Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say

Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say

 

A ring-shaped warp drive device could transport a football-shape starship (center) to effective speeds faster than light. The concept was first proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre.
CREDIT: Harold White

by Clara Moskowitz,

SPACE.com Assistant Managing Editor

A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.

A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.

Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.

"There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.

An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.

Warping space-time

 [Star Trek's Warp Drive: Are We There Yet? | Video]

Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all.

"Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light," explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. "But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."

With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.

The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.

Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more, White found.

"The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told SPACE.com. "The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab."

Laboratory tests

White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory.

They set up what they call the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, essentially creating a laser interferometer that instigates micro versions of space-time warps.

"We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.

He called the project a "humble experiment" compared to what would be needed for a real warp drive, but said it represents a promising first step.

And other scientists stressed that even outlandish-sounding ideas, such as the warp drive, need to be considered if humanity is serious about traveling to other stars.

"If we're ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit, we're going to have to be a little bit audacious," Obousy said.


From Space @ http://www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-possible-interstellar-spaceflight.html
See the PDF @ http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936_2011016932.pdf

Findings of NASA's Harold "Sonny" White Begin To Echo Marshall Barnes STDTS(TM) Research

In a paper presented at last year's 100-Year Starship Public Symposium, endorsed by former President Bill Clinton, elements of warp drive theory, previously the sole development of Marshall Barnes with his STDTS(TM) technology, were presented.

Little more than a month after Marshall appeared at the Mars Conference in Pasadena, California where he was encouraged to pursue the project, using his STDTS™ technology, that has become the successful Verdrehung Fan™ proto-time machine, the 100 Year Starship Public Symposium was held in Houston and endorsed by Bill Clinton. A paper presented there, in a startling development, echoes the documented STDTS™ research of Marshall, citing two key elements that have always been part of the STDTS™ description of warp drive - lower energy requirements for warp drive than previously expected as well as modulating the warp field.

These are all elements mentioned in numerous interviews given by Marshall on the subject of his warp drive prototype, especially, in his groundbreaking paper, Die Grundlagen Der Verzerrung Reise, published online April 19th, 2011( http://network.nature.com/groups/spacephysics/forum/topic... ) . The author of the symposium paper, Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center, cites these two things that make warp drive warrant "further investigation".

"The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told SPACE.com. "The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab".

The same article quotes Icarus Interstellar president, Richard Obousy as saying, "If we're ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit, we're going to have to be a little bit audacious."

"If that doesn't sound like me, I don't know what does," Marshall laughed. Marshall met with and interviewed Obousy for an audio documentary about his STDTS™ and warp drive physics, due out this year, at the Mars Conference is Grapvine, Texas in August of 2011. Marshall presented a paper based on Die Grundlagen Der Verzerring Reise, which is German for The Foundations of Distortion Travel, a reference to the fact that the term "warp" actually means "distortion". While Marshall was at the Mars conference, he was interviewed by several media, including the Dallas Observer ( http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/mixmaster/2011/08/scotty_... ).

Marshall is beyond the laboratory at this point and is actually planning on a variety of launch tests to see if the STDTS™ can help reduce fuel requirements for space launches. His plans include model rockets, balloons and eventually a custom made rocket/balloon combination that will deliver a rocket via ballon to the edge of space outside the Earth and then launch the rocket to see how far it will go with the STDTS™ technology switched on.

"I am not interested in working with Icarus, NASA or any other organization, at this time" Marshall commented, "because for me, this is a private business venture. I have sacrificed greatly, in many different ways, to get this technology developed commercially with no help from the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project or NIAC, which both had their funding cut before I could do anything with them. I hate dealing with bureaucracies and I'm not about to do it now. If NASA wants to buy it from me, they cut me a $500,000,000 check. I'm quite serious. $.5B and not a penny less. We've priced what this is worth and that's the selling price that would make sense at this stage. I know how to develop this without NASA involvement and even prove it in space, so the only way I'd get involved with them at this point is if they bought me out. If I prove that it works in space before hand, you can multiply that price by ten. And under no circumstances is this available to foreign entities."

At least one NASA scientist has seen gravity drop tests of the STDTS™ technology. NASA Kepler scientist Alan Gould, gave Marshall his card and permission to use his name as someone who had actually seen it at the 2010 USA Science and Engineering Festival where Marshall had been an exhibitor. Obousy saw it at the Mars conference, but wants to see it done differently and had difficulty understanding how the signal was divorced from the idea of sound.

