Starship bloopersīobrick and Martire show that any warp drive must be a shell of material in a constant state of motion, enclosing a flat region of spacetime. Bobrick and Martire’s work is set to change all that. There’s just less rug between you and the cup when you switch the drive on.Īlcubierre’s suggestion, while mathematically rigorous, is difficult to understand at an intuitive level. It contracts spacetime to make your path shorter. The warp drive is like tugging on spacetime to bring your destination closer.īut analogies have their limits: a warp drive doesn’t really drag your destination toward you.
You could move across the rug, or tug the rug toward you.
You’re on the rug and you want to get to the cup. How does Alcubierre’s device work? Here discussion often relies on analogies, because the maths is so complex. One could potentially make a round trip into deep space and still be greeted by one’s nearest and dearest at home. Such a drive would also avoid the uncomfortable consequences of time dilation. A flat region is like a part of the mat with nothing on it. Gravity is nothing more than the tendency objects have to roll into the the dents created by things like stars and planets. The mat curves in the presence of matter and energy (think of putting a bowling ball on the mat). To get a sense of what “flat” means in this context, note that spacetime is sort of like a rubber mat. He argued that the mathematics of general relativity allowed for “warp bubbles” – regions where matter and energy were arranged in such a way as to bend spacetime in front of the bubble and expand it to the rear in a way that allowed a “flat” area inside the bubble to travel faster than light.ĭon't stop me now! Superluminal travel in Einstein's universe The catch, however, is that upon one’s return more than 300 years will have passed on Earth. One can reach a distant star that is 150 lightyears away within one’s lifetime. Assuming a constant state of acceleration, this makes it possible to travel the stars. Second, the clock on a spaceship travelling close to the speed of light would slow down relative to a clock on Earth (this is known as time dilation). Even travelling at this dizzying speed it would still take us four years to arrive at Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun. First, nothing can be accelerated past the speed of light (around 300,000 km per second). General relativity places two constraints on interstellar travel. The equations of general relativity capture the way in which spacetime – the very fabric of reality – bends in response to the presence of matter and energy which, in turn, explains how matter and energy move. The story of warp drives starts with Einstein’s crowning achievement: general relativity.
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