William Atkins
Thursday, 14 August 2008 21:44
Science -
Space
Page 1 of 3
American physicists Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy are proposing a “hypothetical propulsion device” that could travel faster than the speed of light without violating any laws of physics. However, we’ll have to ask Scotty for enormous amounts of dilithium crystals!
Such faster-than-light speeds were accomplished in science fiction within the starship Enterprise, commanded by Captain James T. Kirk, when the
Star Trek crew regularly went into “warp drive,” multiple speeds above the speed of light, on its furturistic journeys through the galaxy.
On the other hand, American physicist Albert Einstein, in real life, said that such speeds, those faster than the speed of light, are impossible because they would take an infinite amount of energy in order to accelerate a spacecraft (or anything with mass) to the speed of light.
However, the proposal by Obousy and Cleaver does not violate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity because the spacecraft doesn’t really go faster than the speed of light but rather is inserted into a “warp bubble” in the tenth dimension with expanding space in front of the bubble and shrinking space behind the bubble.
In the
abstract of their article “Putting the Warp into Warp Drive,” which is online at Arxiv.org, Cleaver and Obousy, from Baylor University, Waco, Texas, U.S.A., state
“Over the last decade, there has been a respectable level of scientific interest regarding the concept of a warp drive. This is a hypothetical propulsion device that could theoretically circumvent the traditional limitations of special relativity which restricts spacecraft to sub-light velocities. Any breakthrough in this field would revolutionize space exploration and open the doorway to interstellar travel.”
They continue,
“This article discusses a novel approach to generating the warp bubble necessary for such propulsion; the mathematical details of this theory are discussed in an article published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. The theory is based on some of the exciting predictions coming out of string theory and it is the aim of this article to introduce the warp drive idea from a non-mathematical perspective that should be accessible to a wide range of readers.”
The entire
paper (pdf file) is available online at “Warp Drive: A New Approach.”
For members of the
British Interplanetary Society, the Obousy and Cleaver article is available in the September 2008 issue of the
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society under the title “
Warp Drive: A New Approach” as part of a series of articles entitled “Warp Drive, Faster Than Light: Breaking the Interstellar Distance Barrier
Additional information on warp drive, M-theory, and the Alcubiere drive is found on page two.
