Warp Drive Research at NASA JSC
Warp Field Mechanics 101, NASA JSC
“Finally, an overview of the warp field interferometer test bed being implemented in the Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory: Eagleworks (APPL:E) at the Johnson Space Center will be detailed. While warp field mechanics has not had a “Chicago Pile” moment, the tools necessary to detect a modest instance of the phenomenon are near at hand.”
The Warp Drive Could Become Science Fact, Space.com via Disovery
“White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory. They set up what they call the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, essentially creating a laser interferometer that instigates micro versions of space-time warps. “We’re trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million,” White said.”
NASA Head Bolden: Warp Speed Ahead, US News & World Report
“Former astronaut and NASA head Charles Bolden says the agency wants to one day design a vehicle that goes faster than the speed of light. “One of these days, we want to get to warp speed,” he told a group at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Tuesday. Bolden was discussing the future of American space exploration. “We want to go faster than the speed of light, and we don’t want to stop at Mars.”
Keith’s note: I wonder who is paying for this … JSC? OCT? HEOMD? Where (specifically) does this research fit into the agency’s overall strategic plan? No one at NASA ever bothers to explain this.
I am paying for it, along with the rest of the American taxpayers, and I say hooray!
Incidentally, I think NASA should have an annual Star Trek day (perhaps Sept. 8), and that all of the engineers should wear red shirts or dresses, all of the scientists should wear blue shirts or dresses, and all of the administrative / managers should wear gold shirts or dresses.
i like the idea of a Star Trek day … only the mgmt types should wear red (’cause we all know what happened to the new guy wearing red …).
and i liked the detail “shirts or dresses” … we don’t need to be exclusive, we should be inclusive of all modes of dressing …
Or the original concept proposed for Star Trek TNG – one idea suggested was ‘the Skant’ – (as in ‘Skirt / Pant’) a skirt for male starfleet officers – supposedly to suggest different fashion in the 24th Century. Thankfully that idea died quickly. How would Charles Bolden look in one?
The huge amount of energy needed is just one of several fundamental problems with an Alcubierre drive — it is not the only only, or even the biggest, of these problems. The Discovery News article is wildly misleading in suggesting that this JSC paper is some kind of breakthrough that suggests the fundamental problems might even theoretically be solved.
The issues of an Alcubierre drive are really fundamental issues in physics. A claim that faster-than-light travel is possible is a very, very extraordinary claim that would re-write much of our current understanding of physics. As Carl Sagan used to say, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” At the least, we should expect a paper published in one of the top peer-reviewed physics journals in the world. This paper was presented at the “100 Year Starship Symposium,” which is not, to say the least, a top peer-reviewed physics journal.
This just makes this group at JSC look like some clueless amateurs dabbling in physics who are in over their heads and don’t even realize it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
Chris, could you please tell me how a physicist would be any better at manipulating and ENGINEERING the Einstein equations that lets say a computation fluid dynamics or computational structures engineer? In fact, numerical relatively borrows heavily from engineering.
Also, by using the term engineering, I am meaning exploring the plethora of exisiting theory that was unexplorable until 2010 because computers just aren’t fast enough and perturbation methods suck, in my considered opinion, of course.
Also, this is an idea paper. Let them present their ideas. I would rather have it out on the internet and freely debunked, if it turns out unworkable, than paying and creating a commission of experts in the field. There are no experts in this field. The role of theoretical physics in the last 50 years has been the creation of a perfectly consistent theory of everything. So if you want an expert, let’s hire Stanton Freidman, yes UFO guy, because he was funded to do some of this 40 -50 years ago. (No, not some UFO conspiracy, the military funded the same stuff a while back…)
By the way, how are the over their heads? There is nothing special about relativity, quantum physics compared to engineering if on tosses aside the dis-information (and the associated lack of understanding from the people who write the books) and go back to Feynmann…
“Chris, could you please tell me how a physicist would be any better at
manipulating and ENGINEERING the Einstein equations that lets say a
computation fluid dynamics or computational structures engineer?”
By “the Einstein equations”, I’ll assume you mean general relativity. Well, that’s only a small part of our current understanding of physics. We have 100 years worth of additional knowledge of physics in addition to relativity.
You seem to think physics is like trigonometry — anyone with an engineering background can understand and master it. Physics isn’t like trigonometry. There’s a reason we have professional physicists and they have years of training to get there, but we don’t have professional trigonometrists.
Look in any top-level theoretical physics journal and see how many of the authors there work as computational fluid dynamics engineers versus as professional physicists. Even within physics, most professionals specialize in a very narrow part of the discipline, and it’s rare for someone from another area of physics to publish a top paper in a different area. Modern physics really is that complex and difficult.
“Also, by using the term engineering, I am meaning exploring the plethora
of exisiting theory that was unexplorable until 2010 because computers
just aren’t fast enough and perturbation methods suck, in my considered
opinion, of course.”
You’re missing the point. Some of the objections to the Alcubierre Drive are mathematical proofs that the known laws of physics make it impossible to construct. For example, Coule’s paper that I cited shows that Alcubierre’s setup, and anything similar that would result in FTL travel, would require moving matter faster than light to build — you can’t build it unless you already have it. Having faster computers doesn’t matter if the math shows it’s impossible. Your idea of exploring existing theory is pointless if existing theory says it’s impossible. There’s no way out except to come up with new physics, not explore existing physics for a warp drive.
“Also, this is an idea paper. Let them present their ideas.”
