It May Be Possible That Certain SAPs May Be FTL!

Phys.org reports that in a new paper  accepted  by the journal Astroparticle Physics, written by Robert Ehrlich, a recently retired physicist from George Mason University, claims that the neutrino is very likely a tachyon or faster-than-light particle.

The Possible Look of a Warp Speed Star Ship

Check out this picture that was created by Mark Rademaker.  Rademaker  based his picture  on NASA's Harold White's designs.  White is part of NASA's Advanced Propulsion Team and has been working since 2010 to develop a warp drive that will allow spacecraft to travel faster than the speed of light.

The image shown above (and others on this web-site) is a technologically detailed spacecraft that  Rademaker says  took more than 1,600 hours to create them.

The graphic shows the ship supporting two huge rings.  These are space compressors that both expand and compress space/time.  The space inside the rings is normal space but the compressors themselves have no limit to how fast they  compress or expand space.

More on the ship and the drive HERE                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

FTL Here is a Very Astute Explaination Of Why FTL Is Not Possible

YouTube pundit Veritasium gives a incredibly understandable short talk on why faster than light is not possible. His argument is elegant and his final conclusion is so stunningly simple that you can't help but have a DUH moment. The short video is fun and informative.

Could NASA Really Build an FTL Drive?

For those of you that follow cutting edge physics, Harold White is no stranger.  For those of us a bit further back on the bell curve..... White announced last month that he and a team of NASA scientists  had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive.

White's drive would be based on an Alcubierre type of drive which I last talked about back in September here

Basically the Alcubierre drive accomplishes faster than light and still adhering to the universal speed limit by maintaining a bubble of real time around a ship.  Then warping space before and after the bubble to "push" it through real space time at supra-luminal speeds. 

The thinking is that nothing can exceed light speed in real space, but space can be compressed and expanded at any rate.  So if the expanding space behind pushed you into the compressed space ahead, you speed would not change but your "relative" speed would exceed that of light.  

So far thought it remains a theory only.  Check out the IO9 article here 

Warp Drive...Possible? More-so Than We Previously Thought!

Ian Steadman, writing for Wired UK, has penned an article that if not blowing my socks off, really set me up and take notice!

 Ian writes that NASA scientists think that the concept of FTL may just be available to future generations.

 Back in 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre demonstrated that warp speed was, on paper at least, theoretically possible. However, one of the major drawbacks was the assumption that Alcubierre's drive required the mass/energy conversion equivalent to that of a gas giant of roughly the size of Jupiter!


(Now this renders the drive impossible, but my thinking is that this is stunningly efficient. Now here is my reasoning, discounting warp for the moment, Light has been used as the universal speed limit. Though clearly not infinitely fast, it takes a prodigious amount of energy to reach C. Matter of fact, given any starting point speed and then factoring the energy it took to accelerate to that speed. Now doubling that speed does not take twice the energy but 4x, it soon becomes apparent that even an incremental increase would require more than all the energy available in the Universe. Anytime you could go faster than light on just the energy/mass of a planet like Jupiter is very efficient.)


Now Harold White, a scientist from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, has revealed at a Sept. 14 space symposium that his team has calculated that the amount of energy required to create an Alcubierre drive may be far smaller than first estimated.


Those of you that have been with the blog for some time remember that we have on occasion discussed various drives like an Alcubierre.


The main argument against ftl is that nothing can travel faster than C ( information may be the one exception....but lets stay within the realms of star ships and such) So the trick is, how do you keep a ship in normal space but move it around at super-luminal speeds. Alcubierre's drive "compresses" space ahead of the ship and expands it behind, with the net effect of a "trough" between the two wave fronts. Inside the normal space, the ship would travel in normal space/time, but the normal area between the two warped areas could be moved around at speeds far above C. (It starts to sound very much like the Enterprise's warp drive. Their "Warp Field" could very well have been this normal space maintained inside of of the warp "waves" fore and aft)

As the article points out, if you change the "shape" of the warp field, you greatly reduce the energy expenditures. Alcubierre's engine called for a globe and where White's team has differed is to use a "doughnut" shaped field in their equations.

Still, the energy requirements are phenomenal and far outstrip any form of energy or generation we have at our disposal, at present.

Plus there still is the nagging problem that José Natário published in 2002. According to the Wikipedia article:

• it would be impossible for the ship to send signals to the front of the bubble, meaning that crew members could not control, steer or stop the ship.

Oh my.....

Wired Article

Warp Drive Would Destroy Its Destination

  

            

                                                     Alcubierre drive

Wow, this could lead to someone having a very bad day. I was reading on the Dvice blog that well say we actually built an FTL drive that really could take a craft trans-light - it seems that anything at your destination would gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion. Ouch.

