Warp Your Mind Around It

was the one with the force. Yeah, it was. People would say. People would say, live long and prospered. Then the little gem in their in their hand would light up and then they'd be chased down by replicants. I'm pretty sure that's what how it went. Where did Gandolf come in? You know, um everywhere he could he just you could not keep him out. You tried, and he'd be like, uh here I am, and we loved him for it. No, No, seriously, Star Trek. We're talking about

warp Drive today, the time traveling Police Box. All right, well, let's get let's we're gonna we're done making making terrible like meme mash ups here. But now we're gonna talk about Star Trek and warp drive. Warp Drive, so you know, Star Trek was a space opera, would span the entire

Middle Key Way galaxy more or less. You know, you've got these incredible, huge expanses of distance that you have to cover in order for you to have these adventures where the Enterprise, which was an exploration ship, could get from point A to point you know z delta Q forty seven dash m and uh. In order to do that, you have to figure out, well, how are we going to have a propulsion system for this ship that will allow for this this amazing amount of travel. Well, but Jonathan,

there's no wind resistance in space. So couldn't you just continually accelerate like you keep accelerating, and you just keep going faster, right, there's nothing to slow you down. There's this small problem called relativity. Yeah, special relativity. Alright, Let's let's let's talk about light here for a second. Okay, So in our universe, from what we understand, anything that

has mass is limited by the speed of light. Nothing can go at the speed of light that has mass, nothing can definitely nothing can break through it from our side based upon what we know with special relativity. Now that doesn't mean that there isn't stuff that's moving faster than the speed of light that we just haven't detected yet.

But we believe that there is an impossible barrier of the speed of light and anything on one side of it, meaning anything slower than speed of light can't go faster than that, and anything faster than speed of light can't go slower than that. And how do we know that, Well, it's because we have this equation equals mc squared. You've heard it before, and it's a very well tested equation. It's pretty much proven to be correct on on the

relativistic scale. Um. But the problem is when you plug the numbers and of that, you realize that if something with mass goes the speed of light, it's mass would technically become infinite. Now I'm going to correct you. That's a very common that's a very common uh statement, although

it's not entirely correct. What we should say instead of saying mass, we should think of it in terms of just energy Alright, order to accelerate exactly the amount of energy you would need to propel that that mass to the speed of light, let alone faster would reach infinity, which means that you would not be able to do it.

You cannot do it. At the same time, we have another thing that we have to take take into account, time dilation, which is from the perspective of an outside observer, time would start to slow down for anyone who was approaching the speed of light, and if they were to hit the speed of light, time would stop from the perspective of an outside observer. From your perspective, if you're the one traveling at that speed, everything's a okay, things normal. Well.

In fact, going close to the speed of light is an easy way to create a time machine. Right, you can travel into the future. Well yeah, I can do that too, just by waiting around. Just let it happen. Speed one second per second, travel faster than the things around you into the future because for you, time slows down right well, and only it's only when you reach that frame of reference that the other observer is in. Right.

So like if Joe, if if you get in your rocket ship and you rock it off at near the speed of light and I stay on Earth, to you, time is passing exactly as it would if you were anywhere else. Doing anything else anywhere. To me, time is passing based upon my own experience, exactly the same way a second is a second to both of us. However, from my perspective, more time would be passing for me than it would be for you. And when you got back to Earth and we were to compare our our

time pieces, we would see that. That's the kind of that's how what reality would reflect you in your future. I would you would be younger when you got back then Jonathan was comparatively, In other words, I would have aged more in that time because more time would have passed for me, less time would have passed for you. And we can see that in things like satellites, there's what like a seven microsecond. I believe it's like lag of satellite clocks versus Earth clocks due to the speed

with which they're going. However, there's the relationship to the mass of Earth. Yeah, there are two things you have to take into account, the masses and the speed. But yes, you are right, we have to throw in special little leap seconds every now and then to keep the clocks on track. So um, another interesting thing is that, so you know, we talked about the speed of light being

the maximum. So the maximum maximum being speed of light through a vacuum, right, like when there's nothing else there. Because light will travel at different speeds through different media. Right, If it goes through glass, it's a little slower, If it goes through water, it's a little different. But if it goes through a vacuum, that's supposed to be the fastest ever period right. Wrong. Did you see this? Scientists made light go faster than light? Did you? Okay, all right,

