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United States Science

Darpa Funded Researchers Accidentally Create the World's First Warp Bubble (thedebrief.org) 189

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Reeses writes: The Debrief just reported that DARPA just "accidentally" created the world's first warp bubble. From the article:

Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Harold G "Sonny" White has reported the successful manifestation of an actual, real-world "Warp Bubble." And, according to White, this first of its kind breakthrough by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team sets a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized, warp-capable spacecraft.

There's also a video of the announcement, The Very First Warp-Bubble Created by DARPA Funded Team.
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Darpa Funded Researchers Accidentally Create the World's First Warp Bubble More

Darpa Funded Researchers Accidentally Create the World's First Warp Bubble

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  • Living in the future. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Major_Disorder ( 5019363 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @03:53PM (#62056415)
    If we survive as a species, things are getting very interesting. What a time to be alive.
    • What a time to be alive. Have you been watching Károly Zsolnai-Fehér and his 2 minute papers videos? Squeeze that paper tight fellow scholars!

  • Queue space isolation (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tyr07 ( 8900565 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @03:54PM (#62056423)

    Like in southpark. Advanced species who have been watching are going to be like "Shit, it's going to spread. Alright guys, time to burn it out."

  • Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @03:57PM (#62056437) Homepage
    This is extremely unlikely to be accurate. It isn't at all clear how you could make a warp bubble this way using standard physics. There's some possibility to do so if one has some form of negative energy density (see e.g. https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2019-4288 [aiaa.org] but we don't know how to do that, and simply doing that would itself be a massive breakthrough. It isn't clear what they even measured that makes them think this happened. Given that the main author here, Harold White, was previously a proponent of the EM drive, and his proposed mechanism was widely criticized for not being consistent with basic physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_G._White [wikipedia.org], I'm going to want to wait for a lot more evidence before I take this very seriously.

    • Re: Unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NagrothAgain ( 4130865 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:09PM (#62056481)
      If you can battle through all the popover ads and other bullshit on the source article, it states

      Without going into the complicated physics behind Casimir cavities and the tantalizing quantum-scale forces often observed in these unusual structures, it suffices to say that they are in no way related to warp drive theory or mechanics.

      And then there's a bunch of babble from the guy about talking about making warp drives. I'm sure we'll hear a bunch of argument from the scientific community about this Announcement, culminating in research funding which will ultimately show that he's just as full of shit as he has been in the past. Maybe something interesting will come out of it, maybe not.

      • Re: Unlikely (Score:5, Informative)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:38PM (#62056559)
        I think you are taking that quote out of context.

        “Some work we’ve been doing for DARPA Defense Science Office is the study of some custom Casimir cavity geometries,” explained White at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Propulsion Energy Forum in August of 2021, an event attended by The Debrief. “In the process of doing that work, we kind of made an accidental discovery.”

        Without going into the complicated physics behind Casimir cavities and the tantalizing quantum-scale forces often observed in these unusual structures, it suffices to say that they are in no way related to warp drive theory or mechanics. At least, they never had been before. But, says White, it is work that he and his LSI team are passionate about, and something DARPA believes has a number of possible applications.

        So, whether by pure coincidence or some sort of personal destiny, it appears that one of the handful of engineers on the planet who would immediately know what it was he was looking at when conducting his Casimir cavity research was in the exact right place at the exact right time to notice a striking similarity to his warp drive passion project and his current research, an observation that may have otherwise gone unseen.

        “I think this is a great example of sometimes you are doing work for one reason, and you find something else you really didn’t expect to find,” said White at the AIAA conference.

        Therefore, in this particular case at least, it seems that timing was indeed everything.

        He appears to be saying that their research wasn't looking into warp drive theory, not that what they found isn't related to it. Here is another quote from White at the top of the article:

        “To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble,” White told The Debrief, quickly dispensing with the notion that this is anything other than the creation of an actual, real-world warp bubble. “Hence the significance.”