I agree with this statement. But the proper place for vetting such a revolutionary claim is in one of the reputable peer-reviewed journals in the field it addresses. That’s what Alcubierre did with his original warp drive idea. And that’s what those such as Coule who came up with objections to it did. What this JSC group did is irresponsible — they published it in the 100 Year Starship conference, which is not peer reviewed, and is not even a physics conference, it’s a group of space enthusiasts. And JSC touted it to the media as a breakthrough. That’s grossly irresponsible and does a great disservice to the public.
Also, this is coming from a taxpayer-funded organization whose funding was provided by Congress, so it’s reasonable to criticize them for doing something outside their area of expertise.
“There are no experts in this field.”
That’s completely wrong. There are tens of thousands of experts. They are physics professors at top research universities around the world and researchers at national labs and other research facilities. They are the people who publish in reputable peer-reviewed physics publications.
“So if you want an expert, let’s hire Stanton Freidman, yes UFO guy, because he was funded to do some of this 40 -50 years ago.”
If you think a “UFO guy” from 40-50 years ago is better qualified to understand the implications of fundamental theoretical physics than professional university theoretical physicists, you obviously have a very different world view than I do.
“By the way, how are the over their heads?”
By failing to follow the standard peer-review process before making an extraordinary claim and by failing to mention the published papers that say that the Alcubierre Drive is impossible for reasons that they fail to address at all.
“There is nothing special about relativity, quantum physics compared to
engineering if on tosses aside the dis-information (and the associated
lack of understanding from the people who write the books) and go back
to Feynmann.”
So you think the people who write books about modern physics have a lack of understanding, but you don’t have this lack? Physics is all simple, but the physics establishment puts out disinformation to confuse people? You’ve got one really paranoid, conspiracy-theory world view there. I’m afraid I don’t believe you. I believe the free and open international peer-review process that has given us physics as we know it today — which is enormously complex.
“I wonder who is paying for this …“
People willing to once again embrace risk taking in the name of possible progress. Is it a long shot? That would probably be the majority opinion. Do we know for a fact that they’re wasting the money being spent on this? No. Could it make a major difference in our lives if they should happen to strike pay dirt of some sort, even something unrelated to propulsion? I would think so. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Steve
I agree it’s worth investing in the basic physics research that could someday provide faster-than-light travel and/or other benefits. The question is whether such funding should go to a group at JSC or any one of the many physics departments at top universities, national labs, and other institutions.
I think we should take the funding from this group and give it to the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, DARPA, or another such organization that is better-qualified to fund basics physics research.
This paper was written by one Harold White of JSC. I looked to see what I could find about his professional qualifications. All I found was a LinkedIn profile for a Harold White who describes himself as “SSRMS Subsystem Manager at NASA” in Houston, Texas. SSRMS is short for “Space Station Remote Manipulator System”. I think there are a lot of well-qualified physics grad students devoting their whole careers to physics research who are better-qualified to get funding for basic physics research. They also publish in respected peer-reviewed journals.
Chris,
If I recall correctly, this project was not assigned to NASA, but rather was “dreamed up” internally and is being paid for from discretionary funds. So, there is no top-of-the-pyramid entity who can give the funds to one of these other agencies instead. The others may or may not be be qualified or otherwise better suited (I don’t necessarily agree), but they don’t seem to be interested in work since, to the best of my knowledge, none of them are doing it. It seems to me that it’s the universities and NGOs that have done the work to date, and NASA might be better equipped and/or funded than they are to proceed with this. Just my outlook on the matter.
Steve
Steve,
I guess we just disagree about NASA being better equipped to proceed with this. This warp drive concept has major theoretical hurdles to overcome before we can even start to think about any kind of experimentation. In the paper, White proposes an experimental setup to detect whether a small-scale warp field is created. But he doesn’t have any real proposal for how to create the warp field. That’s because the Alcubierre warp field requires matter with negative mass. We have no idea if it’s even possible to have matter with negative mass, let alone how to create it (anti-mater has positive mass, just like regular mater).
Even if there were some kind of experimental physics that could be done here, I disagree that JSC would be a good place to get it done. There are many experimental physicists working not only at the large labs but also in many universities across this country and the world. If there were anything to the Alcubierre drive concept, there would be dozens of top-notch experimental physicists, each with decades of experience, doing these experiments.
You don’t have to understand how something works to discover it. I think most of the worlds advances were made by observing some phenomena and the science came later.
Everything you say here I agree with.
However, none if contradicts anything I said, either. You don’t have to understand how something works to discover it. But this JSC paper is a claim about the implications of known physics. That claim ignores some objections to the Alcubierre Drive that have been published in the mainstream physics literature. By ignoring those objections, it paints a very misleading picture of what known physics implies, and by parading these misleading claims to the general media instead of publishing in peer-reviewed physics journals, the JSC group does a disservice to the public.
Who cares if White is not an acedemic? Didn’t Einstein articulate some of his most provacative theories while serving as a patent clerk?
Anyone, anywhere is free to publish their ideas, and those ideas should be carefully considered. They should be carefully considered by the peer-review system of reputable scientific journals in the appropriate area. That was not done in this case. Even though Einstein was a professional patent clerk, he published his ideas is the top peer-reviewed scientific journals.
I brought up White’s credentials over the issue of whether taxpayer money should be funding his research. Taxpayer money is a limited resource. I’m in favor of spending taxpayer money for physics research on professional physicists because, while anyone, anywhere could come up with a breakthrough in physics, there’s a higher probability it will happen with a professional in the field, and it’s better to spend the money on the better bet.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the physics that we already know today is much, much more complex than the physics that was already known when Einstein was a patent clerk. A hundred years ago, a patent clerk could much more easily keep up with all the latest physics. Today, much more time and effort are needed to keep up with current physics. So, while we should still keep our peer-review system open to anyone, it’s probably a lot less likely today than a non-professional will make the next big breakthrough than it was in Einstein’s patent clerk days. In the 100 years since Einstein, all the big advances in physics have come from professional academic physicists.