this is this is pretty awesome. So at Princeton we had some scientists, and you know scientists, they get a little rowdy, just like anybody else. And you know, on a Friday night, things are a little slow in the lab. It's time to break some basic laws of physics. Uh. They actually created a a a little chamber of caesium vapor and they they put laser pulses through the this chamber. And they were observing that the laser pulses were emerging from the end of the chamber before they had fully

entered the other side of the chamber. So the laser pulses are shorter than the chamber actually is, and yet they were emerging before they could have already been all the way into it. How is this possible? How could they actually move faster than the speed of light? Well, it turns out it's not actually breaking the law laws

of physics, it's not breaking special relativity. From what we can tell, what seems to be happening there is that the information in the laser pulse is contained entirely in the very front end of the laser pulse, and as soon as it starts entering in the chamber, it's actually generating a new laser pulse on the on the other side, so it's not the same laser pulse going into the

front as it is coming out the back. It's kind of like if you were to have a set of twins and you have one twin positioned at the exit of this room and another twin starts to walk into one entrance just as the second twin goes out the exit. To you, It's like, how did that person cover that entire room instantaneously? They didn't. It's two people in this case, it's two pulses, but it was a pulse that's generated because the information contained in the beginning of that laser pulse. Okay, well,

why is this speed limit a problem? If you want to explore the galaxy like they did in Star direct Let's take a look at the distances. What's the closest star to Earth The Sun? It's eight minutes away. You got me there? Um the No, what is the closest star to our solar system? That is not the Sun? Well, it's Proximus Centaurius, and it is four point two light years away, meaning it takes four point to earth years for light to travel from that star to us, right.

So you make a good point that that is from the outside observer's perspective, not from the traveler's perspective. But let's say that you were going at the speed that it's not possible to go the speed of light as far as we know, So we're gonna still take, for to an outside observer, a really long time for you to get there. I mean, just prohibitively long for really

exploring the whole galaxy. Right from from inside that ship, it wouldn't take four point two years, right, right, But but to anyone else it would take four point two years. And that's the closest star. So if we're talking about distance stars one, it's still going to take you a long time to get there. Personally, it may take months for you to get to a distant star on a ship,

even traveling at the speed of light. To an outside observer, it may take generations, depending upon how far away you're talking. So even for you if you're talking about really exploring the galaxy, like going to other quadrants. So they say, I mean, that's going to take a long time at subliminal speeds, So can we do it? Is there a way that we could ever possibly go superliminal? Well, Star

Trek had to explain it somehow. What did they say. Well, they went with the warp drive approach, which is that originally they were calling it a hyper drive back in the in the original nineteen sixties series, but then um, certainly by the end of that series and when next generation kicked up, they started using this this warp field idea. Yeah,

talking about going at warp two or Warp four or whatever. Um, you know, Star Wars stuck with hyper drive, but they the idea was that, well Star Wars they never explained it. It It might as well just be Magic and Star Wars. But start Yeah, so much is in Star Wars and Star Trek they attempt to explain it by saying that, uh, they generate a warp bubble around the ship, and that

warp bubble actually warps space around it. And so if you were to think of space, you know, space time is kind of this think of it as a as almost like a fabric in a way. It's but it's this three dimensional and really four dimension whole fabric that that is the stuff that our our universe, or or at least our galaxy sits in and um and things like gravity affected and can distort it and change it

in different ways. And uh So if you were to try and travel from point A to point B, and it would normally take you ten years of travel because of the distances involved. Uh if you were to be able to warp those distances so that the distances were actually closer together, it would take you less time to get there, and you would have the benefit of not breaking special relativity in the in the process because in a localized area, you're still going well below the speed light.

You are in a little subspace bubble um that is kind of magically created. That they didn't really get into the actual explanation of this until I believe Star Trek first contact, which began development the date of which is going to become important in just a moment. So the idea here is that we have like, you know, kind of like if you were to look at a map and you look at New York and you look at l A and you think, wow, would take a really

long time. You know, you're just tracing your finger from New York l A and following all the highways, and then you think, well, what if I just fold the map so that L A is on top of New York and now boom, I'm magically there. That's more or less what we're talking about, except that it's not necessarily taking two points in space and folding all of space time so that they are adjacent. That would be more

