NASA starts building faster-than-light warp engine

rt.com ^ | 7/24/13 | Rt.com

[GrandJediMasterYoda]

NASA starts building faster-than-light warp engine Get short URL Published time: July 23, 2013 19:06 Edited time: July 24, 2013 14:39

Researchers at NASA’s Texas-based Johnson Space Center are trying to prove that it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light, and hope to one day build an engine that resembles the fictional Starship Enterprise.

NASA physicist and engineer Dr. Harold G. White, 43, believes it is possible to bend the rules of time and space that Albert Einstein constructed when he postulated that it is impossible to exceed the speed of light.

White's research is based on the theories of Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who in 1994 theorized that exceeding Einstein’s galactic speed limit was possible if scientists discovered a way to harness the expansion and contraction of space. And Harold and his team are trying to do just that.

[Dead Corpse]

Or... You know... Not anything quite that energetic...

http://www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-possible-interstellar-spaceflight.html

But yeah, hang 10... Er... Dude.

[Theophilus]

It’s the only way to reach the escape velocity of our ludicrous debt.

[ElkGroveDan]

This is akin to setting up a single piston/cylinder with some compressed gas to prove the theory that a V8 ICE is feasible in theory.

No it's not. It's akin to experimenting with hydrocarbon vapors to see how flammable they are.

[MHGinTN]

The key to 'violating' that equation is to look at the t factor inherent in both the V² and the c² ... look at how time is treated in both of the velocity expressions. If dimension Time has variable expressions (and it does, we just don't take them into consideration yet), then nibbling at the "t" is the key.

[Dead Corpse]

Not quite, but you are entitled to your pinion...

[MHGinTN]

Actually, no. A rapidly spinning black hole would just be dragging spacetime into distortion. What is needed is a bubble that isolates the time and space of the occupied craft from the spacetime of the 'vacuum' because it is the inertial effect from the vacuum that causes the speed limit for photons. Since a photon exists as a wave packet (the function of a wave packet if you wish) it is 'held' by the temporal stasis of the vacuum.

When the Universe began, as soon as matter appeared time took hold.

Think what happens to a photon as it crosses the Universe. It remains in a null path, a temporal suspension, always in the present of the source at the moment it is created/expelled. Time does not pass for the photon. What happens when it reaches a source/impacts a sensor? What happens to the time component of the photon packet? What does the photon 'release' such that it is sensed? It isn't inertia because the photon arrives without mass.

[Have Ruck - Will Travel]

We’ll promote it as the wonderful socialist universe that they see in Star Trek.

I want to follow them at a safe distance and watch what happens when they make first contact with another spacefaring species. It should be fun to watch.