"Richard kept connecting the signal idea to a sound being the cause," Marshall explained, "and finally I had to use the example of the sound of a modem dial up. I told him that you can hear the modem, but the sound of it isn't what gets you on the Internet. Besides, when the STDTS™  is in use, you don't hear it. There are no speakers involved. It can all be brought back to the fact that I'm an electronic synthesist, as in music synthesizers. In high school, I translated that into creating 3D oscilloscope art as part of electronics class. My approach comes from outside typical electromagnetic field theory, which is why I built the lab that I had. It was created to study exotic effects of exotic electromagnetic fields created by exotic means".

Marshall points out that by getting sponsorship funding, and through other commercially viable revenue streams, the STDTS™ warp drive project could make as much as $25,000,000 or more, and that's without using it with any other organization for space operations.

"The TV value alone, if we can get a unmanned probe to escape Earth's gravitational field, would be incredible. That's even after we do the Great Gravity Drop project which is worth around 25 mil. The unmanned probe through space could be a TV series, once a week, tune in and see what's happening as the craft flies on its way out of the solar system and beyond. It would be incredible. The ultimate reality show".

Marshall's extensive background in marketing, promotions and sponsorships, gives him the edge he needs to be able to go it alone, and also greatly simplifies the usual daunting task of financing space ventures for profit. That is something that the 100 Year Starship project will have to deal with.

Dave Neyland, director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, was reported by Space.com as saying that the focus of the 100 Year Starship Project is to identify a mechanism that gets such a long-range project "out of the government, and make sure it is an energized and self-sustaining enterprise".

"Well, that puts them in direct competition with me." Marshall added. "I have an energized and self-sustaining enterprise now. I have a business model that doesn't require the government in order to succeed. And I have a technology that is the key to both space travel and time travel. So not only am I ahead of Ronald Mallett, in the time machine area, I'm ahead of the 100 Year Starship, but I already knew that".

Marshall points out that he's not trying to focus on manned flight, which would require all kinds of additional tests and involvement with many other entities. His vision is of probes with high definition video cameras that would beam images back to Earth. With no human lives at stake, issues like life support equipment and safety can be avoided, saving time and money.


From PRLOG @ http://www.prlog.org/12052006-findings-of-nasas-harold-sonny-white-begin-to-echo-marshall-barnes-stdtstm-research.html

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Speed of Light Exceeded in Labs

Speed of Light Exceeded in Labs

Gain Assisted Superluminal Light Propagation

by Dr. Lijun Wang

Scientists have apparently broken the universe’s speed limit. For generations, physicists believed there is nothing faster than light moving through a vacuum - a speed of 186,000 miles per second. But in an experiment in Princeton, N.J., physicists sent a pulse of laser light through cesium vapor so quickly that it left the chamber before it had even finished entering. The pulse traveled 310 times the distance it would have covered if the chamber had contained a vacuum. This seems to contradict not only common sense, but also a bedrock principle of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which sets the speed of light in a vacuum, about 186,000 miles per second, as the fastest that anything can go. But the findings--the long-awaited first clear evidence of faster-than-light motion--are "not at odds with Einstein," said Lijun Wang, who with colleagues at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J., report their results in today’s issue of the journal Nature. "However," Wang said, "our experiment does show that the generally held misconception that ’nothing can move faster than the speed of light’ is wrong." Nothing with mass can exceed the light-speed limit. But physicists now believe that a pulse of light--which is a group of massless individual waves--can. To demonstrate that, the researchers created a carefully doctored vapor of laser-irradiated atoms that twist, squeeze and ultimately boost the speed of light waves in such abnormal ways that a pulse shoots through the vapor in about 1/300th the time it would take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum. As a general rule, light travels more slowly in any medium more dense than a vacuum (which, by definition, has no density at all). For example, in water, light travels at about three-fourths its vacuum speed; in glass, it’s around two-thirds. The ratio between the speed of light in a vacuum and its speed in a material is called the refractive index. The index can be changed slightly by altering the chemical or physical structure of the medium. Ordinary glass has a refractive index around 1.5. But by adding a bit of lead, it rises to 1.6. The slower speed, and greater bending, of light waves accounts for the more sprightly sparkle of lead crystal glass. The NEC researchers achieved the opposite effect, creating a gaseous medium that, when manipulated with lasers, exhibits a sudden and precipitous drop in refractive index, Wang said, speeding up the passage of a pulse of light. The team used a 2.5-inch-long chamber filled with a vapor of cesium, a metallic element with a goldish color. They then trained several laser beams on the atoms, putting them in a stable but highly unnatural state. In that condition, a pulse of light or "wave packet" (a cluster made up of many separate interconnected waves of different frequencies) is drastically reconfigured as it passes through the vapor. Some of the component waves are stretched out, others compressed. Yet at the end of the chamber, they recombine and reinforce one another to form exactly the same shape as the original pulse, Wang said. "It’s called re-phasing." The key finding is that the reconstituted pulse re-forms before the original intact pulse could have gotten there by simply traveling though empty space. That is, the peak of the pulse is, in effect, extended forward in time. As a result, detectors attached to the beginning and end of the vapor chamber show that the peak of the exiting pulse leaves the chamber about 62 billionths of a second before the peak of the initial pulse finishes going in. That is not the way things usually work. Ordinarily, when sunlight -- which, like the pulse in the experiment, is a combination of many different frequencies -- passes through a glass prism, the prism disperses the white light’s components. This happens because each frequency moves at a different speed in glass, smearing out the original light beam. Blue is slowed the most, and thus deflected the farthest; red travels fastest and is bent the least. That phenomenon produces the familiar rainbow spectrum. But the NEC team’s laser-zapped cesium vapor produces the opposite outcome. It bends red more than blue in a process called "anomalous dispersion," causing an unusual reshuffling of the relationships among the various component light waves. That’s what causes the accelerated re-formation of the pulse, and hence the speed-up In theory, the work might eventually lead to dramatic improvements in optical transmission rates. "There’s a lot of excitement in the field now," said Steinberg. "People didn’t get into this area for the applications, but we all certainly hope that some applications can come out of it. It’s a gamble, and we just wait and see." From The Anderson Institute @ http://www.andersoninstitute.com/gain-assisted-superluminal-light-propogation.html

