![]() Warp drives were a fairly vague idea until in 1994, Miguel Alcubierre found a way to make them work in General Relativity. I know that sounds somewhat disappointing, but I think it would be pretty cool to move around by warping spacetime at any speed. You can also have slower-than-light warp drives. The second point I want to emphasize is that the term “warp drive” refers to a propulsion system that relies on the warping of space-time, but just because you are using a warp drive does not mean you have to go faster than light. So the problem is really crossing the speed of light barrier, not being above it. Instead, the problem is that, according to Einstein, you cannot accelerate from below to above the speed of light. Neither does this faster-than light travel necessarily lead to causality paradoxes. You can very well have objects in these theories that move faster than the speed of light. There are two points I want to highlight here: First, it is a really common misunderstanding, but Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity do NOT forbid faster-than-light motion. Indeed, physicists think that the universe expanded faster than the speed of light in its very early phase. Space-time can bend, expand, or warp at any speed. However, this restriction applies to objects in space-time, not to space-time itself. ![]() This is not entirely crazy, for the following reason.Įinstein’s theory of general relativity says you cannot accelerate objects from below to above the speed of light because that would take an infinite amount of energy. The idea is that by warping space-time, you can beat the speed of light barrier. And just a few weeks ago, a new paper appeared about warp drives that puts the idea on a much more solid basis.īut first of all, what is a warp drive? In the science fiction literature, a warp drive is a technology that allows you to travel faster than the speed of light or “superluminally” by “warping” or deforming space-time. Today I want to talk about warp drives because I think on the spectrum from fiction to science, warp drives are on the more scientific end. So, to some extent, I became a physicist to find out which science fiction technologies have a chance to one day become real technologies. But of course the depressing part of science fiction is that you know it’s not real. Teleportation, levitation, wormholes, time-travel, warp drives, and all that, I thought was super-fascinating. As many others, I became interested in physics by reading too much science fiction.
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