Most PhDs find it exceedingly hard to think outside of the box they have been taught. Combine someone who asks stupid questions with a PHD who will try to think outside the box in order to answer those stupid questions and we might have some breakthroughs.
Steve, I tend to prefer activities that are very grounded and pragmatic, things that have a solid path to creating new and real value. So some might think I’d be highly adverse to the kind of work Sonny White proposes in his paper.
But no. When I have a spare billion dollars, I’ll be pushing the billion dollars in suitcases filled with small unmarked bills to Sonny, to drive forward with the pursuit he proposes. Yes, White is going after stunningly hard science that has physics challenges more daunting than moving the molecules of your body through a wall while remaining intact, but still it’s the kind of research attempt that will probably result in considerable discovery, and in time, possibly, true breakthroughs.
I see chris wilson’s sobering comments – “…Alcubierre Drive requires matter with negative mass, which is not known to exist or be possible…” and so on – all of which are in-your-face realistic show-stoppers today. So why fund something so far-fetched? Because the value gain far exceeds the cost. So we should fund all far-fetched ideas? No. Each requires analysis and evaluation. But from Sonny’s paper, fundamental barriers recognized, I’d still be game to proceed with iterated funded efforts.
Furthermore, I’d be game to pursue a pragmatic construct of a Thorium reactor as Andrew Gasser suggests too. The gains would most likely far exceed the costs.
As the story goes: “In 1882 Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. The candle makers scoffed at him, saying such an invention was impractical and too costly. They believed, no they hoped, that Mr. Edison’s invention would never make it beyond the laboratory door.” The World is still filled with candlemakers and their naysaying.
It’s easy to find 1,000,000 people that will give you a 1,000,000 reasons to Not do something. Aside them. Look for the 1 person that has the 1 viable breakthrough way to succeed.
And as the saying goes: Beware, if you set your expectations low enough, you just might succeed to that level. It is important we set high expectations and that we succeed at them.
We’ve spent a Trillion dollars on Afghan and related wars. What is the end-value of those activities beyond a lot of dead people and lots of infinitely-angry survivors forever bent on revenge? If we spent that Trillion dollars on space exploration and development, what would the end-value of the trillion dollars of development provide?
Bang on!
There is no evidence to support the notion that Einsteinian physics is incorrect. Besides, Eisteinian relativity has already shown us how to travel to the stars within the lifetime of a star voyager: and that’s by traveling at velocities near the speed of light. NASA needs to focus on trying to achieve light approximating star travel, not some silly attempt to prove that Einstein was wrong.
Marcel F. Williams
Who said they’re trying to prove Einstein wrong?
Marcel,
I don’t think anyone is seriously trying overturn Einstein, but we need to consider every problem in physics as a boundary problem. In other words, a given set of laws, facts, observations, whatever, are or are not valid within a specific context, within specific boundaries.
Newtonian physics is perfectly “correct,” and was for a long time, as long as you didn’t go outside of the boundaries within which it’s valid. And we all accept this with the approximations that we make in everyday life. Outside the Newtonian boundary, we’re into Einstein physics, wherein Newton is not “wrong,” but simply inappropriate because it’s incomplete in the context of the larger universe.
To date, we have no reason to believe that the the universe described by Einstein physics is all that there is. Newton was accepted for a long time and no one envisioned Einstein’s physics. The same situation may well exist now between Einstein and some other context or boundary set.
Don’t think of a different context or boundary set as simply a larger, similar space, but rather an entirely different set of physical characteristics, it’s more like a phase change, like the differences between water and ice. I realize that many people believe that we are the acme of civilization, that we now know everything that we didn’t before, but that same attitude has been expressed many times over a period of a couple of centuries, at least, yet the rate of new knowledge is always accelerating. So the idea that there are other, different physics outside of and in addition to the Einstein universe is perfectly reasonable.
“There is no evidence to support the notion that Einsteinian physics is incorrect.“
Until a mere century ago, there was as no notion of Einstein physics. Until a few decades ago, there was no observational evidence to support Einstein’s theories. Things change; and hopefully always will.
Steve
“Until a mere century ago, there was as no notion of Einstein physics.
Until a few decades ago, there was no observational evidence to support
Einstein’s theories.”
True, but Einstein’s theories came in response to a great deal of experimental evidence that violated Newtonian physics. So it’s perfectly reasonable for Marcel to point out that we have no such evidence at all of any violation of general relativity.
We need to keep experimenting, keep testing General Relativity. We need to expand the envelope of the conditions we have tested. Once we find a violation in the experimental data, we can come up with a new theory, and from that theory perhaps we can come up with faster-than-light travel.
But this paper is beating the dead horse of trying to use current physics to get faster-than-light travel, without actually addressing some of the biggest objections to it.
“NASA needs to focus on trying to achieve light approximating star travel”
Not that this idea is without problems, since the amount of energy that is needed goes up exponentially as you start getting into speeds where time dilation would have any appreciable effect. By appreciable I mean enough time dilation which allows people to reach destinations that they would otherwise not live long enough to do so, which is what I think you are referring to.
It’s hard enough to imagine that one day we will come up with an energy source that can accelerate a spaceship to 50% of the speed of light. Keeping in mind that you need to expend that same amount of energy at your destination to slow down. And assuming that you want to return to Earth, you get to expend that same amount of energy two more times. A total of four expenditures of an incredible amount of energy. We’re colonizing and it’s one way? Okay then only two expenditures of this incredible amount of energy.
