Captain Kirk calls Enterprise! Or Zefram Cochrane of our day

I put Bitcoin on the fact that more than 60% of the regular audience of Habr are respected by the immortal Star Trek series. This is a story based on engineering fantasies and discoveries that were ahead of their time and anticipated the emergence of smartphones, tablets, scanners, and now also moving technology!

Perhaps the most fantastic in the entire series was the way to move the spacecraft faster than the speed of light — the so-called warp drive. (Curvature of space). And so, the other day, a team of NASA scientists found the warp drive principle "theoretically feasible and worth further research." Even more than that, these scientists went a little further than the assumptions and created in their laboratory a scientific device inside which they managed to get, albeit tiny, but still, “bubbles” of space deformation.

The principle of a worp drive, an engine working on space deformation, is quite simple. According to Einstein's theory, nothing existing in the Universe can move faster than the speed of light. But using the artificially created deformation of space, a kind of wormhole, you can make a straight and short path from one point of space to another, regardless of the distance separating these points. This technique allows, at least, the heroes of Star Trek to avoid the mass of paradoxes, problems and limitations associated with flying at light and near-light speeds.

According to NASA scientists, in order to fly faster than the speed of light, it is necessary to create a region of space deformation by using a ring of some exotic material, enclosing the spacecraft in a separate “bubble” of normal space, and somehow making the entire Universe move faster than the speed of light . No matter how crazy it sounds, this is a detour to Einstein's theory, and this should work, at least it has not been proven that this should not work. From the point of view of a spacecraft in an isolated bubble, it will look as if the entire space in front of the ship will be compressed and then expanded behind the ship, almost instantly moving the ship to inconceivable distances.
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While the “thought experiment” described above seems simple enough, its implementation is an incredibly complex problem, since it addresses such fundamental concepts as time and space, which are the “fabric” of the Universe. The implementation of the principle of worp-drive may require the invention and creation of some absolutely incredible things, such as negative energy and some exotic materials that can not exist under normal conditions, otherwise it will require an ocean of ordinary energy.

Speaking of this energy, physicists have tentatively calculated that to move several atoms of matter in the manner described above, energy will be required that is three times greater than the energy contained in the sun. And to move the spacecraft will require energy, several orders of magnitude higher than the energy generated in the entire Universe.

Harold White, a scientist from NASA, presented the results of some of his studies, which indicate that the creation of a Worp Drive is not so hopeless, at the 100 Year Starship Symposium symposium, which was held quite recently, Harold White (Harold White). From his point of view, a spaceship in the shape of a rugby ball can be surrounded by a ring of exotic substance with incredible properties. The influence of this substance will allow to realize the principles of work of a worp-drive with much and much lower energy costs than those that were voiced above.

“Our mathematical calculations show that with a vorp drive we can get to Alpha Centauri in two weeks of time from the moment of launch from Earth,” says White. “At the same time, the time of the onboard spacecraft clock will not differ from the time in the ground control center. All sorts of temporary paradoxes are completely absent, and the acceleration, with which the spacecraft will move, will not smear the crew with a thin layer on the bulkheads. ”

Using the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer, a laboratory science instrument designed to confirm his conjectures, Harold White and his colleagues were able to create tiny “bubbles” of space-time deformation. The degree of deformation obtained was very small, somewhere in the region of one millionth of a percent, which, of course, is not enough to take us to distant stars, but this is a practical confirmation that someday it will be quite possible.

Based on dvice.com/