Top secret: NASA is developing a warp drive. Warp drive - an unattainable luxury or a real means of transportation? Warp drive experiment failed

Last September, several hundred scientists, engineers and space enthusiasts gathered under one roof at the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Houston. The reason for the meeting is the second open meeting 100 Year Starship. The agency itself finances this high-tech get-together DARPA, and is led by a former astronaut May Jemison. The goal is simple: “make a reality of human flight beyond our solar system to another star in the next 100 years.” Intriguing? An exciting story awaits you.

Most of those present at the conference agree that the development of manned cosmonautics is depressingly slow. Despite the billions of dollars that have been spent over the past 20-30 years, the space agencies have not moved much from the point laid back in the 60s. Than, by the way, Elon Musk, having founded his own space agency SpaceX. 100 Year Starship plans to speed up the process of flying to another star, forcing the development of promising technologies. Well, let's buckle up.

Among the most anticipated presentations at the conference was this: "Warp Field Mechanics 102" ("Warp Field Mechanics 102"), presented by Harold "Son" White from NASA. A space agency veteran works on a special propulsion program at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) near the Hyatt. With a team of six, White recently set out for the future space travel. There was a lot in the new presentation: from all kinds of flight projects and improving chemical rockets to powerful engines based on antimatter and nuclear energy. However, the most interesting thing was this: Or a warp engine. Call it what you will, but the warp is still the warp for many, from Star Trek lovers to Star Craft lovers.

Let's shed some light: warp drive could make faster-than-light travel possible. Of course, you will say that this is impossible, because it contradicts general theory Einstein's relativity. White thinks not. In the half hour allotted to him at the symposium, he talked about the physics of potential warp motion, using concepts such as bubbles Alcubierre And hyperspace fluctuations. He also noted that his theoretical calculations had paved the way for warp propulsion, and he began physical testing at his NASA laboratory, which he called Eagleworks.

As you have begun to suspect, a working warp drive will be the number one word in the history of space travel. We will not only be able to fly to Mars faster than a year and a half, like, but also go beyond the solar system, and maybe even replace the power source with "". A trip on a modern spacecraft to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take 75,000 years. But if the ship was warp-driven, it would take two weeks to get everything done, according to White.

With the shutdown of the shuttles and the increasing activity of private segments in the field of near-Earth flight, NASA says that it will focus on daring forays farther into space, much further than the bored digging of the moon. But without fundamentally new engines, such sorties will be of little use. A couple of days after the 100 Year Starship meeting, NASA chief Charles Bolden echoed White's words:

“One day we want to get to warp speed. We want to move faster than the speed of light and not stop at Mars.”

Physicist Miguel Alcubierre developed the warp drive model after watching an episode of Star Trek.

The first use of the term "warp propulsion" dates back to 1966, when Gene Roddenberry launched Star Trek. For the next thirty years, the warp existed only as one of the most enduring concepts. science fiction. But one day the episode caught the eye of a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre. Then he worked in the field of general relativity and asked himself: what it takes to build a warp drive? He published his work in 1994.

Alcubierre imagined a bubble in space. At the front of the bubble, space-time contracts, while at the back of the bubble it expands (as in time). The warp will have little effect on the ship, like a normal wave, despite the turmoil outside the bubble. In principle, a warp bubble can move arbitrarily fast: the speed limit predicted by Einstein's theory only works with spacetime, not the distortions of spacetime itself. In the bubble, as predicted by Alcubierre, space-time will remain unchanged, and the space travelers themselves will be safe and sound.

The warp drive will be able to send travelers not only beyond the earth's orbit, but also the entire solar system. Einstein's equations of general relativity are very complex in a one-way solution—calculating how matter curves spacetime—but quite simple in reverse. Using them, Alcubierre figured out what distribution of matter is needed to create a warp bubble. But the problem is that the solution revealed a strange form of matter - negative energy.

