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.""
This is SO neat! (Score:3, Interesting)
It reminds me of the experiments with the first atomic bombs: they didn't know that the chain reaction wouldn't ignite the atmosphere. Who knows what considerations they've given it. Will it jerk the earth out of it's orbit? Will it open a wormhole that sucks out the earth's atmosphere? Will it end life as we know it? I was under the impression that extreme magnetic fields were fatal to humans, to say nothing of throwing birds off of their migration patterns.
I wonder who they will bestow the honor of first flight on...
Like the WB Gophers:
Latest news: Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott still dead.wwgd: what would google do?
I call shenanigans! (Score:2, Interesting)
Just doesn't sound realistic to me.
YMMV
Come again, please? (Score:5, Interesting)
OK - so far, so good.
Err, what? I hope this is a joke...
How do you test this? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:2, Interesting)
And what of those poor army lads who stood there gazing into the light of a million suns and standing but a few mere miles away from the nuclear blasts? You know, just like the guys on the navy boats who drank fallout until they got home? I can see something similar happening here.
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Having had one of said people as mathematics instructor; he said it was about 1/3 of the team members who thought it would probably kill us all via igniting the atmosphere, or jettisoning a significant amount of it into space.
Philadelphia Experiment (Score:2, Interesting)
Nutjob or not? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:3, Interesting)
A story was related to me by a friend:
His father was working a classified site back in the 40's where several technicians, engineers and so on, were working on things in a lab. At a desk was an engineer, poking at a small pile of uranium in granuals with a pencil. Suddenly there was a brilliant flash as if a photo flash went off. The pressure or friction of prodding the granuals had caused some of it to go critical.
A security guard was sent to get my friend's father who came in (I don't honestly know what his position was) and he asked everyone who had been in the room when it happened to go to the exact position they were standing when it happened. Their shoes were spray painted to create a silhouette and their location and distance from the desk were noted. These people were all tracked and died within two years of the event. Those closest to the desk died within weeks, including the engineer who had been pushing the dust around, those furthest died later. It's probably in a declassified study somewhere but I wouldn't have the first idea where to look.
Re:Slower Dimension (Score:5, Interesting)
FTL
It describes the meeting between a young hotshot applying for money to develop his surefire warp drive and the institute director who has to break the news to him that they've secretly had a functional warp drive for ages . . .
But c is slower in hyperspace.
Reading it as a youth woke me up to the fact that you have to be careful what you wish for, because you might not get it.
KFG
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe eventually, but only after several came to the scary conclusion that it might. Whereupon they re-ran the numbers until pretty sure it wouldn't. Then they crossed their fingers. I think Feynman talks about this in his book.
And it does make sense to worry about it in those cases where someone has their finger on the button of the possible atmosphere-igniter in question.
Was Burkhard Heim a crackpot? (Score:3, Interesting)
Read some of the entries. Or simply look at the domain names of the pages found.
Then take the following test [ucr.edu] to see if he's actually a revolutionary physicist of Gallileo's, Newton's, Einstein's or Feynmann's stature, or merely just another 2-bit crackpot.
Unnecessary (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:3, Interesting)
An atomic bomb is just a device for assembling a critical mass quickly enough that a lot of the material will undergo fission before it gets blown apart. The simplest ones just use a "gun" to shoot one sub-critical mass at another sub-critical mass.
Re:Oh, *come* on, now... (Score:4, Interesting)
the theoretical process works by imbuing heavy metals - such as lead - with the essence of the sun's emanatory spirit, resulting in the lead taking on a yellowish hue.
I remember reading once about how every now and again someone finds a pile of platinum hidden somewhere. It was believed by some gold prospectors that platinum was gold that had not yet turned yellow, thus they hid it so they could come back later and see if it had become valuable gold yet. That has nothing to do with anything, but I find it amusing.
Re:Nonsense (Score:2, Interesting)
Getting science out of Germany in the 50's was a little difficult, and Heim never got the wilder parts of his theory printed, so nobody ever heard about it.
However He did get a paper printed with some of his theory, which predicts accurately the masses of elementary particles based on physical characteristics. This is why his theory has a shot, because so far it is the ONLY theory which can do this.
Again, the main reason no one ever heard of this is that the theory is in German, written by a man who did not want his theory to get beyond his country or control, and who has never been able to get the money together to test the theory.
