Sincerely
How to Build a Warp Drive
With what we know today.
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This is the idea I’ve submitted to the $500,000 grant project over at Warp Factory, an initiative that aims to help people explore feasible warp drive solutions that might be pursued using knowledge available today.
My proposal doesn’t require any “exotic” mass or energy that is, as of yet, entirely undiscovered.
Instead, I rely on several physical phenomena already known to science.
- Relativistic Motion
- Gravitational Waves
- Sound Waves
Particle accelerators like CERN are already quite capable of accelerating mass to arbitrarily high fractions (energy-dependent, of course) of the speed of light.
Our equations on gravity tell us that as an object accelerates closer and closer to the speed of light, it appears, to all outside observers, as being “more massive.”
Because the mass of an object is one of the variables that contributes to its force of gravity, relativistically moving mass should possess a stronger gravitational field — corresponding to stronger gravitational waves.
From LIGO:
Technically speaking, every physical object that accelerates produces gravitational waves.
So we know that we can produce stronger gravitational waves by zooming particles faster and faster (something we are already doing at places like CERN).
This means that we don’t need the equivalent mass of the Sun or Jupiter compressed into the size of a black hole in order to generate strong enough gravitational fields to warp spacetime (at least at tiny scales).
We can make do with a tiny amount of mass that we constantly accelerate — either via particle accelerator rings or by constructing a CERN-like relativistic centrifuge that spins matter in place, which would allow us to produce gravitational waves in a stationary spot, rather than along the diameter of an accelerator ring or in a straight line through space.
So where do sound waves come in?
Recent research has shown that sound waves may have negative mass, and therefore negative energy. To be clear, it is not necessary that this be “real” negative mass and energy expressing physical characteristics that we are still as of yet unfamiliar with.
We only need to acknowledge what sound waves already are — vibrations transmitted through a physical medium via the displacement of atoms or molecules.
The transmission of sound waves creates regions of compression, where density of matter is a higher, and areas of rarefaction, where density of matter is lower. (Link is a video so make sure your volume is safe for your ears).
This is why sound waves are sometimes described as “pressure waves.”
Sound waves propagate through mediums of material, so it should be possible to use them to precisely modulate how we compress and expand atoms spinning at relativistic speeds.
Doing so would allow us to control the geometry of the gravitational waves we are producing indirectly. Since another variable regarding the force of gravity has to do with the radius between centers of mass, our ability to create expansion and compression within a relativistically moving medium using sound is the literal equivalent of modulating the distance between centers of mass in our medium, giving us the ability to create gravitational waves that have elastic, back-and-forth like character.
If it is true that gravitational waves really are wavelike, then like any other wave, they should have peaks corresponding to the highest intensity of the gravitational force, and troughs corresponding to the lowest intensity of gravitational force.
Furthermore, my proposal is entirely falsifiable.
A LIGO-like gravitational wave detector could be incorporated into our particle accelerator/relativistic centrifuge design so as to watch out for any light-lensing that takes place. If we can detect our own artificial gravity waves produced via relativistic motion, then we can also detect changes in the wavelength (amongst other characteristics) of those gravitational waves induced by sound wave modulation.
What is not explored in my proposal (but is explored here) is how this might be connected with the Casimir effect — a means of potentially producing negative energy density (though not necessarily needing to be “real” negative energy density, if the Relativistic van Der Waals forces interpretation is correct).
I do believe, however, that sound wave modulation of artificially-generated gravitational waves in conjunction with the Casimir effect could satisfy our “negative mass and energy” requirement for a warp drive, without actually needing to be “real” negative mass and energy.
One could imagine building a ring-shaped particle accelerator with the Casimir effect in mind. The walls enclosing the interior of the particle accelerator could, in fact, be our Casimir plates. It seems as if the Casimir effect’s true use is in allowing us to tune out more “noise” from our closed-system. Doing so may or may not correspond to “real” negative energy density, but in any regard, less interference from fields and particles in the vacuum of space or here on Earth is a good thing nonetheless, and so it is only necessary that the energy density within a Casimir-enclosed space be negative relative to the regions surrounding it, not something “negative” in some exotic sense that destroys our entire conception of physics.
Dr. Harold Sonny White has already explored the possibility (and is quite confident he has actually produced a nanoscale warp bubble) using a Casimir cavity, so I believe there is a high likelihood of being able to combine his intuition with that presented here to pursue an actual proof-of-concept of a warp drive.
But it would start off looking like an artificial gravity-wave generator, using relativistically moving mass, the arrangement of which can be controlled with sound waves, in conjunction with a LIGO-like detector that could tell us whether or not we have truly warped spacetime.