In a primitive explanation, gravity is the force of attraction between two objects. Every object, regardless of its size, attracts the matter around it. In Einstein's understanding, this force is the curvature of space-time. Negative energy, however, is repulsive gravity. Instead of pulling space-time together, negative energy will push it apart. To put it bluntly, Alcubierre's engine needs negative energy to run the space-time behind the ship to expand.

And although no one has ever measured negative energy, quantum mechanics(let's add to the list of paradoxes) predicts its existence, which means that scientists may well create it in the laboratory. One way to create it would be Casimir effect: Two parallel conductive plates close enough to each other should produce a small amount of negative energy. Alcubierre's model collapsed at the exact moment it was needed great amount negative energy, much more than you can create - according to scientists.

White says he has found a way around this limitation. In a computer simulation, White was changing the strength and geometry of the warp field. It turned out that in theory it is possible to create a warp bubble using a million times less negative energy than Alcubierre had imagined, and enough to spaceship could make it himself.

“From the impossible, everything became plausible.”

"Son"

Harold "Sonny" White, engineerNASAdeveloping a warp drive in a labEagleworks.

Further narration - on behalf of Konstantin Kakaes withPopSci.

The Johnson Space Center sits next to the lagoons where Houston gives way to the port of Galveston. The smell of campuses where future astronauts train is in the air. On the day of my visit, White met me in the fifteenth building, a low-rise building with a labyrinth of corridors, offices and laboratories that together make Eagleworks. He wore a polo shirt embroidered with the Eagleworks logo: an eagle spreading its wings over a futuristic starship.

White didn't start his career in a movement lab. He studied mechanical engineering and joined the agency in 2004 as a contractor in the robotics group, where he has worked since 2000. He ended up taking control of the manipulator on the ISS while working on his Ph.D. in plasma physics. It was not until 2009 that White began studying engines, which he had been interested in for a long time, and the job at NASA was gone.

“The son is a unique individual,” said his boss, John Applewhite, who heads the propulsion systems division at the Johnson Center. “He's definitely a dreamer, but he's also an engineer. He can turn his imagination into a useful technical product."

After joining Applewhite's group, White requested permission to open his own laboratory dedicated to advanced engines. I chose my logo and got to work.

White took me to his office, which he shares with a colleague who searches for water on the Moon (), and then took me to Eagleworks. As we walked, he told me about the difficulties of opening the laboratory, which he described as "a long and tedious process of finding advanced engines that will help people explore space." He speaks with a slight drawl, the result of many years in the South, first at an Alabama college and then 13 years in Texas.

White shows me the apparatus and draws my attention to its central element, the Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster (QVPD). The device looks like a big red velvet donut with wires wrapped tightly around the core. It is one of the two main developments of Eagleworks, along with the warp drive. Of course, it's classified. When I asked about this device, White said that he could not divulge details, except that the development of this technology would take longer than the creation of a warp drive. A report published by NASA in 2011 said that it uses the quantum fluctuations of empty space as a fuel source (which, apparently, even Tesla spoke about), so a spacecraft based on KVPD would not need "gasoline".

White's experiments with the warp were centered in a corner of the room. The helium-neon laser is mounted on a small table behind a perforated grille, along with a beam splitter and a black-and-white CCD camera. This is a White-Judy warp field interferometer, named after White himself and Richard Judy, a retired Johnson Center staffer who helped White analyze data from the CCD. Half of the laser light passes through the ring, White's experimental fixture. The other half is not. If the ring does not change in any way, White will notice this in the data from the CCD. If the space is distorted, then "the interference picture will be completely different."

When the device is activated, White's setup works like in the movie: the laser glows red and the two beams cross like laser swords. Inside the ring are four barium titanate ceramic capacitors, which White charges up to 23,000 volts. For the past year and a half, he has been modeling this experiment, and according to the engineer, "capacitors are gaining a powerful energy potential."

