Warp drive and String theory

[The Doppler Effect]

Here is an interesting article about the posibilty of warp drive.

Click here to read the article...

or read it here...

ScienceDaily (May 8, 2009) — With the new movie ‘Star Trek’ opening in theaters across the nation, one thing movie goers will undoubtedly see is the Starship Enterprise racing across the galaxy at the speed of light. But can traveling at warp speed ever become a reality?
Two Baylor University physicists believe they have an idea that can turn traveling at the speed of light from science fiction to science, and their idea does not break any laws of physics.
Dr. Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Dr. Richard Obousy, a Baylor post-doctoral student, theorize that by manipulating the space-time dimensions around the spaceship with a massive amount of energy, it would create a “bubble” that could push the ship faster than the speed of light. To create this bubble, the Baylor physicists believe manipulating the 11-dimension would create dark energy. Cleaver said positive dark energy is responsible for speeding up the universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.
“Think of it like a surfer riding a wave,” said Cleaver, who co-authored the paper with Obousy about the new method. “The ship would be pushed by the bubble and the bubble would be traveling faster than the speed of light.”
The method is based on the Alcubierre drive, which proposes expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would not actually move, rather the ship would sit in between the expanding and shrinking space-time dimensions. Since space would move around the ship, the theory does not violate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which states that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object faster than the speed of light.
String theory suggests the universe is made up of multiple dimensions. Height, width and length are three dimensions, and time is the fourth dimension. Scientists believe that there are a total of 10 dimensions, with six other dimensions that we can not yet identify. A new theory, called M-theory, takes string theory one step farther and states that the “strings” actually vibrate in an 11-dimensional space. It is this 11th dimension that the Baylor researchers believe could help propel a ship faster than the speed of light.
The Baylor physicists estimate that the amount of energy needed to influence the extra dimensions is equivalent to the entire mass of Jupiter being converted into energy.
“That is an enormous amount of energy,” Cleaver said. “We are still a very long ways off before we could create something to harness that type of energy.”
The paper appeared recently in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

Any input, ideas, theories?

[Maximus Macro]

cool find mate ,string theory is very interesting.so it would kindoff work like moderday torpedo's wich create an air buble around it's shell to cancell out the drag and friction of the wather.

[The Doppler Effect]

Was watching a program about string theory today on, I think NationalGeo HD. Would be very interesting to see this work, although what would be the effects of warp-drive speed on humans?

What do you think the effects would be? I think the effect would be minimal because it is only messing with space-time. you might have some insomnia.

[Baron von Sky Hat]

I mean the speed that you'd be going. Think of just those simulators astronauts train on to experience the speed of shuttle flights, now they go no-where near the speed of light and they pull a couple of G's alone...

now going faster than the speed of light, surely the amount of G's you pull would kill you??

You're confusing velocity and acceleration. High velocity doesn't necessarily imply a high acceleration. Acceleration is any change in velocity, whether that's slowing down or speeding up, or turning; and it's acceleration which is `g force'. Whilst a fighter pilot is flying straight and level, they don't experience a g force (other than gravity), it's only when they maneuver that they do.
Likewise, (ignoring the speed of light thing for now, as it has its own problems) if you want to travel very fast on an interplanetary (or even interstellar) flight, so long as you don't go up to those high speeds quickly, and only speed up gradually, g force won't be your problem.

In fact, the idea has been put forward to use the acceleration of a direct travel interplanetary ship to create an artificial gravity for the astronauts. Direct travel implies that you have efficient enough engines to basically just point the rocket at the target, accelerate half the way there, and then decelerate the remaining half. This is as opposed to the round-about routes current probes take, using slingshots around planets and traveling non-directly.
If you have rockets which cause the ship to accelerate at 9.8 meters per second per second (not a typo, units of m s^-2), then that's equivalent to having the astronauts feel an earth surface gravity on them towards the rear of the rocket (ie, `1 g', earth surface gravity, g, is that 9.8 m s^-2).


On to warp drive and string theory: They are very interesting concepts, but my problem with them is just that, they are more concepts than practicable science. They seem just too speculative, we don't yet have the means to test them in any way at all really. To the best of my knowledge none of the string theory/m theory/similar theories have made any solid observable predictions which differ from the conventional existing explanation.

That's not in any way to say they're wrong, it's quite possible that they're right. It's just that, without the ability to test them, all they currently are is very interesting maths. As to their use as a method of propulsion, definitely very speculative indeed. Should it be developed, I'd love to hear a description of its implications for the causality conditions in relativity. I've heard of a few faster than light travel ideas that claim to get around the speed of light `speed limit', but that's not always the point, mostly they still seem to essentially cause problems with causality, even if technically they haven't traveled faster than light. I've not heard any responses that explain this, but I'd imagine that string theorists would have an, at least, theoretical answer, which would no doubt be extremely interesting.

I leave you with this, which I feel nicely sums up the current state of the `current just maths' interpretation of string theory...:
http://xkcd.com/171/

[The Doppler Effect]

I mean the speed that you'd be going. Think of just those simulators astronauts train on to experience the speed of shuttle flights, now they go no-where near the speed of light and they pull a couple of G's alone...

now going faster than the speed of light, surely the amount of G's you pull would kill you??

Baron von Sky Hat has made some good points but as far as the G force thing goes, you have to take into account that your messing with space-time and you are not moving in the conventional sense. Also, i am an inventor and i have developed some ideas for artificial gravity and an acceleration compensator so even if you would feel the G forces it is quite possible that by the time we build a warp drive acceleration wouldn't matter because we could neutralize it.