# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged warp-drives

15

Edit regarding 3+1 spacetimes and causality I'll keep adding to the answer as I get more information, and hopefully everything will just evolve along. At the very least, I'll have a set of notes to work from in the future :) This is also the first, broadest, cut at an actual answer regarding causality. Alcubierre sets out to find his warp drive metric ...

11

Warp drives are not allowed by the basic laws of physics, in particular the theory of relativity prohibits any superluminal motion or superluminal propagation of usable information. So whatever "exotic matter" or other wordings are proposed to justify the superluminal warp drives is banned, too. The typical "exotic matter" needed for warp drives would need ...

10

Irrepspective of the amount of negative mass matter required, it's still a fact that these schemes require negative mass matter to work, and negative mass matter is not known to exist. And there are still problems with faster than light travel that you would have to resolve--in particular, that a solution like this would enable you to construct a time ...

9

Spacetime can dynamically evolve in a way which apparently violates special relativity. A good example is how galaxies move out with a velocity v = Hd, the Hubble rule, where v = c = Hr_h at the de Sitter horizon (approximately) and the red shift is z = 1. For z > 1 galaxies are frame dragged outwards at a speed greater than light. Similarly an observer ...

7

I don't understand why we are able to see and measure curvature / warping of space at all. The Earth's surface is curved and this can be observed via the vast number of pictures of the Earth from space that now exist. However, the surface curvature can also be "seen" via measurements on the surface itself. For example, if one were start at the North ...

6

It will violate causality globally. There is no way around that. This is the best argument about why building these things is impossible. To see this, all you have to do is zoom out to some scale where the warp drive field becomes a point. Then, the warp ship is just a point moving superluminally against a SR background, and all of the causlity problems ...

6

This is more of a meta answer, since it isn't really Physics, but it got a bit long to put in a comment. You say: I have heard many physicists (ex:- Michio Kaku) saying "Warp speed" from Star Trek doesn't violate any known physical laws. You need to think about precisely what this statement means. If we take the Alcubierre drive as an example it is a ...

6

The interior of the bubble is causally disconnected. It's not possible for the bubble to be turned off or steered from the inside. But there is no reason it cannot be affected from an outside agency at a pre-planned points, or even simply have a finite lifetime, naturally deteriorating to stop at the intended destination. that upon traveling to some ...

5

Curvature affects how objects in the universe move and interact with one another, and these effects can be measured. Take, for example, the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. Because spacetime curvature can deflect the path of light, we can potentially observe light coming from objects that are directly behind other objects. Here's a nice picture. As ...

4

It doesn't require negative mass but negative vacuum energy density, which presumably he is generating using the Casimir effect.

4

Relativistic effects happen when you travel near light speed through space-time. With the Alcubierre drive, you don't travel through space-time, but remain stationary and the space-time around you is warped in a way that brings you closer to your destination. So if it only took a week for you, it would only take a week for your observers. It'd be like if ...

3

Pete, please elaborate your question, the original paper describes by Miguel describes how one can travel back and to a destination using the warp drive. The space in front is contracted to get closer to the destination, and the space behind is expanded. For getting out of the bubble, let's use the picture below: The bubble is created, so to speak, ...

3

Level 1 multiverses almost certainly exist, and any FTL drive would be able to move between them. As far as i know this includes an Alcubierre drive, assuming you could build one. So yes, an Alcuierre drive could move between level 1 universes. As far as I know the only even remotely plausible realisation of a level 2 multiverse comes from eternal ...

3

It's very, very highly likely that none of these schemes are workable for the following reasons: Superluminal travel violates causality. You can talk about "general relativity loopholes" all you want, but you can always envision that the "warp region" is going to be confined to a finite-sized subspace of the whole spacetime, and outside of this region, ...

3

Heat can't just live in the vacuum. Because heat is a form of energy and energy is equivalent to mass, heat has to have a material carrier. The most "neutral" type of heat that you probably meant is the electromagnetic radiation. Dark matter can't be made out of electromagnetic radiation because it would escape, in 100,000 years, away from the galaxy. ...

