TechRepublic has a pretty daring article with the complete title Zefram Cochrane Paging: Humans Have Found a Way to Make Warp Bubbles
It was written with Star Trek fans in mind.
A team of scientists working with DARPA, including Dr Harold G “Sonny” White, a pioneer of vertical drive, may have brought us one step closer to that reality with the announcement that they discovered the space-warping bubble, which is fundamental to the faster-than-light travel of the Star Trek universe.
However, it underlies the paper on physics and current understandings.
This is a rather complicated concept that involves a lot of math, but at its most basic level, a warp bubble is a bit of space that’s narrowed in front and expanded in back. This shape theoretically propels the bubble and its contents forward at speeds exceeding the speed of light without ever violating the laws of physics: You don’t technically moving faster than light, you are gliding in a condensed space bubble.
Warp bubbles have long been the realm of science fiction, until theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre came along and formulated his Alcubierre warp drive theory in 1994, maintaining general relativity in while allowing faster-than-light travel. The key that it rests on, is an energy density field that can be configured into a vacuum bubble that can make anything inside it negative mass.
And bring us to the present.
Fast forward to 2021, and Dr. White, whose 2012 paper was written while he was at NASA as the Advanced Propulsion Subject Team Leader, is conducting DARPA-funded research on object known as the Casimir cavity. These recesses are made up of two parallel plates with a pillar running between them. These are very small – about the size of a micrometer – and they do one really cool thing: Create a negative vacuum between the plates when exposed to a normal vacuum.
“You can predict zero pressure outside and zero inside the cavity, but what we found when we measured it was negative pressure in between the plates,” said Dr. White.
“What we are trying to do is explore the quantum vacuum at a fundamental level,” said Dr. White. “We think there’s a little more to these vacuums than we know at the moment. Some unknown characteristics can be used to create some really useful technology. ” Hence the interest of DARPA.
HT / MOSH
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