"The Scientists Who Won't Give Up on the Warp Drive" Topic

"For most of us, traveling faster than the cosmic speed limit—the speed of light—is a science-fiction fantasy that breaks the very foundation of modern physics. But in the eyes of an engineering undergrad at the University of Alabama in Huntsville named Joseph Agnew, it's a theory worthy of study.

The idea first came to Agnew in high school, when he became enamored of the warp drives he saw in Star Trek. "I thought about some of the technology postulated within," he says, "and wondered what the scientific backing might be."…"
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Amicalement
Armand

"The more we learn about the 'laws of physics' the more we come to realise that they are more like strong suggestions at best"

Yea, and I'm old enough to recall accounts that people thought breaking the "sound barrier" was impossible too, less than a century ago.

Still, Warp Drive, and/or exceeding the Speed of Light will be much more difficult, I suspect.

Once the improbability drive is introduced, we won't need it.

Great article, thanks for sharing!

Two very different physical phenomenon, Thresher01. The so-called 'sound barrier' was never really a 'barrier' at all since artillery projectiles and rockets had exceeded the speed of sound prior to aircraft achieving Mach 1 or greater. The 'barrier' was more the engineering challenge of overcoming a number of aerodynamic problems aircraft encounter at high speeds. It's only a popular misconception (now when would that ever happen in the media) that there's a 'wall-like' 'sound barrier'. The actual phenomenon of sound is a normal classical physics one of the propagation of pressure waves in a physical medium.

The 'speed of light' is a misnomer as well but for a different reason. It isn't really a specific property of light particles (photons) but one that's related to the basic structure of the universe (i.e. space-time). In essence all mass-less particles like photons travel at this universal speed limit – it just happens to be called the 'speed of light'. It's not merely an engineering problem but one that would require a different understanding of the basic properties of the universe's structure.

In a way you can travel 'faster than light' in the sense that as one approaches the 'speed of light' the universe 'shrinks' in the direction you travel or, if one prefers, 'time stretches'. This gets into the strange properties of relativity but what it would mean is that if you travelled to a distant star system it might take many years for people on earth but perhaps only a few weeks would pass for the people on the space ship. The trouble is that takes huge amounts of energy and a means to accelerate (and decelerate) in the near vacuum of space. That's not exactly useful as a means of regular transportation. The idea in sci-fi for warp drives and 'tunnels' in space-time are to circumvent this and that one can travel quickly – for both the travellers and everyone else – from point to point.

So, "much more difficult" than achieving Mach 1 is actually an understatement.

My suggestion is that one look up youtube videos on space-time and the 'speed of light'. There are some good ones but you do have to set aside conceptions of the universe based on everyday conceptions of the universe. Still they're a lot better than me trying to cram a whole course in modern physics into a short forum post. LoL

Happy you enjoyed it my friend!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand