Starfleet Jedi

http://www.baylor.edu/pr/news.php?actio ... tory=52090

Traveling Faster Than the Speed of Light: Two Baylor Physicists Have a New Idea That Could Make It Happen
Aug. 11, 2008

by Matt Pene

Two Baylor University scientists have come up with a new method to cause a spaceship to effectively travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics.

Dr. Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy, a Baylor graduate student, theorize that by manipulating the extra spatial dimensions of string theory around a spaceship with an extremely large amount of energy, it would create a "bubble" that could cause the ship to travel faster than the speed of light. To create this bubble, the Baylor physicists believe manipulating the 10th spatial dimension would alter the dark energy in three large spatial dimensions: height, width and length. Cleaver said positive dark energy is currently responsible for speeding up the expansion rate of our universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light for a very brief time.

"Think of it like a surfer riding a wave," said Cleaver, who co-authored the paper with Obousy about the new method. "The ship would be pushed by the spatial bubble and the bubble would be traveling faster than the speed of light."

The method is based on the Alcubierre drive, which proposes expanding the fabric of space behind a ship and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would not actually move, rather the ship would sit in a bubble between the expanding and shrinking space-time dimensions. Since space would move around the ship, the theory does not violate Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which states that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a massive object to the speed of light.

String theory suggests the universe is made up of multiple dimensions. Height, width and length are three dimensions, and time is the fourth dimension. String theorists use to believe that there were a total of 10 dimensions, with six other dimensions that we can not yet identify because of their incredibly small size. A new theory, called M-theory, takes string theory one step farther and states that the "strings" that all things are made of actually vibrate in an additional spatial dimensional, which is called the 10th dimension. It is by changing the size of this 10th spatial dimension that Baylor researchers believe could alter the strength of the dark energy in such a manner to propel a ship faster than the speed of light.

The Baylor physicists estimate that the amount of energy needed to influence the extra dimension is equivalent to the entire mass of Jupiter being converted into pure energy for a ship measuring roughly 10 meters by 10 meters by 10 meters.

"That is an enormous amount of energy," Cleaver said. "We are still a very long ways off before we could create something to harness that type of energy."

The paper appears in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

That sounds a lot like Warp Drive.

I knew ST was more realistic then SW... :)

Does it mean we'd need to scoop energy as we fly through a blackhole or a sun, and cross fingers?

If we can't do something about those energy requirements, then this is as good as no FTL at all. That was, I presume, a standard-density 10x10x10 ship (which, assuming Apollo-like characteristics, would make it around a thousand tonnes, IIRC), which would require a fuel supply mass of around 1,898,700,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes, or about 2 sextillion times heavier than the ship itself.

That said, it would be worth doing on a really frickin' small scale just to prove it could be done.

still better then needing infinite energy

Unless we discover ST's Ultra Antimatter... ;)

It must be noted here that the work done by Dr. Gerald Cleaver and Dr. Richard Obousy is not going to be the be-all and end-all of this line of work. For the first time in history, we actually have a possible way of traveling FTL that does not involve even more difficult or energy intensive means such as wormholes or the like, and we might expect that further study into this matter may lead to other even less energy and mass intensive means to implement this or another similar form of FTL.
-Mike

Mike DiCenso wrote:It must be noted here that the work done by Dr. Gerald Cleaver and Dr. Richard Obousy is not going to be the be-all and end-all of this line of work. For the first time in history, we actually have a possible way of traveling FTL that does not involve even more difficult or energy intensive means such as wormholes or the like, and we might expect that further study into this matter may lead to other even less energy and mass intensive means to implement this or another similar form of FTL.
-Mike

Indeed. I'd wager theres a fair bit of refining that can be done to their equations. and if not, well I suppose eventualy such energy levels might be obtainalbe, zero point generation maybe?

We probably better start putting squirrels in wheels with dynamos right now.

Mr. Oragahn wrote:We probably better start putting squirrels in wheels with dynamos right now.

never underestimate the power of a hoard of squirrels

I had been watching a thing on the history channel several weeks back that part way through started talking about people getting out into space with that space elevator, but then, it went to FTL stuff and very briefly, it talked about this one guy at a university or something that started saying he was trying to use electromagnetic energy to change a normal object into tachyonic matter to make it go, but it never explained any basic idea how. I forget the guy's name, but the EU folks also have a possible contender. Anyone see it?

Well, there is always the off chance we eventually discover something about the universe that does make 'effective FTL' possible without impossible quantities of energy needed.

So far it looks like we're out of luck though :(