3

By "heat" I'm going to assume you mean electromagnetic radiation, because outside of the interiors of stars and other similarly dense regions, heat cannot be conducted or convected. The answer is simply : No. Dark matter cannot be tiny bits of matter that we cannot see. To help you understand it better, let me explain a bit of history first - Dark matter ...

3

False. These devices require a type of matter that has not been shown to exist, and would become a time machine if they did exist -- I could use it to send signals into the past.

3

This is too long for a comment so I'll post it as an answer, even though this question is years old. If Alcubierre warp bubbles are physically possible, which is exceedingly unlikely, and if the equivalence principle is correct, you could definitely escape from a black hole in one, because there's nothing locally special about the event horizon. In a large ...

3

If somehow, it is only possible to create one alcubierre drive, and it can never turn around, then you won't get closed timelike curves. Otherwise, any construction is going to have them. The reason is that you can "zoom out" far enough that the distortions to spacetime caused by the drive are no longer present, and the person flying the drive then just ...

3

We can't say much about closed timelike curves with any certainty; they are an artefact of the existence of solutions to the general relativity equations which allow them. It is possible (and quite a few physicists believe this) that a theory of quantum gravity may preclude CTC from occurring, or that CTC may occur but the information might be censored by ...

3

All the treatments of the Alcubierre drive I've seen have not dealt with the acceleration and deceleration. The nearest I've seen is the paper The Alcubierre Warp Drive: On the Matter of Matter, but this is mainly interested in the interactions of matter with the drive and it doesn't deal with the mechanism of acceleration. You'd have to specify how the ...

2

The article almost certainly refers to the hypothetical Alcubierre drive. Jerry is quite correct to say that the drive requires exotic matter, and that we have never observed any exotic matter and that if exotic matter existed it would cause all sorts of problems including closed timelike curves. However exotic matter is theoretically possible in the sense ...

2

I've seen various articles on the subject, and I would guess they all stem from the paper Semiclassical instability of dynamical warp drives. If you're in the centre of an Alcubierre drive at superluminal speeds it looks as if there is a white hole in front of you and a black hole behind you. This is because any light rays you send forward cannot escape ...

2

The passage of time inside the bubble will be the same as outside the bubble; the passengers inside the bubble will be able to transfer between points separated by vast distances as if they were effectively moving faster than the speed of light but locally this is not the case since it is impossible to move faster than the speed of light locally. The bubble ...

2

The geometry of the Alcubierre drive looks like this: The exotic matter is arranged as a torus, and it compresses spacetime on one side and expands it on the other so the direction of motion is normal to the plane of the torus. No additional normal or exotic matter is required. One of the lesser appreciated features of the drive should be immediately ...

2

I looked into this a little bit more and this is what I have gathered. We need General Relativity to describe this warp drive machine (bends spacetime after all). But locally the drive is travelling slower than $c$ because spacetime directly "below" it is flat. This I believe would preserve causality even though the drive does appear to be travelling at ...

2

General Relativity deals with curvature of Spacetime, not just curvature of Space. You can't ignore time because clocks are affected throughout the universe. Spacetime events are what we measure and are independent of observers. Now, let's come to point: You're asking why we're able to measure effects of Spacetime curvature with classical way when reference ...

2

You are thinking of spacetime as some form of elastic fluid, and with this perspective it makes sense that if you squeeze spacetime ahead of the ship it must flow round the sides and expand again behind the ship. However this is a misleading model. Spacetime can be compressed and stretched by arbitrary amounts. For example in the FLRW metric that describes ...

2

As I understand it, the space is not actually moving, but expanding; Which means that objects in this space are "moving apart". Now, "moving apart" has not much to do with the physical term of moving. Essentially, one does not move space because that makes no sense; Not because it is impossible. (Or, more poetically: It is not even impossible to move ...

2

The only work I know is in the paper The Alcubierre Warp Drive: On the Matter of Matter, and this deals with individual particles rather than macroscopic objects. The rather surprising result is that the particles get trapped in the field, then when the drive stops they are suddenly released, probably causing an almighty explosion. So I would expect that a ...

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