Faster than light travel!

MTd2

Isn't the cosmological inflation, or even the concept of expansion of the universe, a kind of isotropic warp drive? As for the inflation, if there was a way to deflate space ahead and inflate behind, wouldn't that be a warp drive?

sanman

Well, that's exactly what Alcubierre's Warp Drive concept proposes - a bubble with contracting space in front and expanding space behind, in order to achieve FTL.

MTd2

Yes, I know. But I am actually thinking about a feasible mechanism. What was the energy density by the end of inflation? If we could compress matter at least that much, maybe we could do warp drive.

sanman

Yeah, that would be a prohibitively high mass-energy requirement, which Alcubierre calculated as a Jupiter-sized mass. Impossible to do. But Harold White has recently come up with revised calculations that say it can be done with a mass of 800kg, which is much more manageable - and possibly even lower mass requirements if the warp field is modulated.

MTd2

[QUOTE=sanman;4086320]Yeah, that would be a prohibitively high mass-energy requirement, which Alcubierre calculated as a Jupiter-sized mass. Impossible to do. /QUOTE]

What I am saying is something different. They use negative mass to achieve that. I am talking about using usual matter to deflate space, the opposite of inflation. Is it possible, to deflate space?

sanman

Well, Alcubierre's concept uses negative mass

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

JesseM

Presumably the point of the capacitor ring is to produce negative energy density (exotic matter) in the space between the plates by the Casimir effect? Still, like I said I don't think the belief is "reasonable" unless someone has actually shown mathematically (by finding an exact solution or by numerical solution) that merely producing a ring of negative energy density is sufficient to cause a "warp bubble" to form--while Alcubierre showed that exotic matter was necessary to sustaining an already-existing bubble, he did not address the question of what would be necessary to form a bubble in the first place.

sanman

Somehow, I'd always imagined that "warp coils" might be coils with some kind of superfluid flowing through them, where the movement of the superfluid matter then produces gravity waves, and these waves could then be concentrated by the helical coil shape, in the same way that an electrical coil can then concentrate electric and magnetic fields through its shape.

In principle, would it theoretically be possible to concentrate gravity waves through a helical coil shape, just as we do with an electromagnetic coil?

If so, then why can't we run a superfluid like ultra-cold helium through such coils, to achieve this? Wouldn't this perhaps result in a space "warp"?

Vanadium 50

"Warp coils" are science fiction, and this thread has long-ago moved past the PF standard of published research.