Warp Drive for the Millions or Einstein's Ghost revisited

[UniversalAlien]

Halc wrote:

Ah, a new definition. An objective/absolute reality typically means that the thing’s existence is not dependent on the relations

And just what is this thing Name one 'thing' that exists 'not dependent on relations'

An atom, a proton, or maybe a god - Yes maybe a god exists 'not dependent on relations' - Problem is no god has ever been
proven to exist

So once again:

1. There is no absolute reality - Reality is always relative; Relative to time, space, space-time and observation.

[Halc]

And just what is this thing Name one 'thing' that exists 'not dependent on relations'

The classic question is, would the universe exist if humans hadn't come along to observe it?

The objective realist would say yes, the universe has some kind of existence independent of humanity.

A relational answer would be that the question isn't meaningfully phrased. No, it would not exist to humans, but it would still exist relative to say Earth, or at least what would be a human-less Earth.

That's the essential difference between the two views. PC seems to find the former to be the one and only 'obvious' answer. I just find the two to be a matter of a difference of definition of 'exists'. Yours seems to be different assertion, that all 'things' have neighbors and say antecedent causes and effects such, something to which I am not in denial unless one attempts to qualify the 'universe' as one of those 'things'. So it helps to actually say what you mean when making such an assertion, because it wasn't clear at all until about 20 posts down, long after which the title topic of warp drive had been left starving in some ditch somewhere. My occasional attempts to steer the topic back on that track have failed. You don't actually seem to care.

[Sy Borg]

How do you plan to send people out into space on a FTL craft without killing them or driving them mad?

[UniversalAlien]

Star Trek’s Warp Drive Leads to New Physics
Researchers are taking a closer look at this science-fiction staple—and bringing the idea a little closer to reality
By Robert Gast, Spektrum on July 13, 2021

"For Erik Lentz, it all started with Star Trek. Every few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard would raise his hand and order, “Warp one, engage!” Then stars became dashes, and light-years flashed by at impossible speed. And Lentz, still in elementary school, wondered whether warp drive might also work in real life.

“At some point, I realized that the technology didn’t exist,” Lentz says. He studied physics at the University of Washington, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on dark matter and generally became far too busy to be concerned with science fiction. But then, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Lentz found himself alone in Göttingen, Germany, where he was doing postdoctoral work. He suddenly had plenty of free time on his hands—and childhood fancies in his head.

Lentz read everything he could find on warp drives in the scientific literature, which was not very much. Then he began to think about it for himself. After a few weeks, something occurred to him that everyone else seemed to have overlooked. Lentz put his idea on paper and discussed it with more experienced colleagues. A year later it was published in a physics journal.

It quickly became clear that Lentz was not the only person dreaming........

For that very reason, imaginative physicists have long been pondering the ultimate propulsion system: a bubble in space and time in which a spaceship could dash from sun to sun, just like the USS Enterprise did. This is research at the fringe of science: not necessarily wrong but spiced with a large pinch of optimism.

The fact that scientists are dealing with the idea at all today is thanks to a 1994 paper by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre. At the time, Alcubierre was not just a passionate Star Trek devotee. In his doctoral thesis at the University of Wales College Cardiff (now Cardiff University), Alcubierre also worked on the theory of relativity. Strictly speaking, the theory states that nothing can travel faster than light. But by applying a little creativity, Alcubierre identified an apparent loophole.

According to Albert Einstein’s epic discovery, we live in four-dimensional “spacetime.” Spacetime is not static. Like a tablecloth, it is deformed by massive objects. Everything that moves across the tablecloth (or through spacetime) can accelerate only up to the speed limit set by light. The tablecloth itself, on the other hand, can be deformed at any speed, as the universe itself shows in some situations.

At the instant of the big bang, for example, the original spacetime structure presumably expanded for a split second and did so much faster than any ray of light could travel. Even today, the expansion continues to drive extremely distant galaxies away at speeds faster than light, which means their light can no longer reach us.

Based on his discovery, Alcubierre surmised that it would only be a small step to a warp drive. If spacetime were contracted in front of a spaceship and expanded behind it to compensate, it would be possible to travel to one’s destination at a speed faster than light. The ship would remain encapsulated in a bubble, and the crew would not sense the magnitude of the interstellar journey. In a 2017 lecture, Alcubierre compared it to being on a passenger conveyor belt at the airport: “You can imagine that the floor behind you is being created out of nothing and in front of you it is being destroyed, so you move along.”.................

But formulating this idea in the language of general relativity immediately gives rise to major practical problems. First, to deform spacetime so radically, you would need to cram a huge mass into a bubble bounded by a wall thinner than an atomic nucleus. Then you would need two forms of matter to maintain the bubble. The gravity of ordinary mass would cause the space at the front of the bubble to contract, moving the whole structure forward. But at the same time, the space at the back of the bubble would need to expand like rising bread dough. To make that expansion happen, according to Alcubierre, you would need some form of negative energy radiating a kind of antigravity.

THE CURSE OF NEGATIVE ENERGY............

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... w-physics/


As far as the Negative Energy problem - No problem - There is plenty of negative energy right here in this, probably any,
philosophy forum.

So all we have to do is figure out how to harness the negative energy of many philosophers as they nitpick ideas and bury them
in rhetorical obscurity - Can't you see how easy it might then become to warp space

Warped ideas Warped space