Remember the super-fast spaceships from Star Trek? Well, they might not be just in the movies anymore! Scientists have been scratching their heads over this for years. But guess what? A German physicist might just have cracked the code! Stick around to find out if warp drives are more than just a dream!
Star Trek is all about exploring space and crazy futuristic stuff. A lot of the things they talk about in the show have actually inspired real-life inventions and technologies that we use today. One of the craziest ideas from Star Trek is something called warp drive. Basically, it’s a way for spaceships to go really, really fast, even faster than light! This totally goes against what Einstein said in his Theory of Relativity, which says nothing can travel faster than light. But in Star Trek, they’re like, “Nah, we’re gonna do it anyway!”
Warp drives have been a part of science fiction for a long time, but it wasn’t until 1994 that a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre said they could be real. His idea got a lot of attention because it was the first serious look at how a warp drive might actually work. He suggested that by distorting space, a spaceship could move faster than light, but only from far away. Inside the bubble, things would seem normal.
But there’s a big problem: it would take a crazy amount of energy to make a warp bubble. Alcubierre thought something called negative energy might help, but nobody has proven that negative energy exists. It’s like a magic ingredient we’re not sure is real.
Now, lots of people thought Miguel’s idea was super smart… but there was a problem. It sounded great on paper, but when you tried to make it work for real, it was a big headache.
But then, along came Joseph Agnew, a clever student from the University of Alabama. He thought, “Maybe we can actually test this crazy theory.” Joseph said, “If we crunch all the numbers and meet the energy requirements, maybe it could work.”
But wait! There’s a big problem. You see, Einstein, the super smart scientist, said that nothing can go faster than light. And when things try to go super fast, they get heavier and heavier, making it really hard to speed up. So, going at the speed of light? Forget about it!
Interesting right? Lets know more about Warp Drive- Is it really possible?
According to his Theory of Relativity, going faster than light is a big no-no. It’s like trying to break the unbreakable. Einstein said it would take an infinite amount of energy to even get close to light speed, and that’s just not possible for objects with mass.
But hey, there might be a way around it. Enter the Alcubierre warp drive. Instead of trying to beat light speed, this idea says we could bend space-time around a spaceship, kinda like in “Star Trek. To make this warp drive work, you’d need a ton of energy, like, more than the whole universe could probably provide. Think about it: you’d need the mass of Jupiter just to get going.
But In late 2020, physicist and NASA mechanical engineer Harold “Sonny” White, PhD, who works at the Limitless Space Institute, noticed something interesting in some data from an experiment. White and his team were working with DARPA, a research agency, to study the energy between small metal plates in a vacuum, called Casimir cavities. They found that there was less energy between the plates, making them move closer together, which is called negative vacuum energy density or the Casimir effect. This helps scientists understand tiny structures and could be useful for things like circuits.
What caught White’s attention was that the energy pattern they saw looked like something else. It matched the energy pattern of exotic matter that some physicists think could be used for super-fast space travel. They did some math and realized that a certain structure they studied could create a small warp bubble, similar to what’s seen in sci-fi movies like Star Trek.
While warp drives are usually thought of as just sci-fi, scientists have been working on the idea for a long time. White’s discovery didn’t actually create a warp bubble, but it showed that building one might be possible for the first time.
Dr. Harold Sonny White, is still trying to find ways to solve the mass-energy that is required. He believes by bending ways in physics, it is likely possible to bring down the mass-energy requirement mentioned in the Alcubierre theory. He also suggested there might be slight possibilities to change the shape of the ring of the negative mass to enable a mass requirement of about 700 kg.
White is now leading a team of physicists and engineers in NASA to build the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer. It is a beam splitting interferometer which can easily detect and generate the tiniest warp bubble. Perhaps this might not instantly get you over to Andromeda Galaxy, but eventually, you’ll get there when needed.
German Scientist find new way
Many scientists work on it in their free time. One of these scientists is Erik Lentz, a physicist who loves Star Trek. He works at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington. While he was doing research in Germany during the early days of the pandemic, he thought about how to travel faster than light. He wrote a paper in 2021 saying we could make warp drives with normal energy instead of strange negative energy.
“There are a lot of problems to solve to make a warp drive,” Lentz says. “The biggest problem was the negative energy, so I tried to find a way around that.”
He looked at some new ideas in Einstein’s theory of gravity and found a solution called a “soliton.” It’s like a wave that keeps its shape and moves at a steady speed. This solution could have enough energy and go faster than light. We know how to make the energy it needs, but it’s still too hard. Lentz says the next step might be using energy from nuclear fusion, like in a fusion reactor.
With a fusion-powered device, we could maybe travel to our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, in a few years instead of many decades or thousands of years. But our regular rockets would take 50,000 years to get there, assuming we had enough fuel.
Lentz’s paper got a lot of attention from other warp drive researchers. Physicists Alexey Bobrick and entrepreneur Gianni Martire wrote a paper in 2021 about making slower warp drives from what we know now. They also made a new theory this year about using sound waves and goo to test how strong gravity has to be to warp space. They made a public app to help other scientists check if their warp drive ideas are good. But they need to wait for other scientists to check their work before telling everyone how it works.
Even with these new ideas, there are still big problems to solve before we can travel between stars super fast. Alcubierre, the scientist who first talked about warp drives, worries about what might happen if you crash into something while traveling super fast. He thinks it would be very bad.
Natário, another scientist, says there are practical problems too, like how to steer and stop. He doesn’t think we’ll ever make warp drives because they need too much energy and need to do things we don’t know how to do.
These scientists agree that we’re still a long way from making warp drives real. But they’re still hopeful. White, one of the scientists, compares their work to building a cathedral. It took over 400 years to build the Strasbourg Cathedral in France, but the builders knew they were working for the future. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” White says. “I don’t know what the future holds. But I know what I need to be doing right now.”
Lentz’s idea looks different from Alcubierre’s. It’s like a bunch of diamond shapes in space. But making this in real life is tough. You’d need a special kind of super dense stuff.
Traveling super fast like this is still just a dream. But Lentz’s idea makes it seem less impossible. Other scientists are excited about it too. They say it could open new doors for space travel.
There are other ideas too. Some say you could travel to other stars, just not faster than light. But even that’s tricky. Plus, if you go, everyone you know might be old or gone when you get back.
Some scientists say we should be careful with these ideas. They might not work in real life. But for now, it’s fun to think about. Lentz is even trying to make it real, even though it’s a big challenge.
Read more: XI Class Admission 2024-HSC Admission 2024