A team at the University of Sydney in Australia looked at a warp drive concept proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre. As you might remember this is the system where the ship would be enclosed in a "bubble" of negative energy that would warp space ahead and behind the ship. Ahead, space/time would be compressed allowing the ship to "skip" across the tops of the "folds", and stretched out behind the ship. In theory, once activated the drive would require little energy because space/time itself would "push" against the ship, moving it forward.

However as we have seen with items in the universe that are moving away, there is a red shift. The opposite is true as well, objects moving towards us will blue shift. At trans-light speeds the blue shift would be incredible. The blue shift would come from particles that were pushed along in front of the ship. These high energy particles would emit massive amounts of gamma radiation. Plus there seems to be no limit to how much energy would be built up, the farther you travel the more energy from high energy particles would be released. The result would be very much like a huge GRB very near by. Everything at the destination would be blasted into oblivion.

Here is the link to the Universe Today article
Click picture for the WIKI on the

Alcubierre drive

Time Travel Impossible - Again?

A team of Chinese physicists have put the time travel debate to bed. Their research concludes that a photon can not travel faster than light.

From the article:

• By result, the possibilities of time traveling have been debunked in one fell swoop because it was previously believed that if a single photon could travel faster than the speed of light, it could "teleport" information to another time.

Professor Shengwang Du, Assistant Professor in Hong Kong University of Science & Technology's Department of Physics, study demonstrates that a single photon has to obey the same laws of the universe just as any other Electro-Magnetic wave.

Professor Du points out that by showing that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light, his research also demonstrates the true speed of information carried by a single photon,
thus giving scientists a better picture on the transmission of quantum information."

read more in the HK Institute of Science & Technology article, Dvice article

FTL Possible With Negative Energy?

Well we have seen talks and articles on a manifold approach to FTL. One system we heard of last summer was a way for a ship to warp space ahead and behind it and be "pushed" along. This demonstration works on a similar system of expansion and contraction, but with a twist of a thing called negative energy. Check it out. From Boing Boing

Would Warp Speed be Instantly Fatal?

From a recent NewScientist, via Dvice, article is a story recounting Professor William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's research into what would happen when a craft, like the Enterprise, reaches 99% of C.

As we know, space, both macro and micro, is far from empty. On the macro level there is every type of rock or ice or rock and ice baddie just waiting to eviscerate anything crossing its path. And on the micro level is the lowly hydrogen atom which is spread about thinly at about 2 atoms per square centimeter. As your spacecraft draws away from "populated" areas, you are less likely to encounter the big baddies, but as you accelerate, no matter where you are, you start running into more and more hydrogen atoms.
From the NewScientist article:

• (the speed) transforms the thin wisp of hydrogen gas ..... into an intense radiation beam that would kill humans within seconds and destroy the spacecraft's electronic instruments

Worse yet is the kinetic energy. The hydrogen atoms would reach a staggering 7 teraelectron volts – the same energy that protons will eventually reach in the Large Hadron Collider when it runs at full throttle.

Bummer.... but for me, I always thought of FTL as "hyperspace" where running into things didn't apply. I can remember asking myself back in the late 60, why didn't they run into stars? I reasoned that hyperspace follows different "rules" and folded space is passing from one point to another without travel through the intervening space, thus no stars, planets or hydrogen atoms. what have you got?

Articles
NewScientist
The Register
Dvice

New research shows Warp Drives would suck!

hey here is an interesting article sent in by Tim Sayell from Discovery online.

• According to new calculations by Italian physicists, a warp drive could easily create a black hole that would incinerate any passengers on a space craft and then suck Earth into the same black hole!

As we all know...normal physics shows that FTL is impossible. As speed increases so does mass and therefore the more energy you need to move even a small amount faster. As you approach light speed your mass becomes infinite and therefore the amount of energy you need to move faster also becomes infinity. I have said (tongue firmly in cheek) that the stars themselves prove ftl is impossible. Why? Because if you go an infinite speed you need infinite energy, which means all the power in the universe plus a little bit more. Since the stars are still burning..... but anyway..

The first exception to the ftl rule is a wormhole. If a ship were to cross the wormhole threshold, it would still be going sub light, but it would still arrive at the other end before any light that had to travel the distance outside the wormhole.

The second itself is the idea of a warp engine that physicist Michael Alcubierre envisioned.

• Alcubierre warp drive would create a bubble of energy behind the ship and a lack of energy in front of the ship, like a giant cosmic wave a space ship could surf. That particular section of space can travel faster than the speed of light in the surrounding space, and anything on or in that bubble will accelerate with it. (here is the original article BMU ran on the Alcubierre drive)

The problems start when you consider the amount of energy it would take to create the "bubble" that would contain the ftl. Plus you would need even more energy to "push" the bubble along. The problems really start when the energy to hold everything in check runs out. Just like antimatter, when the dark matter needed comes into contact with normal matter the ship inside is destroyed by temperatures well in excess of that near the core of a supernova. Plus as the bubble collapses it could very well create a black hole that would not bode well for ships or planets nearby.

