Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously

[mellosouls]

Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously

No they aren't. This is just a fluff piece for a highly speculative but excitingly sci-fi sounding propulsion mechanism with not even the remotest prospect of practical implementation. See also EM Drive, etc.

[shadowgovt]

IIUC, it's taken seriously as a mathematical exercise but it absolutely relies on phenomena we've never observed in nature (i.e. matter with a behavior akin to negative gravitation).

There is a possibility antimatter could fit the bill for the "exotic matter" required in the model (we've never accumulated enough of the stuff and held it in a controlled environment long enough to do any tests on how gravity interacts with it), but I wouldn't bet money on that outcome yet.

[smolder]

"Science alert dot com" just screams reputability, doesn't it?

[hhas01]

Never mind implementation; what about causality?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_(physics)

Anyone who wants to build a warp drive has to start by proving Einstein wrong. Anything else is a scam.

[taylodl]

I figure it's more likely that a Space Guild will arise capable of using the spice from Arrakis to fold space with their minds before we have a functioning warp drive.

[contravariant]

I think it's always been taken somewhat seriously from the start of general relativity (it didn't take long before the first formal description of a wormhole). The discovery of gravitational waves has again provided strong proof in favour of general relativity, but I don't think this is what is preventing people from seriously considering warp drives.

Until a way is found to remove the need for exotic matter or to generate exotic matter it remains a purely theoretical exercise.

[qubex]

The problem isn’t really the need for exotic matter in enormous quantities (apparently we have a negatively curved universe where dark energy serves exactly that purpose), but rather the aspect of causal disconnection: everything inside the bubble is disconnected from everything outside it, so it’s difficult to envision how the spacecraft inside could be generating, steering, or even shutting down the warp bubble outside itself.

[unknownkadath]

I feel really bad for this undergrad; The student's advisor did not do him any favors by letting him go and give this talk to the IEEE. It is perfect material for clickbait farms and the wider krank-net.

If you can access it, the doi link to the conference paper is: doi.org/10.2514/6.2019-4288

This is not a serious attempt, and in no way indicates that scientists are starting to "take warp drives seriously." It is pitching that same silly stuff White et al have been promising is "real close now" for around 15 years. I also cringed at the equations and figures that were obviously copy/pasted from White's PDFs to Word and back.

Having this kind of kooky thing hanging from a baby undergraduate's name--a name that I'm not going to propagate on the web for his own good--is not going to help his future career, and everyone involved should feel bad for wasting his time. Sorry this is boiling my grits so badly, am I over reacting or is this awful?

[honoredb]

Typo near the beginning, "press a petal," gave me a fascinating mental image for a second.

I'm sure it'll be informative to learn exactly why every theoretical avenue for faster-than-light travel doesn't work, but I feel like we can infer from the size of the universe that these effects don't exist; if they did, they'd dominate our observations of the universe and we'd never have thought the speed of light was a fundamental limit in the first place.

[nateferrero]

Flower petals would make an amazing tactile controller

[tjchear]

I've heard often about how the energy estimate for warp drive has been revised down from the mass of the universe to that of Jupiter. Forgive my ignorance, but is this just a matter of refining the shape of the warp around a spaceship, or is it something else? What would it take to further drive down that theoretical energy requirement? Is there a trade-off being considered here?

[qubex]

It is the result of refining the geometry of the warp bubble to be generated by two toroids rather than a single ring, inflating the interior compared to the external perception thereof (a la Tardis), and most critically, by oscillating the field.

[diegoperini]

"Scientists" is not single community of converging opinions. "Scientists" do not even agree on how serious the climate change is. Prefixing these kind of titles with "Some" (as in "Some Scientists...") may seem redundant but it actually gives an entirely different message which I believe is almost always important to be explicit about.

[reportgunner]

If you like the idea of Alcubierre Drive, give Elite: Dangerous a try - every ship (that is not a fighter) has an Alcubierre Drive installed and you use it extensively to get around "The bubble" (a sphere of inhabited space roughly 20 light years with Earth as its centre) and even beyond.

I have no affiliation with Elite: Dangerous, that's just how I learned about Alcubierre Drive

[34679]

>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just a reminder.

[mnky9800n]

sciencealert is starting to post non-clickbait articles. wait no they aren't. lol.

[pingyong]

tldr: Nothing changed, we still don't know if negative energy is even something we can generate.

[Pigo]

But they got it down to only needing the total negative energy requirement to be around the mass of Jupiter. So we're on our way?

[baja_blast]

There has been some experimental progress for negative mass from Bose-Einstein condensate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass to some interesting potential properties of future meta materials.

[ptah]

how is this different from aether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

[juped]

Using "aether" as a generalized snarl word is really irksome. None of us were alive for the debates in physics of a century ago. General relativity is an aether theory; i.e., it ascribes properties (the metric tensor) to empty space. Appeal to authority below since that's the level we're playing on when we misuse dated terminology like this.

"We may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense."

-- Albert Einstein

[msla]

When most people talk about "aether" they seem to mean the "luminiferous aether" which propagated light waves like water propagates water waves. The problem with that theory was demonstrated by the Michelson-Morley experiment: The speed of light does not change regardless of how you move relative to the light source. Light can't be a wave like water waves are. The luminiferous aether is therefore disproven.

Applying the term "aether" to other theories is uncommon, especially among non-physicists.

[Vysero]

Sounds to me like they are discussing tech that may exist 5 to 6 hundred years from now... not really worthy of their attention imo.

[pluto9]

For it to exist 500 years from now, someone will have to work on it for the next 500 years.