However, when I asked how all of this would generate the negative energy needed to warp space-time, White's response became evasive: “It works like this… I can tell you what I can say. I can't tell you what I can't." He referred to a non-disclosure agreement, so the details remained under the veil of secrecy. I asked with whom he signed such an agreement, to which the answer was:

“People come and ask about all sorts of things. I just can't go into more detail than I do now."

warp drive

White works in the shadow of a Saturn V rocket at the Johnson Space Center (JSC).

The theory of warp travel is intuitive - warp space-time and create a moving bubble. But in practice, it has several significant obstacles. Even if White manages to significantly reduce the required amount of negative energy than Alcubierra needed, there will still be much more of it than scientists can create. Lawrence Ford, a theoretical physicist at Tufts University, who has written dozens of papers on negative energy over the past 30 years, says so. Ford and other physicists say there are fundamental physical limits - not just engineering problems - as to how much negative energy can be concentrated in one place for a long time.

Another problem is that in order to create a warp bubble that travels faster than the speed of light, scientists will have to spread negative energy around the ship, including in front of it. White doesn't see this as a problem. When I asked him, he answered rather vaguely, saying that the warp drive will work, since "all that is needed is an apparatus that will create all the necessary conditions." But creating these conditions in front of the ship would mean distributing negative energy that travels faster than light, violating general relativity.

Finally, warp drive is a conceptual issue. In general relativity, traveling faster than the speed of light is equivalent to traveling through time. We are already on the topic of whether such travel is possible in principle. By saying that warp drive is possible, White is actually claiming that he can create a time machine.

Doubt creeps like night on earth.

"I don't think any of the usual understandings of physics suggest what he wants to see in his experiments," says Ken Olum, a physicist at Tufts University who attended the 2011 100 Year Starship meeting. Noah Graham, a physicist at Middlebury College who read two of White's papers at my request, responded with the following remark:
"I don't see anything scientific in these papers other than summarizing old papers."
Alcubierre himself, now a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, also doubts:
“Even if I am sitting in a ship and I have negative energy, there is no way to get it where I need it,” he said by phone. - “It's a great idea. I like it because I wrote it myself. But it has a number of limitations that I have encountered over the years, and I do not know how to get around them.

To the left of the main gate of the Johnson Center lies a Saturn V rocket on its side. All stages are disconnected so that you can admire the intestines of the rocket. Just one of the many carrier engines is about the size of a small car, and the side-lying rocket is a couple of meters longer than a football field. This speaks volumes about the complexity of space travel. The rocket is forty years old, and the time when it was introduced - and when NASA was part of the big American dream to put a man on the moon - is long gone. Today, the Johnson Space Center is like a place where greatness once roamed but disappeared.

A breakthrough in engine development could mark new era in JSC and NASA, which will last for many years and the end of which we will not see. The Rassvet probe, launched in 2007, explores the asteroid belt on ion thrusters. In 2010, the Japanese unveiled Ikarus, the first interplanetary solar sail project, another experimental engine variant. In 2016, the ISS will begin the VASIMR experiment, a high-thrust plasma system. And while these systems could one day carry astronauts to Mars, they certainly won't get out of the solar system. That's why, according to White, NASA needs to take on risky projects.

The warp drive is probably NASA's most incredible propulsion project. The brightest minds in the scientific community claim that White cannot build it. Experts say it works against the laws of nature and physics. Despite all this, NASA supports this development.

"What he's trying to do doesn't need a lot of funding," Applewhite says. - “I think the authorities are very interested in him continuing to work. So far it's just a theory, but if it turns into reality, the rules of the game will change dramatically."

In January, White assembled his warp interferometer and took it to a new location. Eagleworks has moved into a new home that is larger and "seismically isolated," White enthuses. That is, it is protected from vibrations. But the best thing about the new lab is that NASA gave White the space to develop the Apollo program, the same one that once took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon.

And it became such an incredible breakthrough that many still believe that the Americans landed on the moon.