like a wormhole, which is a different concept of speed travel. Yeah, this would be more like, let's let's try and crinkle space time so that we can get it closer. And that way we're still traveling at at relativistic speeds, but we're but we're having less distance to cover. More more like um, more like riding a surfboard on a wave rather than trying to swim through it, or like moving on a like standing on a moving sidewalk, and walking

rather than walking on you know, just level. So in Star Trek, what they're precisely talking about doing, because you can always look into the signs of Star Trek, they write a lot of books about it that are really fun. Um is using a matter antimatter reaction to create a really energetic plasma which is then channeled into warp coils that generate this warped field that formed the subspace bubble that take you too, you know, planet cling on. Where

did the Jeffreys tubes come in? Those as you used to to access the nace cells? Right? Which which which come into that process somehow? Right? Yeah, that's where the warp field ends up emanating from the ship to end up surrounding it and then creating this warp drive. Okay, so, uh so the ship itself isn't moving at superliminal speeds. It's riding a wave of space that's moving at superliminal speeds. Yeah, more or less. Yeah, I don't think it's gonna come

out exactly the way Star Trek did. I don't think we're gonna come across dilithium crystals anytime soon. Those are what we're supposed to generate the antimatter. But antimatter is a real thing. For those of you who don't know. Antimatter is matter that would have an opposite charge of its counterpart in matter. So the electron has a negative charge, a positron would be the uh the antimatter component that

would be the positively charged sub atomic particle. In the antimatter world, any matter and matter when they meet annihilate one another and release energy as a result. UH. During the Big Bang, for reasons we don't fully understand, there was a little bit more matter than there was antimatter, and so the those those early reactions and the annihilated most of everything, and we had more matter or left over.

So that's why we've got matter in our universe. UM. I would guess from a universe that had antimatter, maybe they would view theirs as the matter and ours would be the antimatter. Again, it's that frame of reference thing. I believe this was explored in the teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series with the neutrinos. I'm sure it was. Any I'm not gonna even pause to acknowledge that any further. So any further, I said, and now you made me

do it again. You made me break my word. Anyway, So the matter antimatter reactions could actually create enough energy, uh theoretically speaking, to create some form of warp bubble according to certain theories, nothing that we've been able to test out and actually say yes, this is uh, this is something that's actually possible. It's just hypothetical at the moment.

But it would probably take a lot of it, like like a seriously huge amount of antimatter, because the any matter that we've produced in things like the large had drunk collider you're talking about minis aal amounts, not like something on the size of say Jupiter, which is what people first thought would be required to create a warp bubble of significant size to move something like a vessel

um from one point to another. Beyond that being able to designate different levels of warp because you know, they had the warp nine through warp warp ten, and then they eventually would like I think in the final episode of the Next Generation, the new version of the Enterprise goes like warp fourteen or something, which doesn't make any sense because according to the mythology in the world, warp ten was supposed to approach infinite speed. So I don't

know how you go faster than infinite speed. But what is infinite speed? It's it's essentially its supposed to be infinitely faster than the speed of light. Because warp nine was I think one thousand, nine hundred times the speed of light. I don't know. I'm betting that Canter Yeves was involved and I disapprove. Yeah, well, no ship was supposed to be able to actually go arp ten. I think the the the upper limit on ships was supposed

to be nine point six five or something. But but of course star Trek, you know, establishes rules and then breaks them. Okay, so Scotty aside, what have real scientists said about this? Well, so we've got a Mexican physicist.

His name is Miguel Acubert, and uh he proposed a method of stretching space, so you would stretch it in a wave, which would cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand, thus propelling it kind of like in that surfboard type fashion you were talking about, Lauren, so that

you could move at from an outside perspective at superliminal speeds. Right, But again, what we're saying is that the ship itself, relative to its reference frame, is not going faster than the speed of light. It's riding sort of a bubble or a wave of space that is going faster than the speed of Right. So you're still you're still um maintaining special relativity. You're not breaking it in any way.

