Warp Engines In Development? 1016
Toloran writes "Although a staple of Sci-Fi space travel, it is often deemed to be just that: Fiction. However, it seems that one is currently in development. "The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft. Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.""
Original article (Score:4, Informative)
Whacky science.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Original article (Score:0, Informative)
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:5, Informative)
This is mostly a myth. Virtually every physicist associated with the Manhattan Project came independently to the conclusion that a nuclear bomb would not ignite the atmosphere, based on what was known about the nuclear cross-sections of atmospheric atoms (which was a lot).
I guess it's possible that some unknown physics could have resulted in ignition of the atmosphere anyway, but we are always at risk from that, so it's somewhat silly to worry about it. For instance, if current physics is wrong, a passing strangelet [wisegeek.com] could destroy the Earth at any moment.
*Staple*. *Staple*. *Staple.* (Score:5, Informative)
Staple. A *staple* of Sci-Fi space travel. A stable would be... well, I don't know what it would be, but it would be something else besides a staple.
People: spelling phonetically doesn't always work. This is getting "rediculous" [sic].
Re:Would it be fit for human travel? (Score:4, Informative)
Warp drive? (Score:5, Informative)
How could smart people be so obviously wrong? (Score:3, Informative)
Igniting the atmosphere was also not realistic. Scientists knew of far more energetic events in recent history (e.g. Tunguska) and even a chemical reaction of the atmosphere was not plausible.
Re:Original article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Phily experiment all over again. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:2, Informative)
It's happened a few times in the past, though apparently never with granualted Uranium.
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:3, Informative)
Just because the air force expressed interest doesn't mean that it's even remotely plausible. The US army, and later the CIA, had a two decade long program to use psychics to spy on the Soviets.
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:5, Informative)
Edward Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere, due to a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei. Hans Bethe calculated, according to Robert Serber, that it could not happen. In his book The Road from Los Alamos, Bethe says a refutation was written by Konopinski, C. Marvin, and Teller as report LA-602 (declassified Feb. 1973, PDF), showing that ignition of the atmosphere was impossible, not just unlikely.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Slower Dimension (Score:3, Informative)
Then for 200 years it would be presumed your dead and by the time you re-emerge they'll have fixed the flaw in the design and we'll have several colonies on different planets.
Reminds me of books bij Felix Thijssen... (Score:1, Informative)
I never knew Heim actually existed and has even published such theories!
Check e.g. http://www.geocities.com/felixthijssen [geocities.com] (it's in Dutch, sorry).
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:2, Informative)
Psuedoscience (Score:5, Informative)
Let's have a thought experiment first (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Original article (Score:1, Informative)
If true, this is extremely important. If valid and useful, any theory must be capable of producing verifiable predictions about the real world.
Now the down side...
In an abstruse way that few physicists even claim to understand, the formulae work out a particle's mass starting from physical characteristics, such as its charge and angular momentum.
If valid and useful, any theory must also be understandable and reproducible by other scientists.
On top of that, all the above statements pertain only to Heim's original work. Regardless of the validity of Heim's work, the entire notion of this "warp drive" is based on this:
It was only in 1980, when the first of his books came to the attention of a retired Austrian patent officer called Walter Dröscher, that the hyperspace propulsion idea came back to life. Dröscher looked again at Heim's ideas and produced an "extended" version, resurrecting the dimensions that Heim originally discarded. The result is "Heim-Dröscher space", a mathematical description of an eight-dimensional universe.
So, in essence, this "warp drive" depends on Droscher's expansion of Heim's work. And Heim's work has not been experimentally verified nor even fully understood. Not much substance to create fanciful tales of a trip to Mars in 5 hours.
Re:I call shenanigans! (Score:5, Informative)
Admittedly Heim's work is not proven, but so far it's not disproven either. That's an important point. Heim (who was blind, mostly deaf, and was born without hands) has advanced a sort of Grand Unification Theory. It covers all the particles we know about, predicts the masses of those particles plus a few more that we haven't *proven* to exist yet, and doesn't suffer from the necessity of the Higgs Boson, which QM and ST predict, but which has yet to be seen (even though we really should have by now.)
It includes predictions of source of Dark Energy ("quintessence particles") and Dark Matter.
In all these respects, it is similar to any number of current Unification Theories. However, it has one set of properties that predict it should be possible to cause a gradient to form in the fabric of space-time, namely that by passing a set of particles through a massive magnetic field in a rotating torus, that it should be possible to cause the creation of a virtual particle pair known as the "gravitophoton" to form. This particle would then cause a compression of space time to form, giving a bias to space so that the generator would be moved in a particular direction.
The theory goes on to predict that if enough of a gradient was formed, then c' > c within the gradient (along with a bunch of other effects) that can't happen in real space. The only option that preserves GR is that the object must move out of "real" space into a parallel dimension/alternate reality where c'>c is allowed. Thus, faster than light travel.
The whole article is about the U.S. being interested in *testing* the theory. To do this, you build a big-ass torroid (6M) and get it spinning fast (> 700m/s) and then energize a big-ass magnetic field (>37 T) and measure to see if the effect occurs. The effect in this case measuring something like 3 newtons.
If it's there, then HURRAY AND HUZZAH, Heim was a genius who goes down in the history books with Einstein and we have warp drive within 100 years.
If it doesn't work, then the theory is proven wrong, and Heim wasted 19 years of his life doing some really obnoxiously hard math.
The thing is, this is just a physics experiment, no different than when Michelson and Morley set up their twin mirror experiment. And although it's a deceptively simple experiment, it could have just as big of repercussions as M&M's.
Calling it warp drive is premature. Saying it could have massive repercussions if sucessful is a huge understatement.
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:3, Informative)
When talking about nuclear weapons, the convention seems to be that "atomic" discusses fission devices, and "thermonuclear" discusses fusion devices.
The risk of atmospheric ignition was really only discussed seriously for thermonuclear devices, i thought?
The manhattan project dealt with the construction of atomic devices. I would imagine that the h-bomb work (led by Edward Teller, iirc) had a different name...
Re:Psuedoscience (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Psuedoscience (Score:5, Informative)
Antimatter may be the ultimate in energy density, but it is not the ultimate in energy storage. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to create that antimatter, much more than you will get from its annihilation with matter.
On to the "trivial" rockets, you may be able to produce lots of thrust with a matter/antimatter engine, but you also produce enormous amounts of radiation. How will you shield the crew compartment, or even the electronics? Lots of heavy metals? More mass = less acceleration.
Finally, the net world production of antimatter is what, femtograms per year? We're nowhere near ready to fuel even one bottle rocket, let alone a spaceship.
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:3, Informative)
I've looked back at the parent and grandparent post, and your comment makes no sense to me.
Pierre Curie was killed by a horse and cart because he didn't look before crossing the road. (Probably lost in thought - a true geek way to die.)
Marie Curie lived to a ripe old age, and died of cancer or leukemia - I forget which. It could have been caused by radiation exposure, but was probably just been old age.
Are there some fictional Curies to which you refer?
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like someone was trying to tell you about Louis Slotin's demise, caused by "tickling the dragon's tail":
Re:Electrogravitics (Score:3, Informative)
Actually I didn't list the problems. But one for instance the use of diamagnetism for levitation works for lifting something like a frog but wont work for something as big as a human.
Use of electrostatic fields to lift very light small frames works but wont work for large scale objects because for example the breakdown voltage in air. These issues are more than engineering.
Re:Unnecessary (Score:5, Informative)
"Point A: All motion is relative. If I walk down the asile of a plane, I'm not suddenly walking at 202 mph; I'm walking 2mph in a 200 mph plane, so long as that plane is around me and at a steady flight."
-this proves nothing. you are still MOVING at 200mph in relation to the observer who is on the ground. and if you take 3 steps in a plane moving 200 mph, you've just traversed the same distance as the plane did...in 3 steps.
"Point B: The speed of light is NOT relative. It's always c. Always, always, always."
-nope. c = the speed of light in a vaccum. c can be much much slower when in a medium...such as water. scientists have recently been able to slow the speed of light down to walking speed.
The very word, RELATIVITY, indicates the complexity and the depth that must be considered when working with the laws of physics. The laws can change and DO change relative to where you are and how fast you are moving and any number of other factors.
Re:Let's have a thought experiment first (Score:4, Informative)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_Theory [wikipedia.org]
[2] http://www.hpcc-space.de/publications/documents/A
Re:Whacky science.... (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, its the press.
The drive is no warp drive. And the idea is NOT to slip it into a different dimension, at least not as far as I understood the stuff about Heim I read so far.
Heim has a somewhat unified theory about forces. Like Lorenz force, that is a force affecting charged particles, the Heim-Lorenz force affects any particle that has mass. (But the force still needs to be shown to exist in experiments)
According to that unified theory you only need compareable weak magnetic fields (compareable like on the surface of our sun, don't remember the exact numbers, but I googled once for references and I think I remember the strength of the field was a bit below the magnetic field of the sun) I think the field needs to be somewhat in the order of 10 times as strong as in the current fusion experiiments.
Such a field would basically work like an "anti grav" drive, not like a warp dirve, and no, you would not be faster than light, you only could speed up pretty easy. In fact I have no clue how you just would use a field as drive anyway
angel'o'sphere
Re:I call shenanigans! (Score:5, Informative)
yes, Heim worked as you describe and his theroy is neither proven nor disproven, how ever its funny how "myths" starts to grow:
That's an important point. Heim (who was blind, mostly deaf, and was born without hands)
No, he was an ordinary physician. With hands, ears and eyes. But he played to much with explosives in his lab and was crippled in an accident, whre he lost his hands, and most of his sight and lots of his hearing.
Most of his theories he worked out AFTER that accident. His wife was writing it down for him and reading him older paragraphs. So most of his therory he made up in his mind and he enver could see the formulars his wife wrote for him on dictat.
Because he was such ill he did not want to travel, and he did not publish in that period. His late students revived his theories over the last 10 -20 years, and now as I mentioned in a diffeent post, they try to rewrite his theory and correct errors in his formulas and try to work out experiments to proof/disproof it.
Unfortunately most researchers find Heims idea contradicting to their picture of the world and reject it without even trying to udnerstand it. But well, its like with a difficult mathematical proof: the one who found the proof likely worked 5 or more years on that. If you like to understand his proof you have to spend at least one year in recalculations. In our time Heims theory is not popular and money to spend for experiements is going elsewhere.
However the basics of his theroy is pretty simple. And I assume its compareable easy to set up an exsperiemnt, or lets say: cheap. Far chaper than the fusion reactors we have built so far
angel'o'sphere
Read more about General Relativity (Score:5, Informative)
There's no evidence. There's no theory. It's just something somebody made up.
Einstein thought that they did. The ultimate goal of general relativity for Einstein was a Grand Unified Theory of Everything. In Einstein's conception, all forces (not just gravity) were the effect of curvatures in space-time. Since all energy was curvatures of space-time, so was all matter. Heim just expounded on Einstein's theories and he did so in a way that actually predicts the masses of fundamental particles. Thinking hard on relativity was what he did to distract himself from the pain of from where his hands used to be after they were blown off in an explosives lab accident. The same incident made him deaf-blind, so he preferred isolation rather than colaboration and pretty much spent all his time on the subject. This same isolation made his theories relatively unknown for a very long time.
The editorial blurb is hideously sensational, though. Even if we do prove that EM fields can alter space and produce gravitational effects, you're a long way from creating a practical form of propulsion. On the other hand, we'd at least have hope of a reactionless drive.
Beware of the Under Toad!!! (Score:2, Informative)
Multiple gravity wells of sufficient strength to distort space in compressive rotating wavefroms are continuiously created and collapsed at the optimum non-destructive proximite points as related to the craft and in the direction of intended travel. One then is pulled toward the gravity wells and/or uses auxiliary propulsion methods to push the craft in the same direction. Through balancing and counter balancing of the multiple gravity wells one is able to "surf' only the crests of the primary or convergent folded compressed space "waves" thus not really exceeding but still "cheating" the speed limit of C. I'll bet wipeouts would really suck. Beware of the Under Toad!!!
Matthew
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Slower Dimension (Score:3, Informative)
Researchers keep independently rediscovering hyperspace, but are then encouraged into other lines of research. If they kick back against this, they're let into the secret that it's being suppressed to avoid damaging the morale of Star Trek fans.