Science
Related: About this forumNasa experiment: Is faster-than-light travel possible?
Danny Hakim, New York Times | Jul 23, 2013, 03.20 AM IST
HOUSTON: Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center's 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory.
Harold G White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects.
He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it travels in a certain area, and then observing the change with a device called an interferometer. So sensitive is their measuring equipment that it was picking up myriad earthly vibrations, including people walking nearby. So they recently moved into this lab, which floats atop a system of underground pneumatic piers, freeing it from seismic disturbances.
The team is trying to determine whether faster-than-light travel warp drive might someday be possible.
Warp drive. Like on "Star Trek."
"Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago," said Dr. White, 43, who runs the research project. "And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would've went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds."
"Nature can do it," he said. "So the question is, can we do it?"
more
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Nasa-experiment-Is-faster-than-light-travel-possible/articleshow/21258841.cms
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)I've always been "nope. nope. can't be done. sorry" but dude may actually have a point.
LongTomH
(8,636 posts) Quantum back reaction effects in 3+1 dimensional spacetimes
Casual disconnection and controlling warp bubbles from bubble interior
Examination of quantum inequality restrictions for wormholes
Issues of causality and the temporal paradoxes
Experimental metric modeling via metamaterials
Artist's drawing of an FTL starship
Lugal Zaggesi
(366 posts)But I wouldn't expect much progress in the next 200 years.
I'd be much happier if they just threw some serious resources towards former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz's VASIMR propulsion system:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1006/01vasimr/
That's doable, right now.
Fission power on spaceships - that's doable, right now.
Fusion power on spaceships - hopefully that's doable within 30 years.
Get to 1/10 the speed of light this century, and I'll be impressed. 1/2 c, and I'd be floored.
Get to work on antimatter as a way for storing energy for starships - I'll be even more impressed this century.
http://www.space.com/17537-antimatter-fusion-engines-future-spaceships.html
(although this technology would probably be commandeered by the Generals for awesome weapons - let's not destroy Humanity before we reach the stars, shall we ?)
This century, if they can get some spaceships to the Kuiper Belt (30 to 50 AU away from Sun, about 7 light-hours) - I'll be happy.
Faster-than-light travel - if they make NO progress till the 22nd century, I won't be surprised.
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)It took us ~150 years to get from the Maxwell-equations of electromagnetism to an electromagnetic tractor-beam.
It took us ~100 years to get from Schrödinger and Einstein to quantum-computing.
It took us ~65 years to get from Schrödinger's equation to building the first scanning-tunneling-microscopes.
It took us ~50 years to get from Lise Meitner's explanation of nuclear fission to the recent standard-model of particles and forces. (strong, weak, em)
Lugal Zaggesi
(366 posts)I thought they were having problems even coming up with a plausible design to test:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bright-idea-new-tractor-beam