        • Re: Unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @07:38PM (#62057081)

          I think you are taking that quote out of context.

          So, whether by pure coincidence or some sort of personal destiny, it appears that one of the handful of engineers on the planet who would immediately know what it was he was looking at when conducting his Casimir cavity research was in the exact right place at the exact right time to notice a striking similarity to his warp drive passion project and his current research, an observation that may have otherwise gone unseen.

          You say that like having the context makes it better. It doesn't. It makes it worse.

          That guy has the worst savior complex I've seen in the public square in a long time. The other people who make grandiose claims like that are diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic manic depressives. He has an undiagnosed mental disorder, not a physics breakthrough. The other name for that extremely long and ego-fueled sentence is "confirmation bias". Dude sees what he wants to see, all the time, everywhere. He's unreliable to the point of mockery.

    • Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:53PM (#62056609) Homepage

      He had me right up till he said "UFOs." I turned it off right after that. I would like to believe this, but hell, I wanted to believe in the EM drive. So wake me when we launch the Enterprise. Till then, bullshit.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fazig ( 2909523 )
      Here's the link to the paper that's supposedly discussed there: https://link.springer.com/cont... [springer.com]

      You'll find a link to the full pdf on the right, where you can check out the details.
      I haven't read past the Abstract, so take this with a grain of salt, but from there, which is supposed to act as a summary, what I've read there is that they ran simulations that showed the numerical math to work out. As we know, the math checking out is usually seen as a requirement in science, but it's a long shot from bei

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Ygorl ( 688307 )
        In particular, the last sentence of the abstract is telling: "This qualitative correlation would suggest that chip-scale experiments might be explored to attempt to measure tiny signatures illustrative of the presence of the conjectured phenomenon: a real, albeit humble, warp bubble." In other words (based on this and the rest of the paper) they saw something reminiscent of what you would expect to see if there was a tiny warp bubble. It would take a lot of work, with more focused experiments, to be able t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hAckz0r ( 989977 )

      This is extremely unlikely to be accurate.

      Its either inaccurate or it worked and they just pulled SlashDot.org through a time warp to the Circa date April 1 2022

      Why? They have not even defined the structure of spacetime yet or even the process through which they could pull spacetime through such a device. I don't see any details, just a bunch of hand waving and lip service which isn't going to move any spaceships any more than cold fusion powered EmDrives will.

  • This is just the Casimir effect. It is not new, it is well known, and it cannot be scaled up as it is a quantum effect.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Has anyone seen... (Score:4, Funny)

    by magnetar513 ( 1384317 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:02PM (#62056457)
    Dr. Beverly Crusher lately?

  • Misread This (Score:5, Funny)

    by WankerWeasel ( 875277 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:06PM (#62056463)
    I misread the headline and clicked into the article because I thought it said "bubble wrap."

  • Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here.

    - Criswell "Plan 9 from outer space"

    Who wants to bet that it ends up like cold fusion? Lots of money and research but not one kilowatt of power.

  • they should divert some of those funds to accidentally create some bitches

  • Just because UAPs (nee UFOs) are moving in from the fringe, doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of unschooled fringers out there believing any story, as long as it isn't mainstream.

    Where are the anal probes, that's what I wanna know...

  • ...for them to combine this with the EM drive for sci-fi goodness.

  • I'd really like it to be true (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:13PM (#62056495)
    But Sonny White has a bit of a history with "warp drives". To be clear: as far as spacecraft engineering goes, this guy is the real deal. But warp-drive physics? Warp drives are in the same class as perpetual motion machines and devices that break the laws of gravity. Required: ultra-rigorous peer review, then a second round of even more rigorous peer review, then publication, then public demonstration. Then, MORE PEER REVIEW. Or it didn't happen. Full stop. No more conversation. I'm fine with DARPA funding wacky stuff like this. That's their purpose. But they need to stop doing press releases, shut up and get down to the business of peer-reviewing, publishing, and demonstrating. Everything else is a waste of time.

