Despite allegations that scientists have accidentally generated a warp bubble, it appears that warp speed is still a long way off. But there's still hope: a team of scientists led by Dr. Harold G. "Sunny" White has proposed a structure that might be created in the real world and utilized to explore the Casimir effect. It's a tiny step, but it's a step nevertheless.
White and his colleagues recently published "Worldline Numerics Applied to Custom Casimir Geometry Generates Unanticipated Intersection With Alcubierre Warp Metric." They "established" the necessary circumstances to - theoretically - produce a tiny warp bubble in a lab. A warp bubble is similar to an automobile on a warp drive highway.
While White and colleagues have tested some of the science underlying this finding in the lab, the warp bubble itself is still simply a hypothesis based on calculations, which White and colleagues have yet to confirm empirically. However, White believes it would dramatically transform the science of warp-speed space travel if they succeed.
A representational photo of a warp.
Warp Drive Explained
White explains that "space warp" is one of two flaws discovered in the theory of general relativity by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in a 1994 study titled "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity."
Warping space-time would resemble the fabric bunching up in front of the bubble and then extending out behind it in a train, similar to a wormhole, which potentially allows you to skip through space-time by "walking" through an area where the fabric is folded together like a fan.
Alcubierre, per Inverse, compares the phenomena to being on a moving walkway at an airport in a presentation from 2017.
A warp bubble might move down this corridor and ride the bunching space-time fabric in such a manner that its relative time stayed slow (meaning John Doe wouldn't be an old man when he arrived) despite traversing huge distances faster than the speed of light, according to theory and science fiction.
However, there is a catch: the bubble must be encased in negative energy, such as that produced by anti-gravity. Unfortunately, that isn't something that can be readily replicated in a laboratory.
Time is Everything in Warp Space
The Debrief said the phrase "time is everything" is commonly used in this concept. It's not surprising, then, that when Dr. White started his latest DARPA-funded research into custom Casimir cavities (a unique, micro-scale structure with a wide range of promising applications), he had no idea he'd make such a potentially historical discovery, especially one that supports a theoretical concept that has long defined his public persona.
It suffices to emphasize that Casimir cavities have nothing to do with warp drive theory or mechanics, despite the intricate physics behind them and the intriguing quantum-scale forces commonly detected in these strange formations. At the very least, they had never been before. However, White and his LSI team are enthusiastic about their work, which DARPA feels has many possibilities.
So, whether by chance or fate, one of the few engineers on the planet who would immediately know what he was looking at when conducting his Casimir cavity research happened to be in the exact right place at the exact right time to notice a striking similarity between his warp drive passion project and his current research, an observation that might have gone unnoticed otherwise.
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