LANL scientist makes radio waves

travel faster than light

Scientist John Singleton insists that Albert Einstein wouldn't be mad at him, even though at first blush Singleton appears to have twisted the famous physicist's theories about light into a pretzel.

by Sue Vorenberg

Most people think Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that's not really the case, Singleton said.

Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light — but phenomenon like radio waves? That's a different story, said Singleton, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow.

Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light.

The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists, Singleton said.

"Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit radio waves in pulses, but what we don't know is why these pulses are so bright or why they travel such long distances," Singleton said. "What we think is these are transmitting the same way our machine does."

And beyond explaining what has been a bit of a mystery to the astronomical community, Singleton's discovery could have wide-ranging technological impacts in areas such as medicine and communications, he said.

"Because nobody's really thought about things that travel faster than light before, this is a wide-open technological field," Singleton said.

One possible use for the resulting speedy radio waves — which are packed into a very powerful wave the size of a pencil point — could be the creation of a new generation of cell phones that communicate directly to satellites, rather than transmitting through relay towers as they now do.

Those phones would have more reliable service and would also be more difficult for hackers to intercept, Singleton said.

Another application could be in very targeted chemotherapy, where a patient takes the drugs, and the radio waves are used to activate them very specifically in the area around a tumor, he said.

The concept of phenomenon traveling faster than light has been discussed in the back alleys of the scientific community since the 1970s, but observations were based on strange aberrations, like the distorted images of stars as they traveled near the speed of light, said Mario Perez, a Los Alamos scientist who worked with Singleton on the project.

"Radio astronomers found sources that looked like things were traveling faster than light, but they were not truly superluminal, like this is," Perez said.

And other effects have also shown the possibility of phenomenon traveling faster than light, but Singleton's experiment has taken that to a new level, Singleton said.

"If you take a laser and shine it on the moon and swing it rather gently, for example, the spot on the moon travels faster than the speed of light," Singleton said. "If an effect can do that, it makes you wonder if you can do things with light to get the equivalent of a sonic boom."

That's what the faster-than-light radio waves — more scientifically known as superluminal transmissions — do. They're the light version of a sonic boom, he said.

"When something travels faster than its own wave speed you get a very large disturbance," Singleton said. "And these powerful signals that result, well, this would be how E.T., if he were out there, would likely try to communicate with us."

If Einstein were still alive, he probably wouldn't be all that surprised by the discovery, Perez said, even if it does seem on the surface to conflict with some of his theories.

"He might have thought, 'why did this take so long,' " Perez said.

Last week, the two scientists presented the work to the American Astronomical Society at its conference in Austin, Texas.

Singleton wasn't sure how it would be received by the astronomical community, but so far, other scientists seem very interested in his work, he said.

"I thought there would be more resistance to it, because traditional astronomers are very resistant to things traveling faster than the speed of light," Singleton said.

In the next few years, the scientists plan to build a series of newer, more powerful machines to further demonstrate the technology, Perez added.

The Department of Energy has given them a three-year,
$3 million grant to work on the project.

And Einstein — he wouldn't be mad about that at all, Singleton said.

Contact Sue Vorenberg
at 986-3072 or svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com

From http://www.santafenewmexican.com/HealthandScience/LANL_scientist_makes_radio_waves_travel_faster_than_light

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