Last September, several hundred scientists, engineers and space enthusiasts gathered under one roof at the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Houston. The reason for the meeting is the second public meeting of 100 Year Starship. This high-tech get-together is financed by the DARPA agency itself, and former astronaut Mae Jemison is in charge. The goal is simple: “make a reality of human flight beyond our solar system to another star in the next 100 years.” Intriguing? An exciting story awaits you.

Most of those present at the conference agree that the development of manned cosmonautics is depressingly slow. Despite the billions of dollars that have been spent over the past 20-30 years, the space agencies have not moved much from the point laid back in the 60s. Than, by the way, by founding his own space agency SpaceX. 100 Year Starship plans to speed up the process of flying to another star, forcing the development of promising technologies. Well, let's buckle up.

Among the most anticipated presentations at the conference was this: "Warp Field Mechanics 102" ("Warp Field Mechanics 102"), presented by Harold "Son" White from NASA. A space agency veteran works on a special propulsion program at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) near the Hyatt. With a team of six, White recently laid out NASA's goals for the future of space travel. There was a lot in the new presentation: from all kinds of flight projects and improving chemical rockets to powerful engines based on antimatter and nuclear energy. However, the most interesting thing was this: the warp drive. Or a warp engine. Call it what you will, but the warp is still the warp for many, from Star Trek lovers to Star Craft lovers.

Let's shed some light: warp drive could make faster-than-light travel possible. Of course, you will say that this is impossible, since it contradicts Einstein's general theory of relativity. White thinks not. In the half hour allotted to him at the symposium, he spoke about the physics of potential warp motion, using concepts such as Alcubierre bubbles and hyperspace oscillations. He also noted that his theoretical calculations paved the way for warp propulsion, and he began physical testing at his NASA laboratory, which he named Eagleworks.

As you have begun to suspect, a working warp drive will be the number one word in the history of space travel. We will not only be able to fly to Mars in less than a year and a half, as planned, but also go beyond the solar system, and maybe even replace the power source on Voyager. A trip on a modern spacecraft to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take 75,000 years. But if the ship was warp-driven, it would take two weeks to get everything done, according to White.

“One day we want to get to warp speed. We want to move faster than the speed of light and not stop at Mars.”

Star Trek

The first use of the term "warp propulsion" dates back to 1966, when Gene Roddenberry launched Star Trek. For the next thirty years, the warp existed only as one of the most enduring science fiction concepts. But one day the episode caught the eye of a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre. Then he worked in the field of general relativity and asked himself the question: what is needed to create a warp drive? He published his work in 1994.

Alcubierre imagined a bubble in space. At the front of the bubble, space-time contracts, while at the back of the bubble it expands (as in the Big Bang). The warp will have little effect on the ship, like a normal wave, despite the turmoil outside the bubble. In principle, a warp bubble can move arbitrarily fast: the speed limit predicted by Einstein's theory only works with spacetime, not the distortions of spacetime itself. In the bubble, as predicted by Alcubierre, space-time will remain unchanged, and the space travelers themselves will be safe and sound.

And although no one has ever measured negative energy, quantum mechanics (to add to the list of paradoxes) predicts its existence, which means that scientists can very well create it in the laboratory. One way to create it would be the Casimir effect: two parallel conductive plates close enough to each other should create a small amount of negative energy. Alcubierre's model collapsed at the moment when it took a huge amount of negative energy, far more than can be created - according to scientists.

White says he has found a way around this limitation. In a computer simulation, White was changing the strength and geometry of the warp field. It turned out that in theory it was possible to create a warp bubble using a million times less negative energy than Alcubierre had imagined, and enough for the spacecraft to produce it itself.

“From the impossible, everything became plausible.”

Further narration - on behalf of Constantin Cacaes with PopSci.

