It is often said that timing is everything. TIMING IS EVERYTHING, ESPECIALLY AT WARP SPEED Now, it appears the situation has changed. However, like Alcubierre and White before them, the warp concepts of these would-be visionaries all still remain theoretical in nature. Since then, The Debrief has covered a number of physicists and engineers taking their own stabs at designing a viable warp drive, including an entire group of international researchers working on a warp drive that requires no exotic matter. It also resulted in the informal renaming of the original theoretical design, a concept now more commonly referred to as the “Alcubierre/White Warp Drive.”
This change in design dramatically reduced the exotic materials and energy requirements of the original concept, seemingly providing researchers and science fiction fans alike at least a glimmer of hope that a real-world warp drive may one day become a reality. White, a then NASA-employed warp drive specialist and the founder of the highly respected Eagleworks laboratory, reworked Alcubierre’s original metric and put it into canonical form. Over a decade later, this theory underwent a major shift, when Dr. That solution was lauded for its elegant mathematics, yet simultaneously derided for its use of theoretical materials and massive amounts of energy that appeared virtually impossible to engineer in any practical way. More specifically, he outlined a spacecraft propulsion system previously only envisioned in science fiction that can traverse the cosmos above the speed of light without violating currently accepted laws of physics. In 1994, Mexican Mathematician Miguel Alcubierre proposed the first mathematically valid solution to the warp drive. Theoretical Warp Bubble Structure: Image Credit LSI THEORETICAL WARP DRIVES AND SCIENCE VISIONARIES “To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble,” White told T he Debrief, “hence the significance.” White cautioned that this does not mean we are near building a fully functioning warp drive, as much more science needs to be done (Updated 08/12/21). In an interview, White added that “our detailed numerical analysis of our custom Casimir cavities helped us identify a real and manufacturable nano/microstructure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble, not an analog, but the real thing.” In other words, a warp bubble structure will manifest under these specific conditions. Harold G “Sonny” White has reported the discovery of an actual, real-world “Warp Bubble.” And, according to White, this first of its kind breakthrough by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team sets a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized, warp-capable spacecraft. Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Alcubierre did the work illustrated in the article 26 years ago and more.(Updated 08/12/21: Additional comments from Dr. Trouble is, success or no success is something folks aren’t especially allowed to talk about. It’s similar to the idea of a racecar driving onboard a train: someone standing by the tracks would see the car travelling much faster than its top speed.Īll the folks in the article are involved with NASA in the world of then and now, maybe and might be. “And so the concept of warp drive is to say, all right, let’s take our ship, let’s build a bubble of space-time around it, and then we’ll have that propel us faster than the speed of light,” she says. “What warp drive is doing is basically saying that there is no law of physics that says space-time itself can’t go faster than the speed of light,” says Dr Erin Macdonald, astrophysicist and science consultant for Star Trek. The key that makes it possible is that, technically, the ship itself doesn’t travel faster than light. The first scientific theory of warp drive came about in 1994, when theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre used Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to develop a framework that would allow faster-than-light travel within the confines of the laws of physics.