NASA May Have Accidentally Created a Warp Field 

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NASA May Have Accidentally Created a Warp Field

“Star Trek” introduced the world outside of rocket science circles to the concept of warp drive – the propulsion system that allowed the starship Enterprise to travel faster than the speed of light. Warp speed is the holy grail that would let us explore the universe safely surrounded and protected by a space-distorting warp field. After watching the SpaceX rocket recently just try to land on a platform, you’d think this ability is years if not decades away. Yet the buzz on space websites is that NASA may have accidentally discovered a way to create a warp field. Wait, what?

Check out episode 13.15 of the MU Podcast for a in-depth discussion of the warp drive HERE.

To get around the theory of relativity, physicist Miguel Alcubierre came up with the concept of a bubble of spacetime which travels faster than the speed of light while the ship inside of it is stationary. The bubble contracts spacetime in front of the ship and expands it behind it. The warp drive would look like a football inside a flat ring. The tremendous amount of energy it would need made this idea prohibitive until Harold “Sonny” White of NASA’s Johnson Space Center calculated that making the ring into a donut shape would significant reduce the energy needs.

Meanwhile, in the lab, NASA and other space programs were working on prototypes of the EmDrive or RF resonant cavity thruster invented by British aerospace engineer Roger J. Shawyer. This propulsion device uses a magnetron to produce microwaves for thrust, has no moving parts and needs no reaction mass for fuel. In 2014, Johnson Space Center claimed to have developed its own low-power EmDrive.

Which brings us to today’s warp field buzz. Posts on NASASpaceFlight.com, a website devoted to the engineering side of space news, say that NASA has a tool to measure variances in the path-time of light. When lasers were fired through the EmDrive’s resonance chamber, it measured significant variances and, more importantly, found that some of the beams appeared to travel faster than the speed of light. If that’s true, it would mean that the EmDrive is producing a warp field or bubble. Here’s a comment from a space forum following the tests.

That’s the big surprise. This signature (the interference pattern) on the EmDrive looks just like what a warp bubble looks like. And the math behind the warp bubble apparently matches the interference pattern found in the EmDrive.

Another surprise is that the discovery was accidental, as this comment attests.

Seems to have been an accidental connection. They were wondering where this “thrust” might be coming from. One scientists proposed that maybe it’s a warp of the spacetime foam, which is causing the thrust.

What happens next? To prove that the warp effect was not caused by atmospheric heating, the test will be replicated in a vacuum. If the same results are achieved, it seems to mean that the EmDrive is producing a warp field, which could ultimately lead to the development of a warp drive.

What does that mean? I’ll let the physicists, propulsion experts and space scientists answer that. All I know is, it will cause a lot of wet seats at the next Star Trek convention.

 TAGS: Johnson Space Center, nasa, Science, space, spacetime, spacetime bubble, speed of light, Star Trek, warp drive, warp speed

The story of Jasmine Tridevil, a massage therapist in Florida who claimed she paid a plastic surgeon $20,000 to have a third breast surgically implanted on her chest, deflated pretty quickly, to…

Now here’s a good idea: what if a highly respected individual – with a PhD in Psychology – approached a select group of equally well respected individuals in the field of parapsychology?…

The popularity of the films Total Recall (1990, 2012) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) tells us that the idea of memory manipulation can make for an interesting sci-fi premise….

Except it is not. Sure it was fictionnal in the 60s when they first wrote the original series, but a real warp drive theory exists since the late 90s. The power requirements were however unrealistic before its revision by NASA a few years ago. But now it is in the real of the possible. And apparently they stumbled upon a way to generate the theorized warp field. This is an exciting time to be alive.

A lost of science fiction writers were scientists themselves and some of them were even consultants for the DoD for the development of new types of weapons.

I’m going to be extremely sceptical about this source, the claims made and, if it’s all true, what the actual output of this drive would be. However, if this was their ‘Chicago pile’ moment and this was a propulsion method that could actually deliver on the promise, it would beat fire, the alphabet, modern medicine an the internet combined for what it will do for humanity.

If distant space travel would become a possibility it would expand our reach as a species dramatically.

There were no shuttles or other space vessels that could have been launched before the crew’s air ran out. It’s not like jumping in a car, or even taking off in an airplane, you know. Not saying they shouldn’t have told the crew, because they probably should, but they all knew no rescue mission was possible.

No, actually most of the things we have now — cell phones, computers, the internet, virtual reality — all were predicted by SF writers decades ago.

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