FTL
Will we one day be able to breach the light speed barrier and travel to the distant cosmos by exploiting the laws of physics?
This is an issue which has puzzled me for many years, and left me with many unanswered questions. I find this question puzzling due to the vast distances between stars in the universe, and my own desire for knowledge of the many planets outside of our own solar system. The closest star system to our own is Alpha Centauri, which is a mere 4.2 light years away. Using the fastest rockets available today, it would take us over 20,000 years to reach. More interesting star systems are thousands of times further. To travel these great distances within a human lifespan, we must find a way to either breach or bypass the light speed barrier.
To figure out how this can be done, I wanted to first look at the speed of light itself. Albert Einstein’s most sacred work was his theory of relativity, in which he describes the speed of light as the ultimate upper limit of how fast anything can travel in the universe. But why? People used to think the speed of sound could never be broken. The reason light speed is different is due to the fact that as an objects speed increases, so too does its mass. This strange phenomenon is calculated with the famous equation, E=mc2. This means that as an object gains speed, greater and greater amounts of energy are needed to continue the object accelerating, all the way up to infinity. This is a common problem in particle accelerators, where we find that an electron traveling at 99.999% of the speed of light has more than 200,000 times more mass than an electron at rest, exactly as relativity predicts. So for now we must accept that by using conventional means, we cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Therefore we must look to the unconventional, quantum mechanics, for a way around this tedious barrier.
To gain some insight into circumventing relativity, I read an interesting book called “Quantum: A guide for the perplexed” (Al-Khalili, (2004)). In this book I learned about the Casimir Effect and how negative energy may hold the secrets of interstellar travel. In 1948 Dutch theoretical physicist Hendrik Casimir predicted that an unseen force lay in the void of empty space. This force, aptly named the Casimir Effect, was proven and measured many years later at the Los Alamos National Lab. This force is the manifestation of virtual particles containing negative energy which pop in and out of existence in the quantum vacuum of empty space. Might it be possible to harness this energy in large enough quantities to propel a spaceship to superluminal velocities?
I now turned to a paper that I found written by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 titled: “The Warp Drive: Hyper Fast Travel within General Relativity.” In this paper, Alcubierre explains that instead of using negative energy to fuel a spaceship, you need to use this energy to bend the fabric of space, something that gravity does for us already. This would allow two distant places to be very close together for a short time. In this way you could travel virtually anywhere in the universe in almost no time at all. By surrounding your spaceship in this region of bent space, you could stretch the space behind you and contract the space in front of you, surfing in this distortion until you have arrived at your destination. The idea of curving space may seem impossible to some; however as I mentioned above, gravity does this all over the universe, and is responsible for planets orbiting stars.
For a better understanding of how gravity can warp space, I looked to a book by Stephen Hawking titled: “The Universe in a Nutshell” (2001). While studying this book I realized why we need the negative energy of the quantum vacuum, and not just regular energy to create a region of warped space. This is because negative energy exhibits antigravity in the same way regular energy exhibits gravity. We need them both to create the pushing and pulling forces which are responsible for expanding the space behind us (antigravity) and shrinking the space in front of us (gravity). Now that it seems like we may have found an answer, we need to find out if we can gather the massive amounts of energy required. Some opponents of this idea state that there is not enough energy in 10 billion universes for such a ‘warp drive’ (“Current Science,” 1997). However, as we continue to explore quantum mechanics I believe we will overcome that boundary in the near future.
According to Brennan (1997), the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle allows us to borrow vast amounts of energy from the quantum vacuum for very brief periods of time. The shorter the amount of time, the more energy we can borrow. Theoretically we can borrow more than enough for which would be required to warp space in a small region, as long as it’s only for a few picoseconds. We may also be able to tap into the vast amounts of dark energy shown to exist by the WMAP satellite in 2007, which found that a full 72.1% of the universe is composed of this energy which we cannot see (map.gsfc.nasa.gov (2010).
Now all that remains is to bring these technologies together into a useable format. While the science may be understood behind these properties, we do not have the technology available to bring them to life as of yet. As our particle accelerators grow more powerful and our understanding of the universe increases, the answers may be closer than one might think. While the laws of physics allow us to bend space at our leisure mathematically, much research must be done before we will actually know the intricacies and pitfalls of the actual procedure. We may find our atoms fly apart while traveling through warped space, but then again, we thought the same would happen beyond Mach 1.
This is an issue which has puzzled me for many years, and left me with many unanswered questions. I find this question puzzling due to the vast distances between stars in the universe, and my own desire for knowledge of the many planets outside of our own solar system. The closest star system to our own is Alpha Centauri, which is a mere 4.2 light years away. Using the fastest rockets available today, it would take us over 20,000 years to reach. More interesting star systems are thousands of times further. To travel these great distances within a human lifespan, we must find a way to either breach or bypass the light speed barrier.
To figure out how this can be done, I wanted to first look at the speed of light itself. Albert Einstein’s most sacred work was his theory of relativity, in which he describes the speed of light as the ultimate upper limit of how fast anything can travel in the universe. But why? People used to think the speed of sound could never be broken. The reason light speed is different is due to the fact that as an objects speed increases, so too does its mass. This strange phenomenon is calculated with the famous equation, E=mc2. This means that as an object gains speed, greater and greater amounts of energy are needed to continue the object accelerating, all the way up to infinity. This is a common problem in particle accelerators, where we find that an electron traveling at 99.999% of the speed of light has more than 200,000 times more mass than an electron at rest, exactly as relativity predicts. So for now we must accept that by using conventional means, we cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Therefore we must look to the unconventional, quantum mechanics, for a way around this tedious barrier.
To gain some insight into circumventing relativity, I read an interesting book called “Quantum: A guide for the perplexed” (Al-Khalili, (2004)). In this book I learned about the Casimir Effect and how negative energy may hold the secrets of interstellar travel. In 1948 Dutch theoretical physicist Hendrik Casimir predicted that an unseen force lay in the void of empty space. This force, aptly named the Casimir Effect, was proven and measured many years later at the Los Alamos National Lab. This force is the manifestation of virtual particles containing negative energy which pop in and out of existence in the quantum vacuum of empty space. Might it be possible to harness this energy in large enough quantities to propel a spaceship to superluminal velocities?
I now turned to a paper that I found written by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 titled: “The Warp Drive: Hyper Fast Travel within General Relativity.” In this paper, Alcubierre explains that instead of using negative energy to fuel a spaceship, you need to use this energy to bend the fabric of space, something that gravity does for us already. This would allow two distant places to be very close together for a short time. In this way you could travel virtually anywhere in the universe in almost no time at all. By surrounding your spaceship in this region of bent space, you could stretch the space behind you and contract the space in front of you, surfing in this distortion until you have arrived at your destination. The idea of curving space may seem impossible to some; however as I mentioned above, gravity does this all over the universe, and is responsible for planets orbiting stars.
For a better understanding of how gravity can warp space, I looked to a book by Stephen Hawking titled: “The Universe in a Nutshell” (2001). While studying this book I realized why we need the negative energy of the quantum vacuum, and not just regular energy to create a region of warped space. This is because negative energy exhibits antigravity in the same way regular energy exhibits gravity. We need them both to create the pushing and pulling forces which are responsible for expanding the space behind us (antigravity) and shrinking the space in front of us (gravity). Now that it seems like we may have found an answer, we need to find out if we can gather the massive amounts of energy required. Some opponents of this idea state that there is not enough energy in 10 billion universes for such a ‘warp drive’ (“Current Science,” 1997). However, as we continue to explore quantum mechanics I believe we will overcome that boundary in the near future.
According to Brennan (1997), the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle allows us to borrow vast amounts of energy from the quantum vacuum for very brief periods of time. The shorter the amount of time, the more energy we can borrow. Theoretically we can borrow more than enough for which would be required to warp space in a small region, as long as it’s only for a few picoseconds. We may also be able to tap into the vast amounts of dark energy shown to exist by the WMAP satellite in 2007, which found that a full 72.1% of the universe is composed of this energy which we cannot see (map.gsfc.nasa.gov (2010).
Now all that remains is to bring these technologies together into a useable format. While the science may be understood behind these properties, we do not have the technology available to bring them to life as of yet. As our particle accelerators grow more powerful and our understanding of the universe increases, the answers may be closer than one might think. While the laws of physics allow us to bend space at our leisure mathematically, much research must be done before we will actually know the intricacies and pitfalls of the actual procedure. We may find our atoms fly apart while traveling through warped space, but then again, we thought the same would happen beyond Mach 1.
posted by Ron Marish JR at 10:17 AM
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