Read complete article here

Four Reasons Not to Give Up on Interstellar Travel

Ahhh I knew someone else would jump at this. When rocket scientists recently concluded that humanity would never reach the stars, the comments started a firestorm of comments on this blog.( earlier article Man will never reach the stars ) Now IO9 lists four reason not to give up on the stars just yet:

1. We are likely to develop new propulsion methods.
   
2. Humans could figure out ways to endure long space journeys.
3. Earth is not the only source of fuel.
4. We may yet discover a way to achieve faster-than-light travel.

The IO9 article makes a good point on each number and follows our earlier discussion. It's still worth the read though. Check it out HERE

Warp Engine - Possible?

I was reading through some of the listings on Discover News and I came across this headline

• Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light

And I am thinking uh duh that's what warp engines do right?! But I kept reading and the article kept making more and more sense. But the real laugh is I think I saw this concept on an episode of Futurama. Anyway -

• Two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine could possibly work. The warp engine, based on a design first proposed in 1994 by Michael Alcubierre, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble. The ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.
• It is thought that this has happened once before in the cosmos' history - the big bang.
  

Quite simply that if a beam of light and the ship left the same relative space time local, the ship, utilizing it engine, would arrive well ahead of the beam of light. Relative to any other beam of light traveling relatively tangent to the ship, the ship would not be ftl, but since it beat a beam of light from its own space/time, it is in fact Faster than light. Not a play on words (Einstein flat out said this could not take place) or a trick of what gets taken away from what first. Given enough energy, possible? My sticking point to ftl is the energy curve. To accelerate any mass you need energy. To double the speed, you do not need double the energy, you need geometrically more energy. If you have mass and you acellerate to the physical limit of the universe, it stands to reason that you would need all the energy of the universe. Since the stars are still shining is proff that no one has gone ftl. But what if you are not accelerating mass, but distorting space time. At present we only know of one way to do that effectivly and that is with massive objects. Round and round we go. But is sure is interesting.

<- Read complete article in Discovery News ->

Physicists establish 'spooky' quantum communication

Shaun Saunders sends us an article from the Physorg.com website that says:

Physicists at the University of Michigan have coaxed two separate atoms to communicate with a sort of quantum intuition that Albert Einstein called "spooky." Scientists used light to establish what's called "entanglement" between two atoms, which were trapped a meter apart in separate enclosures (think of entangling like controlling the outcome of one coin flip with the outcome of a separate coin flip). "This linkage between remote atoms could be the fundamental piece of a radically new quantum computer architecture," said Professor Christopher Monroe, the principal investigator. "Now that the technique has been demonstrated, it should be possible to scale it up to networks of many interconnected components that will eventually be necessary for quantum information processing." In their experiment, the researchers used two atoms storing a piece of information in their electron configuration. They then excited each atom, inducing electrons to fall into a lower energy state and emit one photon, or one particle of light, in the process. The type of photon released by each atom indicates the particular state of the atom. Because of this, each photon was entangled with its atom. By manipulating the photons emitted from each of the two atoms and guiding them to interact along a fiber optic thread, the researchers were able to detect the resulting photon clicks and entangle the atoms. Monroe says the fiber optic thread was necessary to establish entanglement of the atoms, but then the fiber could be severed and the two atoms would remain entangled, even if one were "taken to Jupiter."

(cool! ftl communication anyone? ftl computer networks? Maybe even transporters! )

New experiments demostrate possiblility of FTL

Two German physicists claim to have forced light to overcome its own speed limit using the strange phenomenon known as "quantum tunnelling". Exceeding the speed of light, approximately 300,000km per second, is supposed to be completely impossible. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object through the light barrier. The scientists set up an experiment in which microwave photons appeared to travel "instantaneously" between two prisms forming the halves of a cube placed a metre apart. When the prisms were placed together, photons fired at one edge passed straight through them, as expected. After they were moved apart, most of the photons reflected off the first prism they encountered and were picked up by a detector. But a few photons appeared to "tunnel" through the gap separating them as if the prisms were still held together. Although these photons had travelled a longer distance, they arrived at their detector at exactly the same time as the reflected photons. In effect, they seemed to have travelled faster than light.

Thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the post

'Mach c'? Scientists observe sound traveling faster than the speed of light

For the first time, scientists have experimentally demonstrated that sound pulses can travel at velocities faster than the speed of light, c. William Robertson’s team from Middle Tennessee State University also showed that the group velocity of sound waves can become infinite, and even negative.