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- In Star Trek, the USS Enterprise is powered
by what is called a "warp drive" and at the moment only Paramount
Pictures know its secrets.
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- But new, highly mathematical research
may have brought us one step closer to being able to explore the Universe
in a starship capable of travelling faster than the speed of light.
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- The analysis of the concept of a warp
drive by Chris Van Den Broeck of the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium
means that building a starship Enterprise is a little closer.
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- The fabric of space
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- Dr Van Den Broeck was reanalysing ground-breaking
calculations made five years ago by Mexican mathematician Miguel Alcubierre.
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- Alcubierre said that it was possible
to imagine how a warp drive would work by distorting the fabric of space.
Starships would ride along waves in so-called spacetime, like surfers do
along waves in the sea.
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- The idea relies on the concept that,
to physicists, space is not empty. Strange as it may seem, space has a
shape that can be distorted by matter. In fact the force of gravity is
actually due to the curvature of space - recognising that was the greatest
triumph of Albert Einstein's career.
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- So you could use matter to distort the
space around a starship to create a "ripple" in spacetime.
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- 'Warp bubble'
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- Miguel Alcubierre came up with the idea
of expanding the space behind a starship and contracting it in front of
it. The starship would rest in a "warp bubble" between the two
spacetime distortions. The result would be a wave in spacetime along which
the starship would surf.
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- It was a fantastic idea. There would
be no limit to the velocity that a starship could attain. It could travel
faster than the speed of light because the starship would, strictly speaking,
be stationary in the space of its warp bubble.
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- Also, the starship and its crew would
be weightless and would therefore not be crushed by the enormous G-forces
of acceleration and deceleration.
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- What's more, the passage of time inside
the warp bubble would be the same as that outside it. The crew would not
suffer from Einstein's "time dilation" effect where time passes
at different rates for people travelling at different speeds.
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- The time dilation effect means that anyone
travelling to the stars at speeds approaching that of light would experience
a journey of a few years. But when they came back to Earth they would find
that thousands of years had passed and all their friends were long dead.
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- Massive energies
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- Alcubierre's idea was a good one, but
his work seemed to suggest that building a warp bubble would be impossible
in practice. More energy than the entire universe could supply would be
needed to create the spacetime distortions.
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- However, Dr Van Den Broeck's analysis
suggests a far lower amount of energy is required, reduced by a factor
of one followed by 62 zeros.
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- This is not to say that it is time to
go out and start building a warp drive. As Dr Van Den Broeck says in his
forthcoming paper in General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology: "This
does not mean that the proposal is realistic."
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- Building a warp drive is currently far
beyond our technological abilities and there are severe theoretical arguments
that say it may never be possible.
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- But it just might be. Dr Van Den Broeck
concludes his analysis by saying, "The first warp drive is still a
long way off but maybe it has now become slightly less improbable."
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