Warp drive not science fiction after all?

I am not sure if this is the right forum to post in but thought this would be an interesting topic to talk about. As a peruser of scientific news, I found this interesting article announcing that creating a 'Warp Drive' is not relegated to the dustbin of Star Trek fantasy.
http://news.discovery.com/...0yss-120917.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1Physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested a concept of a warp drive using a ring of exotic matter that would 'warp' spacetime and allow a spacecraft at its center to travel at faster-than-light speeds. Further refining of Alcubierre's conceptual warp drive suggests that such a craft could be designed with reasonable amounts of energy and matter.http://i.huffpost.com/...75752/thumbs/s-WARP-DRIVE-large.jpg

​

Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.

---

"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

Yeah, that happens every once in a while.This time, as always, it is not related to some soft scifi tech from star trek, they just choose to call anything FTL, "warp drive".I stil don't believe it will happen though. E = mc2 man, E = mc2.

But how is warping spacetime violating mass—energy equivalence? I don't believe the energy content of the universe is changing at all. We are just relocating matter from one location in spacetime to another location, correct?Maybe a better way of stating this is that the matter in the spacecraft does not need to be converted to pure energy to travel at light speed because instead you are 'moving' or more accurately 'warping' spacetime around it. I am in way over my head here of course.Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.

Yes, well, you can do anything you like if you have some exotic matter, so long as it's exotic enough.But you don't.

Exotic matter not totally unfeasible I think.http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2011/08/110812161813.htmEdited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.

...to call this a "loophole" in the speed of light law?

Not exotic in quite the right way. But maybe you could make a science fiction plot device out of this stuff.

Wrong sort of exotic matter. That stuff doesn't warp spacetime, it just summons unicorns.

Hmm, there seem to be a dozen types of 'exotic' matter out there. What exactly is this 'exotic matter' they are talking about and how would we get a bunch of it to form a ring around a spacecraft? Doing more reading to figure this out.

Okay, believe the exotic matter the article is talking about has negative mass. That is to say the energy content in a particular 'area' of spacetime is less than zero which creates in essense a wormhole through the spacetime fabric of the universe. However since space and time are connected, travelling using this 'warp drive' would not only allow you to 'travel' or rather 'warp' through space but also time as well, creating in essense a time machine as well as a fantastical space craft. Interesting.Here is an article that more eloquantly discusses what negative or exotic mass is.Negative Energy - Wormholes and Warp DriveEdited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.

The exotic matter is what is known in scientific circles as
"Unobtainium." as a side note, star trek predicted flip phones, talking computer interaction, flat screens, holograms, laptops, and a whole host of cool stuff.Edited by 1.61803, : No reason given.

Hi, DA.As in avid science fiction fan, I have read a great deal on the Alcubierre drive concept (most of which, due to my lack of a physics background, I still do not understand).But, my basic understanding is that the Alcubierre drive works by warping space before and behind the ship using a bubble of exotic matter. The new discovery is that you can achieve the same effect with just a torus (doughnut) of exotic matter, which purportedly solves the energy-requirement problem (the original Alcubierre drive was supposed to require a mass of fuel equal to the mass of jupiter to move a small spaceship, while the new version requires a much smaller mass, apparently comparable to the Voyager deep-space probes).My understanding is also that the Alcubierre drive suffers from what they call "time dilation" in sci-fi stories. That is, it only seems to go faster than the speed of light from the perspective of a passenger inside the ship. From the perspective of someone outside the ship, the ship does not actually go faster than light.That means, for those of us watching, a Voyager probe with an Alcubierre drive still wouldn't reach Alpha Centauri for hundreds of thousands of years.

I came up with the same idea independently, years ago. Unfortunately, I too lacked the necessary "exotic matter". My problem was compounded by the fact that I can't form more than two or three sentences at a time, so I couldn't turn it into a sci-fi novel either.Today, I'm wondering how you would use such a system to "go" anywhere. Wouldn't warping spacetime mess up your destination?

In General Relativity, the field equations tell you how a given piece of matter effects the spacetime around it. Specifically you enter in a description of the matter and a description of the spacetime it lives in is the output.However you can reverse this process and first write down a spacetime and use the field equations in reverse to figure out what kind of matter gives the spacetime.Alcubierre originally wrote down the spacetime with a warp drive bubble inside. Unfortunately the matter the field equations say is necessary to form the bubble is physically unrealistic. When you include quantum mechanics the results are even more severe. Quantum effects cause the edge of the bubble to emit a blast of thermal radiation strong enough to collapse the bubble.Also, the deeper problem is that quantum field theory forbids the kind of matter the drive requires from existing. Basically you need large negative energy densities, but quantum field theory doesn't allow energy densities that large.The warp drive is one of the many cool things General Relativity permits, but quantum mechanics forbids.

How would spacecraft travelling 10 times faster than the speed of light succumb to time dilation that effects objects traveling close or at the speed of light? Is warping spacetime to 'travel' faster than the speed of light subject to special relativity the same as objects traveling slower than the speed of light. Still trying to wrap my head around this.