Re:Unnecessary (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Point B: The speed of light is NOT relative. It's always c. Always, always, always.
Point C: When you move relative to an object, the speed of light stays constant both for you and that object.
Point D: The only way to have a constant c with different relative speeds is to change the other side of a speed equation -- that is, time.
Conclusion: As you go faster, you travel through time faster.
(Bad) Example: Imagine you have ten identically sized strings ("time"), and you have to stretch them from one line on the ground to another line in the ground. The space between the two lines is the speed of light -- a constant. Normally, exactly ten strings reach from one line to the other. But if the line became further apart (as if you were moving faster through space), you'd still have to stretch those ten strings between the lines, but you'd have gaps -- time would be dilated, or slowed.
Frog Levitation Movies (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Psuedoscience (Score:3, Interesting)
See: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/inquiring/matter/smallest
Also, I don't know if antimatter is the ultimate energy source. They use way more energy to produce the antiprotons than they get out of them smashing them with regular protons. It's the same problem that we see with hydrogen fuel cells. You still have to put the energy into the system before you can get it back out. If you can find a plentiful source of pure hydrogen or pure antimatter, then you do have a great energy source. Also, antimatter is difficult to store (a lot more difficult than hydrogen gas).
If you're ever near Batavia, IL, go through their tour at Fermi, or contact me and I'll help you hook up with one of their top physicists (though I have to warn you, I feel like this guy can be a bit demeaning at time).
My attempt at explanation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I call shenanigans! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, a footnote to the article says he had his forearm blown off in the same accident that cost him his hearing and most of his sight -- fiddling with high explosives. It also mentions he developed a photographic memory. Absolutely amazing stuff.
Re:I call shenanigans! (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds a whole lot like the weird Podkletnov Antigravity machine [americanantigravity.com]. Torroid
Re:Warp drive? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't be so quick to shrug it off (Score:2, Interesting)
We know that gravity bends space. We know that mass and energy are interchangeable. We know that mass creates a gravity field (that bends space.) What about massive energies? Does it have a gravity field? What if we took the equivalent energy in a 2 ton ball and stored that in a capacitor? Would its mass (as observed in relativity) increase by 2 tons? Incredibly, yes.
That's pretty whacko. But consider the possibilities. Using only energy, you can BEND TIME AND SPACE.
What can you do? Can you set up weird gravity fields that don't look like point sources? What about the acceleration due to gravity? Is that limited by relativity? What if we effectively cut out a region of space by surrounding that with a hollow black hole. What are the rules on whole regions of space as they travel through other regions of space? If it can move near the speed of light, and we are moving near the speed of light in that piece of space, are we moving 2x the speed of light compared to objects outside of that region of space? What if we had several layers of space each travelling within another region of space near the speed of light? Can we obtain infinite speed?
What about taking a region of space and effectively patching it somewhere else in the universe. Isn't this a wormhole of sorts? And are those possible?
String theory says that there may be more than 4 dimensions. If space is curved, then we can effectively travel from one spot to the other without covering as much ground as we would've in regular space. But what if there are different rules? What if with gravity we can put a kink in a strategic location in space thus making space curve in a way that makes this kind of travel easier?
You see, there are a lot of possibilities, and they aren't all that unreasonable. Unfortunately, we can't perform these experiments with today's technologies. Or can we?
Just remember how absurd people thought Einstein was for suggesting that light waves are really very tiny massless cannon balls. That earned him the Nobel Prize, and was the concept that gave birth to Quantum Mechanics, which Einstein himself thought was absolutely absurd. Physicists spend a great deal of time calling each other names when in the end, they end up proving the other guy correct by trying to disprove him.
Hawking Radiation: Z-Pinch vs Black Hole (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Paper this is based on (Score:2, Interesting)
However, I wonder what implications Heim theory would have for millisecond pulsars? That is where we see incredibly strong magnetic fields spinning at 1000 rpm or more.
3 of the six dimensions describe "meaning"? WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
From Heim-theory website [heim-theory.com]:
(Speaking of the extra 3 dimensions in the six-dimensional theory):
(Emphasis mine)
This is starting to remind me of that oft-referenced Timecube website [timecube.com].
Re:This is SO neat! (Score:3, Interesting)