You're not like physically traveling. It's not like not like someone is suddenly able to run faster than the spe of light. It's just that again, let's say that you're doing the hundred meter dash and uh, and you're able to to to compress those hundred meters into two meters for you, and you'd be able to across that that hundred meters in the same amount of time that normally take it across two meters. That's oversimplifying what this model

would do, but it's a similar idea. It's this idea of being able to essentially compress space uh and ride the super fast hyper space warp bubble um. Right. But the problem here is still with fuel because what Miguel was saying, I'll Alciber was saying that um that you would potentially need more energy than what's contained in the

entire universe in order to get this engine started. Yeah, and then there were others who said that even if you fiddled with a little bit, you might be able to get it down to a matter antimatter reaction to provide the energy for generating this hypothetical warp bubble. As far as we know, this is just hypothetical. We may not ever be able to do it. Well, I think what he showed is that, um, it's theoretically consistent. The problem is just practical right that that that it's not

like that this doesn't make sense the idea. What it is is that the idea makes sense. It like could technically work. You just need this stuff that we don't know if you could really make right And and anti batter was just one of the examples of something that could give power. In fact, he was talking more about if you were able to find matter that has negative mass. All right, so I'm gonna blow you guys minds here

for a second negative mass. All right, negative negative mass, So negative mass would be like imagine it's I can't really imagine this, but I'm going to ask you to do it anyway. Imagine that you have an object that has negative two kilograms of mass, instead of having two kilograms of mass, it's negative two kilograms a mass. Now, with simple equations, for example, force equals mass times acceleration.

If you take that negative factor in there and you multiply that by an acceleration and to get the force, you're going to get an interesting results. So, for example, it would mean that if I had an object with negative mass and I were to push it, it would move in the opposite direction of the force applied to it. So, Joe, if you had negative mass and I pushed, you would go into your hand, Yes, you would. You would move into me, and that would be a very awkward thing,

and we'd have to go see hr. But or or on a larger scale, like a negative moon and a negative earth, if you could imagine such things would um would repel each other instead of attracting each other gravitationally. It would also be a little odd because when you have negative mass, the the electromagnetic force that holds it together would be uh a destructive force rather than because it because anything that pulls it together would actually push it apart. Let me ask you this, all right, so

you've got negative mass. Let's say that I have a negative mass object that that I've suspended somehow, don't don't ask me how yet. But then but then it drops, let go of it. What happens to it? It up? No, it does not go up. It actually falls. And the reason why it falls is because what we call gravity a force, it's actually an uh, it's actually acceleration. It's not really a force in the in the sense of

the basic forces of thermodynamic law. It's an acceleration. It would still fall, however, because an object that has negative mass would go in the opposite direction of where you put placed force. You know, if I put an object on top of a table, technically the table is pressing up at a level of force that's equal to keeping that object on on the table. Well, if an object with negative mass goes in the same direction as whatever

force you applied to it, it happens to be. That means you'd have to put a negative mass object underneath a table and let go, and the table would keep it from falling. But if you were to remove that table, then it would fall and once it hit the ground, because the ground would be providing force pushing up, and because the object would want to go in the same

direction as where the force is coming from. It would start to either disintegrate or burrow into the surface of the Earth, not stopping until it got to the center. Just kill me, now, this well, this is this is the kind of stuff matter like this is what physicists might call exotic matter. It's stuff that in a lot of cases, we don't really have any way of knowing that this exists. But you can make sense of it mathematics. You can make a mathematical argument for it, but we

don't have any actual practical evidence of it. I would put quotation marks around sense in that particular application. But but ries about this go back to the nineteen fifties, and um, we're we're kind of revamped and applied to conceptual engines in the nineteen eighties, which probably is what led us to our fancy star trek kind of concepts. Right. But so technically, if you could get your hands on a whole bunch of this exotic matter that we're not

sure exists, you could maybe create this warp drive. Possibly possibly because if if you get two objects, um that the masses of which cancel out, then um, you know, the interactions between them could create a constant acceleration in the direction of the positive mass, wherein their momentum and energy would remain canceled out. I'm going to just not because at some point I just started imagining candy bars that in the middle of that sentence. That's probably safer

from everybody. Let me put to you this way. Let let me say something else. So let's say that we were able to create a warp drive. That doesn't even even assuming that that's even possible, and we've got their people working on it right now. NASA's got folks working right now trying to see if there's if this is actually a possibility. We don't just breeze past that NASA is working on warp drive. Well, they're looking at at least the feasibility of Yeah, I wouldn't saying building a

warp drive. I'd say, checking to see if the science or at least the hypothesis can be reflected in reality. Yeah, they wouldn't. You wouldn't say working on it as in like their building one. You'd say they're doing research on it, and they've devoted at least one, I think fifty dollar interferometer to this research right to see if it as all it is at all possible to generate a warp