But with all of that energy expenditure we still don’t have an appreciable amount of time dilation. To get that we have to go well beyond 50% of the speed of light, and the amount of energy required to do that goes up exponentially from the already impressive amount needed to go 50%. And to get anywhere near the speed of light the amount of energy goes off the page, no matter how big of a page you are using.
Okay you may say but that’s just an energy problem, not a physics problem. Maybe so. But it seems to me that coming up with the amount of energy needed to travel at near light speeds is itself a physics problem, meaning that it’s not something that NASA should be researching.
Physics warms its cockles on energy. Unfortunately, without some new insight, everything being relative is holding FTL back. Just to get a time dilation factor of 10 you have to travel 99.5% of the speed of light. That means if you want to move something the size of the ISS (a reasonable guess at size, although likely on the very, very small end of what would be required IF this were at all possible), 417,000kg, will require 3.37 x 10^23 joules, about 1/1000 of the total estimated energy output of the Sun and about the energy output of 1.1 x 10^14 3 GW nuclear power plants. I’m not holding my breath on that happening in the near future.
The numbers associated with that “tiny” step to meaningful relativistic speeds are so large they defy our ability to grasp their hugeness.
The experiment seems straightforward enough… how could they not have already performed it?? Perhaps I don’t understand the power levels required in the “toroidal capacitor ring” to induce these 1 part per million distortions.
The capacitor ring isn’t explained in the paper. It’s mentioned in one parenthetical remark when describing an experimental setup to measure very small-magnitude warp fields, and it’s mentioned in the caption for one figure describing the same experimental setup. Nowhere in the paper is it mentioned why a capacitor ring would be expected to create even the smallest of warp fields. In fact the paper mentions in the conclusion “the need for negative energy density”, and negative energy density means negative mass. Nobody has ever seen any matter with negative mass or has come up with any reason to believe we can construct the stuff. How they think they’ll get a warp field out of a capacitor ring without having some matter with negative mass isn’t explained at all.
Of course, small-magnitude warping of space is known to be possible — it’s called gravity. Warping it in a way that pulls along a ship faster than light is the hard part.
Do you really NASA would tell you the design of the ring, even if if they have one?
You know… and I am just speaking for myself here… I would much rather see NASA attempt to start tackling these sorts of problems instead of trying to build a rocket.
If we want a SSSSSHLV just contract it out already. The private contractors know how to build rockets. Just get the bureaucracy out of the way and let them do it. Companies, Corporations, will find a way to be profitable.
NASA is supposed to revolutionize… let the commercial sector (free market) evolve. To all the people in DC… psst you know these companies you have paid for years, no not evil SpaceX or Bigelow, but you know, the ones you funnel $10s of billions into each year… they have a frigging army of engineers who can do the job.
So good on NASA and JSC for at least identifying, or starting to identify, or trying to quantify, what a engine might be or consist of.
How about just trying to get a 1 GIGWATT Thorium Reactor into space without a coolant loop the size of Connecticut?
#justsayin
Respectfully,
Andrew Gasser
TEA Party in Space
If we want NASA to do research into basic physics, that’s fine with me, but in that case we should set up a group specifically chartered to do such research, hire professional research physicists, and get them to publish in reputable peer-reviewed physics publications.
None of this happened in this case. This was physics by an amateur who made a wild claim without it being peer-reviewed, then got a lot of breathless, misleading press about it. This is not how good science operates.
As far as I know, JSC’s area of current expertise is operations. It’s not basic physics research. It’s not even science at all, for the most part. Ames is much more of a science-oriented NASA center than JSC.
The author of this paper was a manager of a part of the ISS robotic arm, not a professional scientist.
You have no Idea what you are talking about. Sonny White has a PhD in physics and an absolutely brilliant scientist.
There are lots of people with PhDs in physics who don’t work as professional physicists. It’s reasonable to allocate taxpayer money for physics research to those PhDs who continued a career in pure physics rather than those who became engineering managers for robotic arms.
From what I can see, the team that Sonny is working on is trying to take some physics/mathematics developed by a “professional physicist” or mathematician, Miguel Alcubierre, and are trying to turn the physics into an actual machine. Isn’t that what we engineers are supposed to do?
I certainly can’t speak to whether they are on the right track or not, but I know Sonny a bit . I’ve worked with him a couple of times and some of the people in my company have worked with him a LOT. We and engineers & management at NASA all have the same opinion of him: he’s one of the hardest working, most respected and best engineers at NASA. If Sonny says he sees some light at the end of the tunnel, even “maybe”, then there _is_ some light there.
It might be the oncoming train, but he’s not blowing smoke or trying to gain publicity. He’s an enthusisatic professional engineer/physicist and he wants to get it right and provide that extraordinary propulsion breakthrough we’ve all thought couldn’t happen.
Maybe, just maybe, it can.
Paul
You have no idea what you are talking about. Sonny White has a PhD in physics and is a brilliant scientist. You are way to hung up about somebody from the outside playing your sandbox. I am not impressed by the words “professional scientist”, especially those who have never done anything in the real world other than write theoretical papers that can never be proven or disproven.
It’s those professional scientists whose theories are responsible for all the technology we take for granted today.
Except for people like Edison (who attended school for only a few months), Tesla (who never graduated from university), et al.
Edison and Tesla did engineering. Neither made a contribution to physics.
