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Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light
Eric Bland, Discovery
NewsJuly 28, 2008 -- It is possible to travel faster than light.
You justwouldn't travel faster than light.Seems strange, but by manipulating
extra dimensions with astronomicalamounts of energy, two Baylor
University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp
drive, could be created that wouldbend but not break the laws of
physics."We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on
generalrelatively and string theory," said Gerald Cleaver, coauthor of thepaper that
recently appeared on the preprint server ArXiv.org

The warp engine is based on a design first proposed in1994 by MichaelAlcubierre.

The Alcubierre drive, as it's known, involves expandingthe fabric of space behind a
ship into a bubble and shrinkingspace-time in front of the ship.

The ship would rest in between theexpanding and shrinking space-time,
essentially surfing down the sideof the bubble.The tricky part is that the
ship wouldn't actually move; space itselfwould move underneath the
stationary spacecraft.

A beam of light nextto the ship would still zoom away,
same as it always does, but a beamof light far from the ship would be
left behind.That means that the ship would arrive at its destination
faster than abeam of light traveling the same distance, but without
violatingEinstein's relativity, which says that it would take an
infiniteamount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed oflight,
since the ship itself isn't actually moving.

The fabric of space has moved faster than light before, says Cleaver,right after the Big Bang, when
the universe expanded faster than thespeed of light."We're recreating
the inflationary period of the universe behind theship," said
Cleaver.

While the theory rests on relatively firm ground, the next question
ishow do you expand space behind the ship and contract it in front ofthe
ship?Cleaver and Richard Obousy, the other coauthor, propose
manipulatingthe 11th dimension, a special theoretical construct of m-theory
(theoffspring of string theory), to create the bubble the ship would
surfdown.If the 11th dimension could be shrunk behind the ship it would createa
bubble of dark energy, the same dark energy that is causing theuniverse
to speed up as time goes on.

Expanding the 11th dimension infront of the ship would eventually cause it to decrease, although two
separate steps are required.Exactly how the 11th dimension would be expanded and
shrunk is stillunknown.

"These calculations are based on some arbitrary advance in technologyor some alien technology that would
let us manipulate the extradimension," said Cleaver.

What the scientists were able to estimate was the amount of energynecessary,
if the technology was available, to change thesedimensions: about 10^45 joules.

"That's about the amount of energy you'd get if you converted theentire mass of Jupiter into
pure energy via E = mc^2," said Cleaver,an energy far beyond anything
humanity can currently envision creating.

While the challenges to creating a warp drive are quite formidable,the concept is intriguing, says
Tufts University theoretical physicistLawrence Ford."If there are extra
dimensions and we could manipulate them, thatwould open up all sorts of
exciting possibilities," said Ford."I don't see this leading immediately to a warp drive,
but I could seeit leading to other interesting possibilities in basic scientific research," said Ford.Cleaver agrees that
the creation of a real warp drive is still far away."Warp drive isn't
doable now, and probably won't be for the nextseveral millenia," said
Cleaver.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/07/28/warp-speed-engine-print.html