The Johnson Space Center sits next to the lagoons where Houston gives way to the port of Galveston. The smell of campuses where future astronauts train is in the air. On the day of my visit, White met me in the fifteenth building, a low-rise building with a labyrinth of corridors, offices and laboratories that together make Eagleworks. He wore a polo shirt embroidered with the Eagleworks emblem: an eagle spreading its wings over a futuristic starship.

“The son is a unique individual,” said his boss, John Applewhite, who heads the propulsion systems division at the Johnson Center. “He's definitely a dreamer, but he's also an engineer. He can turn his imagination into a useful technical product."

After joining Applewhite's group, White requested permission to open his own laboratory dedicated to advanced engines. I chose my logo and got to work.

White took me to his office, which he shares with a colleague who searches for water on the Moon (he apparently found it on Mars), and then took me to Eagleworks. As we walked, he told me about the difficulties of opening the laboratory, which he described as "a long and tedious process of finding advanced engines that will help people explore space." He speaks with a slight drawl, the result of many years in the South, first at an Alabama college and then 13 years in Texas.

“People come and ask about all sorts of things. I just can't go into more detail than I do now."

warp drive

Finally, warp drive is a conceptual issue. In general relativity, traveling faster than the speed of light is equivalent to traveling through time. We have already discussed whether such travel is possible in principle. By saying that warp drive is possible, White is actually claiming that he can create a time machine.

Doubt creeps like night on earth.

"I don't think any of the usual understandings of physics suggest what he wants to see in his experiments," says Ken Olum, a physicist at Tufts University who attended the 2011 100 Year Starship meeting. Noah Graham, a physicist at Middlebury College who read two of White's papers at my request, responded with the following remark:

"I don't see anything scientific in these papers other than summarizing old papers."

Alcubierre himself, now a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, also doubts:

“Even if I am sitting in a ship and I have negative energy, there is no way to get it where I need it,” he said by phone. - “It's a great idea. I like it because I wrote it myself. But it has a number of limitations that I have encountered over the years, and I do not know how to get around them.

warp travel

A breakthrough in engine development could usher in a new era at JSC and NASA that will last for years and never see an end. The Rassvet probe, launched in 2007, explores the asteroid belt on ion thrusters. In 2010, the Japanese unveiled Ikarus, the first interplanetary solar sail project, another experimental engine variant. In 2016, the ISS will begin the VASIMR experiment, a high-thrust plasma system. And while these systems could one day carry astronauts to Mars, they certainly won't get out of the solar system. That's why, according to White, NASA needs to take on risky projects.

"What he's trying to do doesn't need a lot of funding," Applewhite says. - “I think the authorities are very interested in him continuing to work. So far it's just a theory, but if it turns into reality, the rules of the game will change dramatically."

And it became such an incredible breakthrough that many still do not believe that the Americans landed on the moon.

Ilya Khel

The other day, NASA experts successfully tested a new revolutionary method of space travel, which allows reaching unrealistically high speeds. The experiments were carried out for the first time in a deep vacuum, which corresponds to the conditions of outer space.

A team of scientists from the US, China and the UK has been developing a warp drive for space rockets more than 15 years, but the prospect of research was controversial, since the laws of his work did not fit into existing physical theories. However, tests conducted in NASA laboratories have established that it is still possible to implement a new way of implementing electromagnetic propulsion in space.

The technology is based on the use of an electromagnetic drive. The main idea is the conversion of electrical energy into thrust without the use of propellant (rocket fuel). However, in the realities of classical physics this is impossible, since in this case the fundamental law of conservation of momentum is violated.

If the theory put forward by scientists really has the right to life, then it can be implemented in the development spacecraft already in the near future. Warp drives will provide cost reduction space flights and increasing their speed will make it possible to travel not only around the solar system, but also beyond its limits.

Imagine a car that can carry four passengers and their luggage to the moon in about four hours, or multi-generational space travel at only one-tenth the speed of light, reaching Alpha Centauri in less than a century. Warp drives will no doubt change the world of space travel. They are the main trump card of the American space program today.

