A Theoretical Exercise How to Make a Warp Drive A Theoretical Exercise

Light travels fast Light can go around the earth 7 times in 1 second.

Light from the Sun Light takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to Earth.

Light to Mars Light takes 4 minutes to get from Earth to Mars

Light to Pluto Light takes 5 hours to get from Earth to Pluto

Light to Epsilon Eridani Light takes 10.5 years to get from Earth to epsilon eridani, another star.

Six Months to get to Mars With current technology, it takes 6 months to get to Mars. At this speed, it would take thousands of years to get to another star. A warp drive, although purely hypothetical at this point, would be a way to get there faster. With a warp drive, conceivably you could travel faster than light or at least near the speed of light.

Bowling Ball A bowling ball deforms a mattress.

Golf ball on a mattress If you roll a golf ball on a mattress near the bowling ball, it will “orbit” the bowling ball if there is no friction.

Earth deforms spacetime Earth deforms the fabric of spacetime

Moon near Earth The moon “orbits” the Earth because it is near the Earth and there is no friction.

Falling into a Gravity Well If the moon had no tangential velocity, it would fall right into the Earth.

Falling Into Mass The idea behind a warp drive is to have the spacecraft continuously “falling” into a source of mass at the front of the ship and/or being “pushed” by a source of negative mass behind the spacecraft. Since gravity only travels at the speed of light, it may not be possible to exceed the speed of light by this method.

Warp Drive The idea behind a warp drive is to make a spacecraft “fall” forward. Remember, you need mass in front of the spacecraft. The ship will “fall” by gravity forward.

Warp drive According to Alcubierre (1994), you would want the front of the ship falling into a gravity well and the back of the ship being pushed into a gravity well. Again, gravity does the pushing.

Physical Limitations In order to actually have a warp drive, you would need negative mass behind the ship and something like a black hole in front of the ship.

Limitations We don’t know how to make negative mass in those quantities We don’t know how to make a black hole

Possibility for Negative Mass: Vacuum Energy There may be lots of energy in a vacuum because of wavelets of light

Possibilities Casimir Effect makes a small amount of negative mass

Casimir Effect In the Casimir Effect, there is less energy between the two metal plates than outside of them because certain wavelengths cannot exist in the small space between the plates. Hence it can be a source of negative mass or negative energy. This effect would need to be multiplied somehow.

Particle Accelerators It was hypothesized that a black hole could be made for a very small amount of time at a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider, for the black hole in front of the ship.

Need for a Warp Drive to Work If one could obtain some very dense source of mass and keep it in front of the spacecraft and/or a source of negative mass behind the spacecraft, the spacecraft could theoretically continuously accelerate until it was near the speed of light.

Overcoming Limitations If we could figure those things out, going to another star would be much easier!

References Alcubierre, M. (1994) The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity. Classical and Quantum Gravity 11(5):L73-L77.