bubble in the first place. But I was going to say that even if we were able to make a warp drive like tomorrow, and we were able to build a ship that could in fact warped space around it, there's some other potential issues, one of which is that, uh, there's some people who think that it's possible such a device would create such a huge level of hawking radiation that we would all die we were to ride inside

a spacecraft. That yeah, there's there's also there's also some some people who suggest that the deceleration process, while perfectly fine for everybody who's on board, assuming that we're still okay from the hawking radiation, UM, could be somewhat destructive

at the destination. Yeah, there's this idea that UM, say, a bubble of space moving through space around it at the superliminal speeds, would sort of collect charged particles that are flying through space at super high energy as it moved along, and it would just kind of like carry them along in its pocket until you stop. And parts don't have breaks the way that the ship does, and so you know, suddenly your bubble stops, your ship stops,

the particles keep going and destroy the sal system. Right. Yeah, so is you're is you're flying along, you're just collecting ammunition that will immediately be launched out in a cone of death in front of you wherever you stop. My bad, It's kind of how I am. Everywhere everything I touch a destroy. Well, just the point is, if we if we get this drive working, you'd want to, like, I don't know, park around the block. You don't, don't pull

right up to where you're going. Yeah. Um, And and there's theres still a little bit of an energy problem because even this NACA team, which is being led by a herald sunny white um, is saying that the system would work on about like the annual energy consumption of the United States, which is smaller than that Jupiter thing that we were talking about. I think they said that the antimatter, the amount of antimatter they would need, would be about the size of the voyage your spacecraft, as

opposed to Jupiter, which is significantly smaller. Yeah. Yeah, it's still the the we're still running into that huge problem of how do you apply enough energy? In fact, that was one of the interesting things that how stuff works. Dot Com if you read how Warp how warp speed works, which John Fuller wrote a few years ago. I said, I sat next to John and I gave him helpful hints, and he still didn't include my bit about the Jeffreys tubes. Um. But anyway, he had asked me a couple of questions

as he was working on this article. Uh, he taught it. He actually did some research and found that scientists were talking about how impractical it would be because a ship the size of the Enterprise would require a certain amount of energy in order to move just at impulse uh speeds impulses like it's it's slower than the speed of light. It's not. It's pretty fast, but as I recall, its

um less than warp one. So, but impulse drive would be it would be enough to require more energy than what the Enterprise could feasibly supply, let alone the energy you would need to fuel a warp drive. Uh, you know, propulsion system. So uh, that seems to still be well within the realms of science fiction. So even if we were able to prove that this is a possibility from an actual uh like being able to really create a warp bubble, like that's actually a thing we could do.

It may not be something we can practically do as a means of transportation. Uh. At the same time, while we want to be careful not to overhype, we also shouldn't laugh this off. I mean I encourage this research, oh sure, I mean, well, if nothing else, it teaches us more about how spacetime itself is constructed, right, and it may it may tell us more about things like the the the the conditions the universe was in in

the instant after the Big Bang. You know that that will be amazing stuff to learn, you know, just from making observations through this kind of stuff. And who knows, maybe there is some way we can harness this in a way to either have communications or transportation in some future implementation. It would be phenomenal. Um as all, we don't, you know, blow up whatever it is we're trying to

call fingers crossed. Yeah, yeah, that that that NASA research team is is talking about trying to implement this on the quantum level. As you know, many things are talked about being implemented in in this kind of theoretical physics. But but, but, but even that, if if they could pull something like that off of creating a warp bubble on quantum particles in the next few years. That's that's terrific. Yeah. Well, I mean, not to beat a dead horse, but we

keep revisiting this idea. Go a hundred years back and show them all the technology we have now. It is magic. Yep. Yeah, well heck. I mean, if I just have a conversation with some of my extended family members, they think that that I've harnessed some sort of weird magical power. But uh, you know, I grew up in rural Georgia. So all right, well, do you guys have anything else you want to say about warp drive before we sign off into the sunset? That's that's all I got. All right, Okay, well we're

gonna wrap me up. Let's wrap up warp So guys, that's it. Make sure you go and visit our website f W thinking dot com. That's where we have all the videos and blog posts and articles that you can peruse and enjoy. There's some amazing stuff on there. I highly recommend you go check that out, and remember you can find us on Twitter and Facebook. Our handle is FW thinking and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this topic. In the future of technology.

Visit forward Thinking dot Com brought to you by Toyota, Let's Go Places,