Paul March, an engineer working on warp drives, notes:

“My work at Eagleworks [a warp drive testing lab] is a continuation of my research into the fundamental problems hindering the development of manned spaceflight and causing the suspension lunar program Apollo. If the research results are successful, then we will get an effective technology that will allow us to get rid of the restrictions imposed by the rocket equation [Tsiolkovsky's formula that determines the relationship between speed aircraft and rocket engine thrust]”.

According to March, the technology still requires a significant amount of testing to convince scientists that it really is not the result of a mistake or a coincidence. Warp drives are currently being tested at the Johnson Space Center. It is assumed that if such an engine is created, it can be installed on any spacecraft, and the electromagnetic drive will receive energy from a compact nuclear power plant created specifically for this purpose.

An artist's journey through a wormhole

Image: Wikimedia Commons

NASA officials have disowned the creation of a warp drive. The agency staff responded to the rumors that have appeared in the media over the past weeks in a letter to Space.com. You can get acquainted with the opinion of the engineers of the Lyndon Johnson Space Center, as well as a number of independent experts, in the material of the publication.

As industry watcher NASASpaceFlight.com previously reported, NASA Eagleworks engineers have successfully tested the new EmDrive electromagnetic motor in a vacuum and have even been able to measure its thrust. A feature of this device, which many news outlets have called a warp drive, is that there are no moving parts or a combustion chamber. According to the theoretical physicists who developed the concept, the operation of the engine occurs only due to the interaction of the electromagnetic waves generated by it with the end plates of the waveguide in which they propagate. It is important to note that the mechanism of traction is unknown.

Appearance EmDrive engine

SPR, Ltd., of the EM Drive

CNET reports that EmDrive will enable fast flights inside solar system, in particular, that the flight between the Earth and the Moon can take only four hours, and the journey to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, will take less than 100 years.

But such statements are premature, according to NASA officials, responding to a request from Space.com. Despite the fact that the engineers have shown the possibility of creating a prototype EmDrive, their experiment has not yet brought any significant results. "NASA is not developing a warp drive," the agency added.

According to Ethan Siegel, professor of physics and astronomy at Lewis and Clark College (Portland), the thrust values observed in the experiment (about 30-50 micronewtons) are only 3 times the measurement error of the instrument. This does not allow us to consider these measurements as reliable enough, however, the expert notes that it was important to test the device in various directions in order to level out possible interaction with magnetic field Earth. No less important, he considers the fact that the device was tested in a vacuum - in atmospheric conditions, repulsion from gas molecules, known to physics, could be observed. In addition, Siegel notes that the details of the experiments and their results have not yet been peer-reviewed and have not been published in scientific journal- this condition is necessary for the scientific community to recognize the discovery.

The NASA team, led by Harold White, began developing space warp engine capable of moving objects faster than the speed of light. The warp drive compresses the space ahead of the ship and expands behind, which keeps the ship moving. With it, scientists intend to cover the 4.3 light-years separating us from Alpha Centauri in two weeks. The project was named "Speed" (Speeds).

The idea of a WARP engine was announced a long time ago, but the principle of operation was not entirely clear. More precisely, it is understandable, but not for everyone :) So, what are NASA scientists going to bend / deform? And they were going to deform the so-called space-time - does it sound clear? Personally, not really for me. And the thing is that with Einstein's physics, a substitution of concepts crept in, veiling simple and understandable things. So, let's figure it out.

I'll start a little from afar, so as not to provide links to previous articles - it will be even more interesting that way. It appears that somewhere far away from us is the Alpha Centauri system - approximately at a distance of 4.3 light years. In other words, the light flies from Alpha Centauri to us, earthlings, for 4.3 Earth years, and this "flight" occurs at a tremendous speed - 300,000 km / s. The huge space separating us from Alpha Centauri, as by our standards. An inquisitive mind can even translate all this into earth kilometers: multiply 4.3 years * 365 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds and multiply the resulting figure by another 300,000 km. Who cares - count himself. The main thing for us is to understand the scale of this vast space and what is in it. modern science tells us that there is a vacuum, that is, nothing - there are no molecules, no atoms, absolutely nothing.