    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This is a press release. Doesn't even come close to meeting the bar.

    I sincerely hope this guy is different, but scientists who seek out press before they publish their work... they generally wind up looking pretty bad.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Reeses ( 5069 )

      Those are fair criticisms. And Slate wrote an article leveling similar criticisms a few years ago. But if you read TFA, you'll see there's links to a few published papers. So it seems like maybe he's working towards addressing those issues? He found someone willing to let him do experimental research and has posted his findings. Whether or not they're real, or even truly "accidental" we'll have to see.

      Even a small warp bubble is progress.

      • Re:I'd really like it to be true (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:35PM (#62056549)
        ANY warp bubble would be world-shattering, life-changing, re-think-everything-about-human-existence progress. From my understanding, an Alcubierre drive requires matter with negative mass, and there are weird things about the Casimir effect that suggest that it MIGHT be able to produce effects along those lines.

        As far as I can tell, he's got 3 papers: 2 on RF thrusters and 1 on casimir. Again, I'm fine with the guy doing this research, but the jump to "warp bubble" requires proof, proof, proof, and more proof. Hell, even the tiniest atom-sized speck of negative mass would requires hundreds of man-years of research to verify. It would probably be the most important discovery since the frikkin wheel.
    • TBH I'd be satisfied with dispensing with the first three steps and having a peer-reviewed public demonstration with the data made available to prove that it worked.

    • Re:I'd really like it to be true (Score:4, Informative)

      by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:51PM (#62056599)

      Warp drives are in the same class as perpetual motion machines and devices that break the laws of gravity.

      Not really.. A warp drive might be creatable without breaking fundamental laws; Also, I don't believe anyone's claimed to have shown a working one, not even this Sonny fellow. There is rather a huge difference between posing an idea and claiming you have a working prototype or design.

      Considering DARPA's involvement: there is a high probability they are experimenting with / investigating something worth taking a look at - As for whether this turn out to be useful vs whether it ever lead to the possibility of a working Warp drive: Well, that is a different matter entirely. For now this clearly is research that will be far from any stage of thinking about practical applications.

      Perpetual motion machines were things people wanted and there's a long history of people claiming to have invented, built and demonstrated but should be impossible to exist based on fundamental laws of thermodynamics - and the prototypes, etc, turn out to be bogus.

    • If it were true, my government would redirect research to counter russia and chinas hypsersonic missiles with warp missiles that can deliver nukes in less than a second. Forget space travel. Saber rattling takes precedence.

    • Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
      Nope!

      Ordinary proof is enough.

  • Good thing the US is cutting China off from its technology. Can't have the Chinese stealing this and become masters of the universe.

    This shows the US is not in decline. In fact, it's rising, like the Hindenburg. It's a technological innovator - the Chinese have nothing on loot boxes, WeWork and Uber. So much so that the Chinese decided to quit those disruptive industries and move back to manufacturing and engineering.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jddj ( 1085169 )

      And the whole world celebrates 'merica's status by raising a single finger!

    • It's a good thing China is cutting us off, because they are lifting themselves up through manufacturing and engineering, eventually the totalitarian regime there will fade into irrelevancy, and the quality of life continues to rise. They don't need to be distracted by our waxing about feelings.

    • In spite of all the self-loathing of America regarding its history, it's probably best for human history Europeans swept in and took over a continent.

      Without it, we'd have just broken down continents and Europe dominated by dictators.

      Because Earth seems like it would be the exception rather than the rule, we can presume galactic civilization is one or a bunch of dictatorships.

      The only hope would be the occasional free world, which can outstrip dictatorship in progress and production many times over, pulling

    • Thanks. So there's a mathematical overlap between real experimental data on Casimir cavities and hypothetical models of Alcubierre warp drives.

      What White told the reporter is pure wishcasting. He's the lead author and the paper itself is full of terms like "intriguing" and "encouraging" and "correlation" - as it should be. Can't really blame the reporter for this is the quote is accurate.

