Physics of Warp Drives — My MAGICal Experience
Even if you’re not a Trekkie, you have to admit: the idea of a warp drive seems pretty cool. Just imagine being in a spaceship with the ability to travel faster than light, and yet experience little to no side effects. Think of the possibilities it would open up: visiting other planets, traveling across the Universe in just a couple of days, pulling a Captain Kirk and saying “warp velocity 7” as naturally as you’d say “pass me the cheese”.
These possibilities excited me (specially the last one), so I decided to study the physics of warp drives during my summer mentoring session with MAGIC. Read on to learn more about my experience!
My Mentor
First things first, my mentor. Sarah Rice works in the Navy as an Engineer. She majored in Ocean Engineering and minored in German, and later went to graduate school to study Physics. In short, I couldn’t have done any of this without her.
Let’s start with the fact that she’s probably one of the most supportive people I’ve ever met: I’m sure that whatever path I had chosen to take for my final project, she would have helped me with an equally enthusiastic smile on her face. She always made sure I felt comfortable to say what I thought and happy with my progress, but never pressured or overwhelmed. Her flexibility was also great, and it allowed us to work smoothly in different time zones. I’m glad to say that I got to know Sarah during our time working together.
Selecting a Topic
One of the first things that Sarah was absolutely great at helping me with was selecting a topic. It took me four of our ten meetings to figure out what I wanted to do, and throughout that process not only did I not feel pressured, I also learned a big personal lesson.
I knew I wanted to work with physics, which has been my passion since I was 11. Earlier this year, I started to learn about general relativity, an area that definitely captivated my interest, so I was inclined to work on something within that field. Finally, I was interested in exploring the connections between physics and science fiction: physicists taking ideas from sci-fi, sci-fi writers taking ideas from physics. The challenge now was to find a project that would allow me to unite all of that.
Initial ideas included a historical exploration of wormholes in both science fiction and physics, a more general sci-fi and physics timeline including various technologies (time travel, invisibility cloaks, wormholes), and a study of how sci-fi changed after general relativity and after quantum mechanics.
During our third meeting together, I was desperately trying to choose one topic and adapt one of these ideas until I had the perfect project. Sarah noticed that I seemed anxious, and asked “Are you trying to choose now because you believe you truly have to, or is it because you’re uncomfortable? If so, you need to get comfortable with that”. What she said allowed me to relax a little during the following week, which was when the inspiration came, in the form of a YouTube video.
“Warp Drive News. Seriously” was its title — who wouldn’t click it? So I watched as Sabine Hossenfelder explained the most recent warp drive results by Bobrick and Martire. I’d found my project: a literature review on warp drives.
Final Project
Having found that idea, I needed to learn how to use LaTeX and Overleaf, and read as many articles as I could on the topic. Sarah sent me several tutorials about Overleaf, and made comments on my writing as I made progress on the article. The fact that she had a background in graduate-level physics, and therefore in general relativity, but had focused in a different subfield — environmental physics — made her comments even more valuable. One of my goals when writing the article was to present the topic in a manner accessible to beginning general relativity students and to researchers from similar areas, so she was able to point it out to me whenever that goal wasn’t met.
By the end of the session, I had a full first draft of the article. Here is a graph (formally known as the volume element plot for the Alcubierre drive) I made during the session (if you’re interested, here’s the source code):
Now, I’ll focus on reformatting and proofreading and try to get it published. Regardless of whether I publish it, I have MAGIC, and specially Sarah, to thank for this wonderful (some would say MAGICal) experience.
About Me
I am currently a high school junior at Colégio Marista Anjo da Guarda, a small school located in Curitiba, Brazil. I’m 15, an aspiring astrophysicist, and plan on studying in the US. When I’m not studying physics, I also like reading sci-fi (clearly) and some literary classics (beat literature is a must). Sometimes I (try to) code — here’s my GitHub.
