Like Star Trek, only real. Physicist Richard Obousy speculates about a means of faster-than-light travel and dubs it 'warp drive'. The picture above is of the ship that he proposes be built to test his idea, which works like this:
The shape of the warpship was chosen to optimize the manipulation of surrounding dark energy, creating a spacetime bubble. How exactly the bubble would be created is still a mystery. But once the bubble gets created, spacetime at the front of the warpship would be compressed, and behind, it would expand. Inside the bubble, spacetime remains unchanged; therefore the warpship floats in the center of stationary space while the bubble moves through spacetime.
The bubble itself, containing the warpship, "drives the spacecraft forwards at arbitrarily high speeds," said Obousy. This means the warpship can travel faster than the speed of light.
Link
...But that dousn't prevent us from "knowing" already how it would look.
Well anyhow it somehow has pretty convincing looks.
Nonsense.
Zo, if we were able to travel at the speed of light, then presumably, we would have the ability to exceed it.
This is just plain silly psuedo-science.
Once we perfected supersonic flight, we made sure to not spend much time in that region. Just punch right past it as quickly as possible and leave it far behind.
Probably gonna be a similar situation with FTL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light
Your going at warp speed. Why would you want to stop?
Maybe if you push on space really hard? No, Jimmy, you're not pushing hard enough.
Just don't push too hard this time. You remember what happened last time when you accidently tore a hole in the space time continuum, and we had to deal with the flesh eating jello mould a second time. I mean, once was enough.
i am going to go beyond the displeasure already expressed in these comments and allude to my larger quam with jazzy science: in these sorts of theories extrapolations are made upon extrapolations all in the name of government grants and publicity.
dark energy? we have extrapolated it's possible existence based on ponderings of dark matter. we believe that dark matter might exist based on the fact that by our calculations there isn't as much observable matter in the universe as there should be. we think we know how much matter there should be based upon another forumla. this stuff snowballs out of control all throughout the scientific community. string theory is an mathematical extrapolation with no actual evidence; even the big bang theory, which is probably the most widely believed theory in the world, is based off of very little actual evidence.
evolution ironically is backed by so much evidence if you could put the physical mass of it into one big lump it would be small mountain.
i support darkhorse theories, steady state for one, not because they have a ton of evidence themselves, but because their rival theories are often baseless. i even think the expanding earth theory has merit...and most people think that stuff is ridiulous.
It seems like, if that's true, science can only be used to describe the universe at present. Anything that attempts to explain the past, or predict future "possibilities" may be valid, but as I understand it, it shouldn't be called "science." That's more like epistemology or futurism or some other clearly theoretical doctrine.
His design is no better than a 12-year-old putting together parts from several plastic models around an imaginary power source. Instead of stealing the central idea from Trek he could just have easily said 'oh here is a ship that would work with a ZPM and naquda generator' from Stargate at a comic-con.
You use REAL science to design ship, Dr. Physicist, not rainbows and fairy-dust.
So I think this is like asking a cartoonist to make a drawing of Spiderman, assuming radioactive spiders could give people spider powers.
It's just a concept, nothing more.
This idea is so old it's literally last century. ;)
The drive idea is, however, founded on good solid science. You should check it out, Wikipedia is your friend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
Last time I checked, physicists didn't design vehicles anyways, we train perfectly good engineers for that, don't we?
Why do you think that the design is built like a rubber tire? I think that answers your question.
Nothing can travel faster than light, the author should specify that the ship really isn't traveling faster than light, but that the space-time matrix it sits on is being manipulated relative to this.... "bubble"...
Even if he does go around building this ship, the amount of energy needed to warp the space-time matrix is quite possibly infinate, making this nigh impractical.
http://interstellarjourney.blip.tv/
http://interstellarjourney.blip.tv/
To get back to their own time they flew around the sun at warp 8, and were sling-shotted faster than possible through drive...
For a very short time they were traveling at HYPER-WARP velocities...
cool huh...