  • This is bullshit. Nothing interesting for Nerds here.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Thud457 ( 234763 )
      I concur. Those flakes over there at (D)ARPA invented the internet and immanentized the collapse of civilization. Let's not fall for any more of their soft-headed thinking.

  • How do we know that the Chinese or Russians haven't already done it in secret? Or it could be a reverse engineered UFO that Bob Lazaar has talked about?

    It may be the first known.

    • And they are keeping a stable full of unicorns.

        What I expect is government technology to be a few decades ahead of what is generally known while it slowly filters down to the general public. Has nothing to do with aliens and UFOs, but everything to do with being ahead of their adversaries.

      • And they are keeping a stable full of unicorns.

        Of course they are! Where do you think Rarity and Twilight Sparkle come from?!

  • No. They didn't. Extraordinary claims... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mononymous Coward ( 9087707 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:38PM (#62056563)
    Extraordinary claims require more proof than a story in thedebrief.org and a youtube video, Nerds know that. Editors, apparently, do not.

    • There's a paper release (link upthread) and while certainly interesting it never comes close to claiming the creation of a warp bubble.

      And yet the lead author of the paper is the same guy quoted in the story.

  • Shit... (Score:5, Funny)

    by KlomDark ( 6370 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:57PM (#62056615) Homepage Journal

    So what? I used Warp Drive to get to high school back in the 1980s.

    (It was a road named Warp Drive) :)

  • I can't really tell how they created a negative energy density, other than they used cylinders and nanotech.

    If they did actually create something, the article might describe how they achieved the warp bubble via some physics. Instead it says they did so by "being in the right place at the right time"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      It's not hard to create negative energy density. If you put an ice cube in a warm room you've done it, by some ways of measuring. If you want something a little fancier you can put a couple of conducting plates close together; that's the Casimir effect. There's some speculation that the latter might produce "negative energy" that is negative in the way required to stabilize a warp bubble.

      If that's true then there's just the matter of scaling it up a few (tens of) orders of magnitude. Oh, and figuring out ho

      • An ice cube is not negative energy.
        If it is a -1C ice cube, it still has the energy of a 272K _hot_ body.
        Arguable if the ice cube is replacing a similar sized patch of atmosphere, the cube contains more energy, thermal as well as in terms of math -> E=mc*c.

        The Casimir effect, probably you know, but explained it badly.
        You have two plates in a vacuum. Between the plates spontaneous photons pop up out of vacuum energy. If they are parallel, depending on their distance, the photons with the wavelength of hal

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          It depends on your choice of reference, and that's the point. If you choose zero to be the average energy density in the room, the ice cube is negative.* If you choose zero to be the average energy of a vacuum, the space between the plates in a Casimir effect experiment has negative energy density. Gravitational potential energy is conventionally negative. Dirac's sea is an equivalent formulation of quantum field theory where the universe is filled with negative energy. Particles in the ergosphere of black

          • Ice cubes don't race away at light speed. I'm no physicist but I'm pretty sure if you want to create a warp bubble you have to create a negative energy density from zero energy.

  • Universe is there to be had and to the winner go the spoils.

  • Warp? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bu11etmagnet ( 1071376 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @05:17PM (#62056685)

    Are they running OS/2 version 3.0 on their computers?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Really?
    Or is this a Theranos-style breakthrough?

  • warp speed!

  • There seems to be fewer and fewer people around, and those I see don't remember them. Maybe I'm just getting old.

  • Zephram Cochrane is born in 9 years. (Score:3)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @06:42PM (#62056933) Journal

    Good thing we finally got started on this stuff.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • To freak out the Chinese and the Russians.

  • So this may be a dumb question, but does anyone have an idea what nanoscale warp bubbles would do as propulsive exhaust?

  • A video... (Score:3)

    by pahles ( 701275 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @06:11AM (#62058315)
    of a static image with some narration. Couldn't they have just posted an MP3?

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