They also lived in a time when the sum of physics and engineering knowledge was much, much less than it is today. Many people have argued that today it takes much more study to learn enough to make an important contribution to physics than it did back then. The low-hanging fruit have all been plucked.
Name anyone who has made a significant contribution to physics in the last 100 years without a degree in physics.
Sonny White is a mechanical engineer who thinks he understands quantum field theory.
I know there are some scientists out there that teach classes…
In Alcubierre’s initial paper, he pointed out a setup that would allow faster-than-light travel that would not violate certain known laws of physics. Unfortunately, Alcubierre was only claiming those particular laws weren’t violated.
Others have since pointed out that other known laws of physics are violated by Alcubierre’s drive. A warp drive might still be possible if there are laws of physics we don’t know about, but it isn’t under the laws of physics we do know about. If we want warp drive, we should be doing general-purpose physics experiments to try to find any behavior that violates our current understanding, not wasting time on an attempt to get faster-than-light travel with known physics, which turns out not to work with known physics.
Among other problems with the Alcubierre Drive:
* “The warp drive spacetime of Alcubierre is impossible to set up without first being able to distribute matter at tachyonic speed, put roughly, you need one to make one!” (D H Coule, (1998) in Classical and Quantum Gravity http://omnis.if.ufrj.br/~mb….
* The Alcubierre Drive requires matter with negative mass, which is not known to exist or be possible.
Also, it’s worth noting that if the Alcubierre Drive were possible, it would provide a way to build a time machine and a source of free energy.
The JSC paper doesn’t address any of these problems, except to briefly note that exotic matter would be required and there’s no known way to get that.
Chris:
I don’t think a time machine is in the works here. Since space/time on the starship would be a relative constant, even though they were going faster than light, the starship would always return from a round trip after it left.
Another issue I haven’t seen dealt with anywhere on this topic is collision mitigation at warp speed. At least we’d know (relatively speaking) that a collision happened when it lit up the sky after the light made it’s slow way back to us.
tinker
Tinker,
If you have faster-than-light travel, you get a time machine, no matter how the faster-than-light travel works. It’s an inevitable consequence of relativity.
That’s because relativity says that physics works the same way in all inertial frames (all frames of reference that are moving at a constant velocity with respect to one another), and relativity says that what looks like simultaneous events in two different places in one inertial frame happen at different times in another inertial frame. So, if you have a way to travel faster than light, all I have to do is put your whole setup on a spaceship and accelerate it (with conventional rockets) to a good portion of the speed of light. Then I have you travel faster than light forward in the frame of that rocket. In the frame of reference of the rocket, you move forward faster than light, but in my frame, you arrive before you left. Now set up the same thing going the other direction and you get back to the starting point before you left.
None of this depends on any of the details of how the faster-than-light travel works. If you can move faster-than-light in an inertial frame, and if relativity is correct that physics is the same in all inertial frames and that events that are simultaneous in one frame occur at different times in another inertial frame, the inescapable conclusion is that faster-than-light travel gives you time travel.
If you read any of the papers in peer-reviewed physics journals that discuss Alcubierre’s drive, they tend to talk about “closed time-like curves”. That’s physicists’ way of saying a time machine.
Chris:
I could see launching a powerful radio telescope on a mission eighty years out (any direction will do) and then aiming it back at Earth to pick up all those TV & radio programs we thought were ‘lost to the ether’. No hurry, the longer it takes to mount the mission, the better the radio telescope would have to be is all.
tinker
Great idea Tinker! We can get all of these back:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
Won’t work. To do that would require getting ahead of the wavefronts of those shows from long ago which would require FTL flight, which as already stated many times and by others, is a non-starter.
Tinker,
“Another issue I haven’t seen dealt with anywhere on this topic is collision mitigation at warp speed.”
Actually, I remember reading an analysis of the Alcubierre drive that said if it were possible it would sweep up everything it encountered, including photons, into an enormous bow shock. That alone might be enough to destroy the whole ship, even if it were possible in the first place.
Chris, this is a phenomological paper, aka as an engineering model. Not everything is right in it. It took a couple of years for the full calculation of superconductivity of Helium -3 from Landau’s phenomological model.
Tinker,
The Wikipedia article “Faster-than-light” has some discussion of how faster-than-light implies time travel. Here are a couple of quotes from the article:
“Faster-than-light communication is, by Einstein’s theory of relativity, equivalent to time travel.”
“Therefore any theory which permits “true” FTL also has to cope with time travel and all its associated paradoxes”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faste…
“Therefore any theory which permits “true” FTL also has to cope with time travel and all its associated paradoxes”
The same way as special relativity with Twin Paradox…
What if instead the communications is simple “effective” FTL? Imagine for a moment that the communications takes place via the curled up dimensions where almost everywhere in the universe is next to each other? Or via some micro wormholes where the signal speed is <=light speed? But from our view the effect is that it is FTL. Keep in mind that one must only move at or less than the speed of light in your local frame.
Therefore one might one day have communications that for practical purposes is FTL but without causality issues.
