Warp Bubbles In Negative Mass

How tech does that sound? Well, travelling at the speed of light just got a step closer thanks to theoretical physicist, Chris Van Den Broeck, of the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium who has come up with a new idea for a warp drive that would allow starships to travel at tremendous speeds through space, safely cushioned within a warp bubble.

"I started thinking, 'How do you fit a spaceship inside something very small?' It only took an hour or so to come up with the idea," Van Den Broeck said. "But I thought it would never work, so I left it in my drawer for a few months."

A few weeks ago, or multi-million light years, depending which galaxy you're just joined us from, he dug it out again and worked out how to sidestep some of the major theoretical obstacles to warp-speed travel. How would any normal human go about "sidesteping some of the major theoretical obstacles to warp-speed travel"? Well, he just begun by improving upon calculations made by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who startled the physics world five years ago with his assertion that warp-speed travel was not just the stuff of sci-fi starships.

Alcubierre proposed a warp bubble, a little region where a vessel could rest. The space contracts in front of the ship and expands behind it, allowing the bubble to warp space and surf through a wave of space- time, faster than the speed of light.

"There are very strong constraints on a bubble," said Larry Ford, a professor of physics at Tufts University who refuted the theory in 1997. "It needs to be very thin and it requires an enormous amount of negative mass, larger than the order of the observable universe."

"The Alcubierre solution would require the energy of 1 billion galaxies," Ford said. "It would be an unrealistically large amount of negative mass."

But, our man Van Den Broeck forged a path around Ford's findings and came up with an alternative to Alcubierre's solution that would only require 1 gram of negative mass to travel at warp speed ... quite a bit smaller, you'll notice, than the originally thought billion galaxies.

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