User blog:Mr.Robbo/On 'Superluminal Inductors' ...again.

HELLO. In 1994, a guy called Miguel Alcubierre came up with the 'warp drive' (named after the FTL drive in the Star Trek sci-fi shows), a method for an object to travel faster-than-light which agreed with Einstein's equations. Before this, the only method for an object to travel faster-than-light that agreed with Einstein's equations was the wormhole (or 'Einstein-Rosen bridge, if you want to be all posh and technical).

It is so rare for an FTL method to agree with Einstein's equations because they say that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light*. However, in certain exceptional circumstances spacetime itself can expand (such as in the Big Bang) or contract (such as in black holes) faster than the speed of light.

The warp drive was a spherical 'bubble' that would encompass a starship. The front of the bubble would cause spacetime to contract faster than the speed of light (such as in a black hole), while the back would cause spacetime to expand faster than the speed of light (such as in the Big Bang). The starship would sit happily in the centre, completely still (though the bubble would be blasting through space at warp speeds!)

HOWEVER, you're not gonna get the kind of energy to do that out of a pair of double-A batteries, or a star for that matter, or even a galaxy, in fact, the original calculations said that you would need to convert more than the whole universe into pure energy to power a warp bubble... wait for it... 200 metres across... at 10 times light speed.

There were other problems, too, such as the fact that you can't communicate through an FTL warp bubble (aka. to turn it off), and the small fact that turning such a powerful warp bubble off anyway would probably give off a planet torching death ray. Whoops. Plus the fact that the matter needs to be negative (aka. weighs less than 0kg) I won't try to explain further, you just need to know that there were problems.

ANYWAY, one day this guy called Harold White looked at the calculations for the energy requirements of a warp bubble and was all like "hey, why've you guys said that the warp bubble wall should have a thickness of, like, ten trillion trillion trillionths of a millimetre?" and physicists were like "well, the thinner we make the warp bubble the more it pulls on spacetime, like, if you crushed the Earth into a black hole it would have more gravity than it does now." Then Harold was like "wouldn't it be easier if you made the warp bubble a lot thicker, like, metres?" and the physicists were all like "I disagree" then Harold was like "it reduces the energy requirements down to 500kg (4.5x10^19 joules)" and then the physicists were just like "WTF!!?" then Harold proceeded to dance to Gangnam Style (not real conversation).

MOVING ON, Einstein's equations showed that the easiest way to make a warp bubble would be to create a ring of negative matter that fully encompasses the starship. Now Harold came along again and said "wait a minute, it's just a ring; how do you determine which way the warp bubble will travel?" Turns out that when you say that a warp bubble travels at 10 times lightspeed, it's more like 'light in the bubble would travel 10 times lightspeed!' In other words, the warp bubble multiplies the current speed of the starship!

This solves a lot of the original problems with warp drive. There is a lot less energy involved, so the warp drive is a lot safer and easier to make. Also, since the warp drive multiplies the speed of a starship, this solves the control problem.

For example, if the warp drive multiplies the speed of the starship by 100, and the starship is travelling at 10% light speed, the starship's 'effective velocity' will be 10 times lightspeed. Now you can't communicate through a FTL warp bubble to turn it off, but if the starship decelerates (using conventional engines) to 0.9% lightspeed, its effective speed will now be 0.9 times the speed of light! STL! You can turn the warp bubble off! Yay!

BY THE WAY, there is this other guy called Marshall Barnes. Marshall claims that he knew about this boost effect before Harold, and that he's even built a machine to prove it. Marshall's device apparently uses "synthetic electromagnetic fields" to produce a warp drive effect that multiplies the speed of objects within the field by a factor of about 1.117. He calls it STDTS(TM) (space-time dilator-transmitter system (trademark)). I'm not sure about it myself. If you want to find ou more about that then you'll have to google something like "Marshall Barnes STDTS," here, I've already done it for you.

If you have any questions, just ask me on my message wall. If you totally just don't get me, then ask Nra 'Vadumee or Holbenilord, they could probably give a better explanation than me. Go on... it's fine... I won't mind... (walks quietly away and sobs in corner).


 * Well, there are these hypothetical particles called tachyons, but they're hypothetical so you don't need to know about those... oh, and they travel backwards, rather than forwards, in time.