Now let's see what is light? Most will say - a stream of photons, that is, particles of light flying at a tremendous speed of 300,000 km / s. Everything seems to be clear - the particles fly to themselves in a vacuum - who is stopping them? But not everything is as simple as it seems at first glance. After all, visible light has the nature of electromagnetic waves, that is, a medium oscillating with a certain frequency:

But we just forgot about the medium of propagation of electromagnetic waves. There are waves / fluctuations, but the medium has disappeared somewhere. Although not completely gone - it was just replaced by the concepts of vacuum or space-time. And before it was called simply - ether. Still, I have to quote an excerpt from a previous post:

The wave has its propagation speed in different environments, for example, sound in air propagates at a speed of 340 m/s, and in water already at a speed of 1500 m/s. When they talk about the speed of light of 300 million m/s, they mean its reference speed, in the so-called vacuum - in the airless space between the Sun and the Earth, the Sun and Alpha Centauri, etc. So what happens to the light while it "flies" towards us from the Sun in the so-called vacuum? Being an electromagnetic wave, does light suddenly "become" a particle flying in the void of vacuum, and when it approaches the Earth, it again turns into a wave? By this analogy, we can say that while the water wave goes from one coast to another, there is no water itself. And for example: while sound wave goes from my mouth to your ear, the air, of which sound is the vibration, is also not there. Does it sound crazy? Totally agree with you! Just as crazy as what electromagnetic waves can exist without a transmission medium, which is the ether.

So, we can conclude what the physicists from NASA decided to deform, calling it space-time (or vacuum) - the all-penetrating ether medium through which electromagnetic waves propagate - including the visible range - light. And in the passage below, describing the principle of operation of the WARP engine, it is well shown that what is called space has the properties of the environment. After all, deformation, whether it be expansion and contraction (low and high pressure) is a property and characteristic of the medium - whether air or water, and in our case - ethereal.

A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the space world by announcing that he and his team at NASA had begun work on developing a space warp engine capable of moving objects faster than the speed of light. The concept he proposed was an ingenious rethinking of the Alcubierre drive, and could eventually lead to an engine that would transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in weeks - without violating the laws of physics. The idea for the engine came to White when he was analyzing a remarkable equation formulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In his 1994 paper titled "Basics of the Drive: High-Speed Travel in General Relativity," Alcubierre proposed a mechanism whereby space-time could be "warped" both in front of and behind a spacecraft. In fact, if the empty space behind the starship expands rapidly and in front of it contracts, it will push the ship forward. Passengers will perceive this as movement, despite the complete lack of acceleration.

(Hence - America is building a starship that will overcome 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri in two weeks)

By analogy with a moving car, which creates an increased pressure of the air in front of the direction of travel and a reduced pressure behind:

But for a WARP engine, the cause of movement is the creation of compression / rarefaction of the ether, in contrast to a car that accelerates with the help of wheels to a certain speed and for which a change in air density is rather a consequence. Now the meaning of the phrase from the same passage above is clear " Passengers will perceive this as movement, despite the complete lack of acceleration. "- "wheels" repelled from the constantly moving surface of the Earth (continuously - because the Earth continuously rotates around its axis, which means that the surface of the Earth is constantly moving) and accelerating cars - no.

I will add that when the car moves, creating zones of air compression / rarefaction, we perceive it as sound:

By this analogy, we can say that the principle of operation of the WARP engine is the creation of a kind of longitudinal (and there are also transverse waves: for example, light is a transverse em-wave) electromagnetic (ethereal) wave, which will "carry" the future spacecraft to distant Centauri.

I will be glad to constructive comments.