Harold White's Warp Drive Research: Casimir Effect Insight?

[Randy Subers]

TL;DR Summary

How important is Harold White's paper on warp drives

This is in reference to https://epjc.epj.org/articles/epjc/abs/2021/07/10052_2021_Article_9484/10052_2021_Article_9484.html in the European Physics Journal. In it it is stated a Casimir effect produced an energy pattern similar to what is needed for an Alcubierre warp field.. Is there substance to this? It seems to me that since the Casimir effect produces a negative energy area this is more hype than substance, or am I missing something?

[Mentor Note -- two threads on this subject have been merged]

 

[PAllen]

Various quantum effects do produce stress energy states violating the dominant energy condition, which is what is required for a warp drive GR solution. The problem is getting large macroscopic concentrations of them. It is also worth noting that if you could really make a ball of such exotic matter, you wouldn’t need a warp drive for superluminal effects - you could just cause the ball to move superluminally. It is a feature of exotic matter that it can move on a spacelike trajectory per the field equations of GR

 

[Haorong Wu]

I read from https://thedebrief.org/darpa-funded-researchers-accidentally-create-the-worlds-first-warp-bubble that a first warp bubble was discovered.

Is that true?

 

[mfb]

It's White needing more funding. Here is the paper. It's purely theoretical work. They haven't created anything apart from computer simulations. And even the computer simulations don't suggest a "warp bubble". At best they create a somewhat interesting energy density distribution.

 

[RobertGC]

This article discounts the idea on the grounds the research didn’t actually create a “warp bubble”:

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/no-warp-bubble/

But the negative energy regions discussed in the research known as Casimir cavities have been experimentally confirmed for small regions:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

Then by using multiple copies of these Casimir regions, it might be possible to use the idea to transport small particles at superluminal speed thus producing superluminal communication, if not superluminal travel.

Robert Clark

 

[PeterDonis]

by using multiple copies of these Casimir regions

You can't just have multiple copies of Casimir regions, because each small Casimir region requires a pair of plates to produce it, and there must be normal regions on the outsides of the plates. So you would end up with a lot of tiny Casimir regions surrounded by plates, with normal regions in between. That won't get you anything except a lot of tiny Casimir regions.