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Is the Alcubierre warp drive possible?
Alcubierre showed that the warp drive from “Star Trek” was in fact theoretically possible. Proxima Centauri here we come, right? Unfortunately, Alcubierre’s method of compressing spacetime had one problem: it requires negative energy or negative mass.
How fast is the Alcubierre warp drive?
An object might take a few minutes to move with at low speed through the neck of a wormhole, observing the local speed-limit laws all the way. However, by transiting the wormhole the object has traveled five light years in a few minutes, producing an effective speed of a million times the velocity of light.
What inspired Miguel Alcubierre?
Miguel Alcubierre, Inventor of Warp Drive? Inspired by Star Trek, distinguished physicist Miguel Alcubierre developed the general relativity-based model for warp drive 20 years ago. Hear why he doubts it will ever be a reality, and learn about his current research on gravitational waves.
What is Miguel Alcubierre best known for?
Miguel Alcubierre. Miguel Alcubierre Moya (born March 28, 1964) is a Mexican theoretical physicist. Alcubierre is known for the proposed Alcubierre drive, a speculative warp drive by which a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel.
Is an Alcubierre-type warp drive possible?
Nevertheless, an Alcubierre-type warp drive might be realized by exploiting certain experimentally verified quantum phenomena, such as the Casimir effect, that lead to stress–energy tensors that also violate the energy conditions, such as negative mass–energy, when described in the context of the quantum field theories.
What is Alcubierre’s warp bubble theory?
Alcubierre interpreted his “warp bubble” in terms of a contraction of space ahead of the bubble and an expansion behind, but this interpretation could be misleading, since the contraction and expansion actually refer to the relative motion of nearby members of the family of ADM observers.
How did Miguel Alcubierre change the geometry of space?
In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method for changing the geometry of space by creating a wave that would cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand.