{"id":523,"date":"2008-07-16T01:07:43","date_gmt":"2008-07-16T06:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=523"},"modified":"2008-07-16T01:07:43","modified_gmt":"2008-07-16T06:07:43","slug":"how-to-build-a-warp-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=523","title":{"rendered":"How to build a warp drive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/alcubierre-drive.jpg\" title=\"Alcubierre drive\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/alcubierre-drive.thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"Alcubierre drive\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Is faster than light travel allowed by the laws of physics? There&#8217;s no harm in speculating, right?<\/p>\n<p>In 1994, Michael Alcubierre, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, put warp drive on a firm (-ish) theoretical footing for the first time. His thinking was that what relativity actually prevents is faster-than-light-travel relative to the fabric of spacetime. But it places no restrictions on the way in which spacetime itself can move and stretch.<\/p>\n<p>The Alcubierre drive consists of a device that somehow contracts space in front of your spacecraft, bringing your destination effectively closer,\u00a0 while expanding space behind it. The spacecraft sits in a bubble of flat space in the middle.\u00a0 So while the bubble can travel at any speed across the universe, the spacecraft can be almost stationary relative to the space in which it sits.<\/p>\n<p>Clever idea.\u00a0 And today Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy from Baylor University in Texas, take it further by explaining how it might actually be possible to stretch spacetime into the Alcubierre bubble.<\/p>\n<p>Their idea is based on the possible existence of extra dimensions that are curled up with a radius so small that we never experience them. They say:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>&#8220;The basic idea is that by altering the radius of an extra dimension, it would be possible, in principle, to adjust the energy density of spacetime.&#8221; <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And that would allow the kind of space-time stretching\u00a0 that could create an Alcubierre drive.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s one drawback. Cleaver and Obousy calculate that the energy needed to distort the space around a spacecraft-sized object is about 10^45 Joules or the total energy of an object the size of Jupiter if all its mass were converted into energy.<\/p>\n<p>Still, if you&#8217;re glass half-full\u00a0 kind of physicist, you&#8217;ll take that as encouragement.<\/p>\n<p>Ref: <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0807.1957\">arxiv.org\/abs\/0807.1957<\/a>: Putting the &#8220;Warp&#8221; into Warp Drive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 Is faster than light travel allowed by the laws of physics? There&#8217;s no harm in speculating, right? In 1994, Michael Alcubierre, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, put warp drive on a firm (-ish) theoretical footing for the first time. His thinking was that what relativity actually prevents [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,21,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-seaside","category-calculatin","category-hellraisin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}