SA1776 III
Chris,
I find nothing wrong or inconsistent in your comments (for whatever my opinion may be worth), but I would like to point something out. Your contention that “we should be doing general-purpose physics experiments to try to find any behavior that violates our current understanding” represents the logical, structured approach, but it is not the only approach, or even the only valuable approach.As you know, it is very common in physics and engineering work that an observed phenomenon is seen repeatably but not understood. This then causes researchers to diverge in direction for the purpose of trying to understand, or at least better understand, the observed but not understood phenomenon. So, the original “goal” becomes only a starting point which leads to a series of activities not originally planned, and the results, or lack thereof, from one activity suggest the requirements of subsequent activities; in short, going where the evidence takes you. (This is one reason why research budgets are almost impossible to get right.)Also, let’s consider the fact that in many disciplines, from the most basic to the most esoteric, we make regular use of empirical knowledge, things that we know are true but have no idea why they’re true. Sometimes we undertake to try and find out why such knowledge is true, and in other cases we simply continue to accept it and use it, because it works.Both of these methods of proceeding result from digging in and getting your hands dirty, sometimes even when we’re at the height of our ignorance in the subject matter. But on the flip side, neither of these valuable methods are ever likely to result from structured, the top-down “doing general-purpose physics experiments …” that you prescribe. Many milestones and turning points in science have been discovered while people were looking for something else altogether. So let’s never either underestimate serendipity or look a gift horse in the mouth.All of this suggests to me that if they are working on a Alcubierre drive, or something derived from it, it may be because that represents a starting point, a starting point that is not properly understood and not generally accepted in the physics world, but still a starting point, and it will hopefully give them new problems and new directions to branch off to which will bear more fruit, or at least raise new questions. We accept that testing of launch vehicles (a similarly complex undertaking which employs empirical knowledge) will involve failures along the way, possibly major, expensive failures, but each failure, when we’re lucky, adds to our growing knowledge base, or at least identifies new problems in need of attention. Shouldn’t we be willing to take the same attitude with something as complex as (really) advanced propulsion concepts? At the start of the US rocket program when Vanguards were blowing up one after another for reasons not really understood, the US could have said let’s forget it and have cited all kinds of “logical” reasons why it was a waste of money, just like many do now days with FTL and similar concepts today. If they had done that, how different would our world and our lives be today? I see no reason why this research should be looked upon any differently. Leonardo saw no reason why heavier than air craft could not be made to fly, and pretty much everyone disagreed with him. However, …
Steve
“As you know, it is very common in physics and engineering work that an
observed phenomenon is seen repeatably but not understood. This then
causes researchers to diverge in direction for the purpose of trying to
understand, or at least better understand, the observed but not
understood phenomenon.”
I completely agree. But the JSC paper in question doesn’t give any unexplained observations. It’s a theory paper. It’s a claim about the implications of current theory. But it ignores other implications of current theory, and that’s the problem I have with it. I also object to it not being presented to the standard peer-review system for theoretical physics, and the fact that it’s funded by taxpayers even though it’s being done by someone whose day job is not closely related to the area of study.
Chris,
You make valid points, but I think it’s a no-win situation, since:
1) Nobody would want to step up to peer review it (aside from those people who are already taking heat and/or being discounted) because it’s controversial and far out, and today’s conservative professionals will avoid the issue in case it somehow taints them.
2) It’s not really closely related to anybody’s day job or area of study, not even those agencies that you suggest would be better suited, so by default nobody works on it, except universities and NGO labs if they should chose to, all of which I would suspect are on short leashes and very regular progress reviews.
How do we get the future we want if no one is willing to work on it? At least these guys are stepping up to the plate and swinging at the ball. Even if it turns out to be a complete failure in terms of propulsion, anything that might be learned in trying will (should) be public domain knowledge, which is not the case with NGOs, patent-loving universities, or the military (and personally I include the NSF under military because DOD and ITAR are always looking over NSF’s collective shoulder).
Even if they haven’t a chance or a clue at JSC, at least someone of repute is working on it (unlike the others you named) and that, I think, at least opens the credibility door just a little bit wider than it is now, which is something we need if we’re ever to have the heavyweights working on this. I see it as a step in the right direction, not a program expecting to yield final results. Whoever goes up to bat next will have the JSC data to help them avoid some dead ends, and just maybe give them some good stuff to take further.
I always remember about Einstein working in a patent office because nobody would hire him elsewhere, and I wonder where the next Einstein is working right now. Maybe he’ll read this story and apply to work at JSC.
Steve
Steve,
I disagree with your contention that mainstream academic physics won’t touch warp drive because it’s controversial or not related to anyone’s day job or because the funding agencies reject it.
First of all, it is exactly the day job of theoretical physicists. This kind of thing is all they do.
Alcubierre himself is a professional theoretical physicist. He published his proposed warp drive in a respected peer-reviewed journal. And far from it causing harm to his career, it’s what he’s most famous for. If anything, Alcubierre’s experience shows the system works very well, and encourages exactly this kind of work by professional physicists.
Following Alcubierre’s 1994 paper on the warp drive, there were a number of other papers by professional physicists responding to it, and those papers were published in peer-reviewed journals too.
If there hasn’t been much more published about the Alcubierre Drive since the 1990s, it’s because nobody has any good response to the objections raised against it, such as Coule’s paper that shows you need to already have a faster-than-light machine to construct Alcubierre’s machine in the first place, and the fact that Alcubierre’s system requires negative-mass matter, which is not known to exist. The JSC paper doesn’t address these objections either. It basically just says that less negative mass is needed, but concludes that a lot of negative mass is still needed, and doesn’t address Coule’s points at all.
Chris,
NASA does not have to publish peer reviewed work where foreign scientists, presumeably like you, have the ability to kill technology off for their country or host country’s national interest.
NASA DOES have an internal publishing system where ideas like this can be reviewed to whatever level NASA management sees fit. In my opinion, this is a reasonable comprimise. Congress and the President have signed off on this long ago, so it has been vetted (by some sub-commitee) in some shape or form. These papers are freely available to U.S. citizens.
