic blunders - or did, and the blunders were fixed. But much more work is needed to verify anything this speculative. You can bet that there’ll be plenty of papers critiquing and/or supporting these efforts. So now you’re all up to date with warp technology. Superluminal warp fields exist in theory, and there’s a very tentative hints that the worst deal-breaker can be resolved - that of requiring a non-existent type of energy. 

But other possibly-impossible hurdles remain - can the required energy densities be created without creating black holes for any useful sized warp bubble? And can a warp bubble be created at sub-luminal speeds and then accelerated past the speed of light? So far there’s no known way to do this, and warp fields may suffer the same strict speed limit as does matter. And of course we still have the time travel issue - accelerating across the speed of light breaks causality and so probably can’t be a thing. Einstein and the universe appear to be trolling us - alternately inspiring and crushing our hopes for a star-hopping future. But these studies have made one thing very clear - if warp travel is possible, humanity will figure it out. Scientists are very persistent, especially the ones who are also die-hard science fiction fans. They’ll continue to try to “make it so” by exploring Einstein’s theory - hoping to build starship, but in the process learning how our universe works. And possibly also building a starship, to propel humanity into the galaxy on waves of warped space time. Space Time gets an enormous amount of help from our Patreon supporters. You guys really help us plan ahead to more ambitious episodes and series. And today I want to give a special shoutout to Vinnie Falco, who is supporting us at the Big Bang level. Vinnie, we’ve used your support to build a very real warp drive, which, thanks to this new result from Bobrick & Matire is now possible. These guys define a type-1 warp field as a surface of positive energy density enclosing a flat metric. Now the authors can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that this means literally any enclosed surface can make a warp field. 

Like, for example, a cardboard box could be a warp drive. So introducing the first type 1 warp drive. We’re calling this version the Falco drive, and it’s guaranteed to be literally exactly as effective as any warp drive ever constructed. Future versions will be even better. We might add more tubes and some flashing lights for example. Okay, onto today’s comments we’re covering two episodes - there’s the quantum Zeno effect and the recent result from Fermilab’s muon g-2 experiment. We’ll start with the muon g-2 result, which revealed a possible a crack in the standard model of particle physics. A few of you asked whether similar experiments could be performed using the tau particle. The tau is the heaviest of the 3 generations of leptons. The probability that a particle will interact with other massive virtual particles is proportional to the square of that particle’s own mass. At nearly 17 times the mass of the muon, the tau should be even more sensitive to unknown particles. The problem is that the tau’s lifetime is around 10 million times shorter that the muon, which itself lives only for only microsecond or so. That makes it pretty hard to watch tau particles precess in magnetic fields, and so far the g-factor for the tau hasn’t even been measured to 1 significant figure. That said, there are other ways to track a particle’s interactions with virtual particles. For the tau, the focus is in watching its decay products. For example, the energy distribution of those decays products are sensitive to the complex interactions with virtual particles that happen during the decay. People aren’t really working on this, but you can be sure that there’ll be even more focus on these experiments going forward. 

These could yield a truly independent verification of the muon g-2 result. Paul Vicory and Verdatum are impressed that Fermilab is producing cutting edge science even in competition with the much larger large hadron collider. Well not only has Fermilab remained competitive, it seems to have won the race - or at least it’s ahead on the final stretch to find that elusive crack in the standard model that may lead to whatever physics lies beyond. And this is entirely due to Fermilab being extremely clever about where they focused their efforts. When the LHC switched on and Fermilab’s tevatron accelerator was demoted from being the largest in the world, Fermilab made the very hard decision to switch the tevatron off and direct resources towards things like their neutrino experiments which we covered previously, and of course the muon g-2 - neither of which require quite such enormous accelerators. Fermilab’s scientists and engineers are right to feel very proud of this result. OK, onto the quantum Zeno Effect, and the idea that you can freeze a quantum system by observing it. By the way, the name comes from the Zeno paradox, which argues that a moving arrow isn’t moving because it’s stationary at each separate instant in time. 

Raven Lord always thought that the idea of "instantaneous velocity" that solves this paradox is just a theoretical artifact of calculus. Actually, in quantum mechanics, velocity isn’t just change in position with time. Momentum, which incorporates velocity, is as fundamental as position. So a particle at an instant in time really does have an instantaneous velocity. For Flensdude the quantum Zeno effect reminds them of a poem composed by the Norse god Odin. It goes like this: A fifth spell, I know; if I see shot with ill intent; an arrow, travelling in a flight; it's incapable of flying too quickly; for me to stop it in its path; as long as I keep my eyes on it. So we can conclude that Odin knew quantum mechanics. I mean, stopping an arrow with the power of observation is a spell they teach you in undergrad quantum. It’s also the first midterm exam, which really helps cut down the class size. Also, as everyone knows Odin plucked out his own eye in order to be able to drink from the mythical well of knowledge. I thought this was just a fable teaching that “knowledge requiring sacrifice”, but now But now I see it’s an ancient viking metaphor for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. By the way, don’t think I didn’t notice that the last commenter - Raven Lord - bares one of the many names of the All-Father. So maybe Odin learned his quantum mechanics watching space time like the rest of us. Alex Turner asks the real question: If the Quantum Zeno Effect plays a role in birds' ability to see magnetic fields, then according to the Many-Worlds interpretation are there many, many worlds full of very, very lost birds? I don’t think that’s quite how it works - instead there are a relatively very tiny but non-zero number of worlds where the freezing of cryptochrome quantum states randomly failed in all avian magnetoreception. Given the extensive use of homing pigeons by the allied forces in WWII, my guess is that the Nazis would have won in all of these worlds. Hm, I think we just explained the premise of the Man in the High Castle. Nice one, physics.

Thanks for reading: Did NASA accidentally create a warp bubble? The NEW Warp Drive Possibilities, Sorry, my English is bad:)