Doo doo dee doo! How are you doing? Did you use hyperspace to avoid the Christmas cybercrowds on your way here? Sure would make life travel easier if we had it, wouldn't it? Well fill your coffee mug and latch onto a virtual muffin or doughnut while I tell you about advances in warp drive exploration.
In the Star Wars films, spaceships like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon are able to jet between solar systems that are light-years apart. According to "Star Wars" canon, these "hyperdrive" propulsion systems let intergalactic travellers jump into a shadow dimension called "hyperspace," which provides shortcuts between points in real space.
While the movies are hazy on the details, the idea of hyperspace and faster-than-light (FTL) travel has a basis in real science, said Eric Davis, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced
Studies at Austin, in Texas, who researches the possibility of FTL travel.
Studies at Austin, in Texas, who researches the possibility of FTL travel.
While it's impossible to travel faster than light, the curved nature of space-time proposed by Albert Einstein suggests space could be distorted to shorten the distance between two points. One way of doing this would be a warp drive that contracts space in front of a ship and expands it behind the vessel. Another would be to create a wormhole, or a section of space that curves in on itself to create a shortcut between distant locations. Creating these kinds of distortions would require exotic matter with so-called "negative energy," Davis told Live Science, a phenomenon that has been demonstrated in the lab using the Casimir effect, which can be measured as the force of attraction or repulsion between two parallel mirrors that are placed just tiny distances apart in a vacuum. [Warped Physics: 10 Effects of Faster-Than-Light Travel]
that contracts space in front of a ship and expands it behind the vessel. Another would be to create a wormhole, or a section of space that curves in on itself to create a shortcut between distant locations. Creating these kinds of distortions would require exotic matter with so-called "negative energy," Davis told Live Science, a phenomenon that has been demonstrated in the lab using the Casimir effect, which can be measured as the force of attraction or repulsion between two parallel mirrors that are placed just tiny distances apart in a vacuum. [Warped Physics: 10 Effects of Faster-Than-Light Travel]
Earlier this year, a lab called Eagleworks, based at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, claimed to have created a warp drive that appears to exploit this effect to create spatial distortions in a vacuum. But, sadly for sci-fi fans, the lab's unpublished findings have been met with skepticism. And Davis, an FTL optimist, called the claims "bizarre and questionable."
"These remain as speculative theoretical concepts at present because they remain under further theoretical study and also because there is no technology envisioned that can implement them," he said. "It might take between 50 and 300 years to develop the technology that produces traversable wormholes or warp drives."
50-300 years sounds like a long time but in the overall scheme of things, it is a drop in the proverbial bucket of the universe...and that's one meganormous bucket! Did you know that the Milky Way galaxy alone is about 100,000 light years across? Meanwhile, sci-fi writers and film-makers can still tease us with these 'someday' products.
See ya, eh!
Bob
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