NASA can also somwhere down the line ask for review by the National Acadamy of Science, or Engineering, cross program reviews by DOD and DOE, and ask for formal industry input, including comments from individuals. Congress, or the President, can also demand these same processes happen. So, peer review takes place, is constanty taking place, just not by some presumptive editor and three reviewers in a journal.
NASA also allows collaboration with foreign scientists (look on the web site), as long as their government pays for it, and their embassy, not the indvidual directly contacts NASA for collaboration.
“NASA does not have to publish peer reviewed work where foreign
scientists, presumeably like you, have the ability to kill technology
off for their country or host country’s national interest.”
Right….I’m an evil foreign scientist trying to kill NASA’s warp drive technology for the benefit of my own country. Because, really, how better to kill off warp technology than to say on NASAWatch.com that it should be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal?
Maybe, maybe not. But, tying meaningful technological work to increasingly beauracratic processes (with no intention of following themselves) is a “social engineering” method foreign governments, and competing corportation and indiviuals use to get ahead. It has happened.
So, let me ask you this, if you were a reviewer would you accept it? I would, as long as they clearly stated the physics defying problems of the Alcubierre drive.
I suppose I’m not really worried about this. So long as it doesn’t absorb huge amounts of funding, manpower and time, it might be worth it to have some of the R&D guys sit down and decide whether this can be done.
The problems associated with chemical propulsion and electric propulsion as applied to sustainable crewed deep-space flight are well known, so I do think it should fall into NASA’s remit to look into new and innovative solutions. That said, an FTL drive is jumping too far ahead. What is more urgently needed is for NASA to research something like the Impulse Drive – a fuel-efficient high-acceleration interplanetary drive.
This Sonny White is probably a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office…definitely not a “professional scientist”
That’s just so wrong, I don’t even know what to say.
Keith,
I wonder who is paying for this … JSC? OCT? HEOMD?
PAO?
As to research, the issue is not physics but mathematical physics. Entirely different area and means of research.
NASA is a great consumer of mathematical physics, which often is used to solve/reduce massive problems, making them more tractable. Many recent advances here of note.
Such mathematicians work on a dozen unrelated issues at once, because at their fundamentals they are alike, or “homomorphic”, in abstraction.
Where is the money come from? Taxpayers. And as a taxpayer, I will gladly spend my 0.05% on cool ideas like this.
And to the argument that White is not “professional” is an immature statment. This guy is far more intelligent than those of you making this claim.
I have no problem with this and, in fact, applaud it. We tend to forget that NASA’s roots lie with the NACA which conducted a lot of basic research without any prospect of an immediate payoff. And yet, the NACA helped change aviation in a very short time and helped make possible the performance improvements of WW II fighters and their successors.
Sometimes a strategic plan is a constraint.
Chris,
Bluntly, the Standard model of physics has not changed in since – what 75? This is based of Feynmann’s path integral approach. This is currently what can be engineered and concrete results can be given.
Please don’t cite String theory, where the actions (aka the physics) as are made up in each model, then they go through laborious applications of set theory to say their non-provable theory is consistant.
Simple methods on the Navier-Stokes equations tell us the bumble bee cannot fly.
Don’t tell me how hard it is to read a physics paper. Most of it is because people are trying to impress their buddies. The same thing happened with CFD in the early 90’s. What happened? Simple, non-elegant methods won out.
Much of your argument is the same reason turbulence modelers said they were so special, and CFD and Finite people were geniouses. Well, technology takes a downward path. Those guys on the guns shows (History, Discovery Channels), who are not engineers, rightly or wrongly are using CFD and FEA, to create their latest gun.
Ok, let’s say the Alcubierre drive is flawed. Okay, but neither you nor I can really say anything unless it is experimentally proven wrong. I doubt the Russian guy used the full standard model with a relativistic background to disprove the drive. Ansys does not have a package for the Standard model + relativity, yet.
Most of use are engineers because we are paid 4X more than physicists.
By the way, legally there are no professional physicists, but there are professional engineers, which I am one. When physicists take personal liability for their work, then they are professionals. Ask the m.d.’s, d.d.s.’s, lawyers, architects, accountants, and military officers – they would agree. Physics is academic subject; most physicists work as engineers – for the government or companies.
Well, pray you never have to endure a career transition, because everybody else would be so much smarter than you or I that it is useless to try.
Maybe Microsoft, Apple, and the Linux people should have done nothing, because pontificating Ph.D’s at Digital Equipment Corp said computers of today could not work.
Anthony,
You say, “By the way, legally there are no professional physicists, but there are
professional engineers, which I am one. When physicists take personal
liability for their work, then they are professionals.”
That’s nonsense. The word “professional” is an English word with a very well-understood meaning: a professional in a particular field is anyone who practices in that field for a living.
Some organizations have taken it upon themselves to try to hijack the word “professional” and claim than unless someone has met their particular set of criteria they shouldn’t be called a “professional engineer”. Most of the engineers I know consider that arrogant nonsense.
In any event, whether or not you agree with the hijacking of the term “professional engineer”, it’s even more silly to claim that there are no professional physicists at all just because there isn’t a similar organization trying to hijack the term “professional physicist”.
Yeah, everybody thinks licensing is stupid because of the manufacturing and federal gov’t exemption is stupid, until they have to find another job. This is the law. If you don’t like the law, try and change it. FIrst tier professional are personally liable for their work. This liability is reflected in their pay. I don’t see the law being changed, but I could be wrong.
“Simple methods on the Navier-Stokes equations tell us the bumble bee cannot fly.”
This is typical of the rest of your post — a disdain for all theoreticians.
Theories can be wrong. Or theories can be correct but incorrectly applied. Either way, there can be incorrect claims from theoretical arguments.
But you seem to be making the jump from that to just ignoring theory entirely. I think that’s silly. There are a great many theories that have been extensively tested, and a great many people who are very good at correctly drawing conclusions from those theories.
General relativity is one of those theories that has been extremely well tested for decades. The analyses that claim this warp drive can’t work come from top peer-reviewed physics journals. I think it’s silly to ignore all that simply because of some general distrust of theory in general.
If you think relativity is wrong, propose an alternative that better fits the data. If you think the analysis of the papers criticizing the warp drive concept are wrong, publish a paper refuting them. This JSC paper did neither. It simply ignored many of the objections this warp drive.
The apparatus appears to be a conventional interferometer with perpendicular legs (like the one used in the Michelson-Morley experiment?) except for the capacitor ring. There isn’t any explanation of how the capacitor ring works or even exactly how the capacitors are arranged. The article devotes a lot of space to describing what FTL flight will be like without saying much about how it will be achieved. If the interferometer detects a change with the capacitors energized, how will it be shown to be a time-space distortion rather than some less exotic effect of an electric field? Relativity is a remarkably simple and solid theory, and physicists have been probing its limits for a century without finding a convincing path to FTL.
There are a bunch of conventional interferometers, but the one used in this case is a Michelson interferometer. The ring capacitor (a toroidal capacitor) is used to theoretically muck with quantum vacuum fluctuations to induce the space-time warp that is at the heart of this kerfuffle. Remembering that light follows a geodesic through space-time, causing a warp would cause a change in the “optical distance” the light travelled. Since interferometers are all about measuring the difference in “optical distance” that two different light paths, this “warp” would cause interference fringes (because the light which was “in phase” will no longer be in phase since a slight delay will be imposed on the leg passing through the “warp”…..or so thinks Dr. White.
Yeah, the thing about the capacitor ring is bizarre. It’s never explained in the paper. The paper first has a theoretic discussion how to arrange negative mass so you need a less overwhelmingly large amount of it than previously suggested to achieve faster-than-light travel. Then they describe an experimental setup that is testing a capacitor ring, without any explanation at all. It’s a complete non sequitur.
Because positive energy ALSO will bend space-time. Energy has a gravitational effect as does mass. Also some recent papers have shown an equivalence in effect of positive energy with negative pressure to negative energy.
Not sure of that last parts truthfulness but space-time is surely deflected by positive energy as much as negative energy (just in a different direction).
Also there may be some usefulness in the area of Warp Drive to negative absolute temperatures, negative energy and quantum vacuum energy and their identification with dark energy.
But there are deeper concerns regarding interstellar travel. The real issue is who can be allowed to go to the stars. And whether earth governments, particularly the UN–an organization dangerous to individual liberty–will try to assert itself on colonized worlds, which they almost certainly will. Socialism–a political and economic system that is anathema to liberty cannot be allowed off this planet either–neither can any of its adherents and if we do decide to allow it, they must be confined to their own world and be given no real technology. They should like that anyway being generally anti-technology–they can commune with nature (whatever that turns out to be on the world we settle them on)-and its not like we can ever expect to see them out in the galaxy–so not too big a problem.
That said, under no circumstances can practitioners of Islam-(and please no flames on this as there are some 67 or so conflicts on this planet and all but 3 or 4 are centered on Islam. So no!) be allowed off this planet! They get to stay here and perish one day when the earth does.
Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, even Wiccans can form their own civilizations on whatever worlds they can find. They can form their own nations, have their own constitutions and laws and worlds without interference from earth and especially the UN. The technology for interstellar travel; however, must be kept from Islam at all costs.
When we’re ready to leave the earth for good, they can have it all to themselves and install their world-wide Caliphate then at last.They will be too busy then killing themselves to develop interstellar travel for themselves – hell they will probably be unable to send anything at all into space and they will perish along with the earth as they should. In fact, they will probably murder themselves long, long before that even.
Hated to inject politics into it, but politics is never far from anything and we do need to consider what man brings to the stars.
SA1776 III
I think its never too soon to start thinking about viable interstellar travel. I know it probably won’t occur in my lifetime, and may take a couple of centuries before humans finally reach nearby star systems, but thinking about how to do it, and what technology is need, and how the science of interstellar flight needs to develop is important, and can be done as part of a broad scientific output not just of NASA, but of the US, and indeed the entire human race. So a multi-national partnership between governments, private industry and academia is the way to go, based on achievable short-term objectives building up to a long-term objective of demonstrating viable interstellar travel for humans.
Superluminal – be it warp drive, wormholes or hyperspace, or something else – has yet to be proven as possible from a science or engineering perspective. So efforts should continue to achieve progress in scientific research towards achieving that goal. Sub-luminal flight is viable, but very challenging, the closer you get to ‘c’. But even if we could develop propulsion that could accelerate to 5% or even 10% c, that would be a huge benefit to interplanetary exploration. Just imagine being able to send a spacecraft and its crew out to the Kupier Belt in a matter of days, or weeks! At that point, the solar system really opens up to us. Research into exotic propulsion which could propel a spacecraft at such velocities, is well worth doing, because we can’t keep on relying on chemical rockets. Beyond LEO and even the Moon, rockets just are’nt sufficient to do serious exploration and ultimately, human colonisation. Nuclear-electric concepts should be at the vanguard of such research.
Before committing large sums of money, NASA looks at experiments in the lab to see if they succeed, can be refined or fail. Even in the failure there is a lot of data that is gathered that may be useful in the future.
Right now, NASA is mission driven. if that mission is to be expanded beyond Mars and to the stars, a space drive is required.