Mathematical theory behind Alcubierre-White Warp Bubble Oscillation Drive

[jonnymind]

Of course, there are small practical difficulties. If you send human through time, the atoms in his body will arrive into space that will be occupied by other atoms, overcoming repulsive forces and triggering fusion process. Basically, you'll get human sized fusion bomb. But no worries, just a minor technical inconvenience!

That's nothing with respect to the inconvenience of the Earth having moved through space-time in the meanwhile. If you just want to open a "stargate like" time portal into the past, or send a whole and "naked" human body back into the past, you'd have to precisely calculate the position of Earth at the time of arrival (and the position on the ground where you want to land the poor man), and that might be tricky.

Sending back in time a starship in open space would make it easier. Another approach might be having a quantum coupled machine go back in time in open space before, and then land on the planet, to provide a stable space-independent portal beakon (that's from a Neil d.g. Tyson Nova show). That could make the task of opening a time portal to a non-stationary place (as the surface of a planet) "easy".

 

[jonnymind]

Lets say Exotic matter has the infinite range of gravity force, but with the strength of a Strong nuclear force: FWOOMP!! Or its strong nuclear force is 5% weaker than ours: we all fizzle away as Exotic Gamma Rays as all matter simply dissolves.

Wow. I could use this as the theme for a SF novel

 

[TallTroll]

"Exotic Matter" has two real world problems, both of which make them unusable here in [what we tend to agree is] the Real world:

1) It doesn't Exist.
Exotic Matter is a lot like Dark Matter or Dark Energy... it is a temporary Fill-In that basically amounts to "we dont know what". To use as an example, Saying "we could use exotic matter to travel to the core of our planet" is equal to "We could use We Dont Know What to travel to the core of our planet".

Sure, Its possible that Exotic Matter could be a thing. Its also possible that I'm a Chinese Fighter Pilot [I'm not].

Not quite true. Given what we can now prove about vacuum energy, it is statistically very, very likely that exotic matter of all sorts of descriptions exist at any given moment, although any specific particle may only exist for a vanishingly small period of time. Whether we can ever manage to extract useful quantities of the type required for use remains to be seen.

The term "exotic matter" covers a lot of territory. There are some forms of exotic matter that we have actually made (Bose-Einstein condensates for instance), and others that remain purely theoretical for now. Some we will eventually learn to detect and work with, others will probably prove to be non-existent, or too difficult to work with.

2) Exotic matter would cause a phase transition [and this one is terrifying]
If we made some Exotic Matter, It would end our universe. This goes down to "quantum refresh" of quarks and the fundamental forces of nature. The quarks inside a proton are constantly "refreshed"- reminded by continuous updates, that it is an up/down quark. This reminder comes from the other quarks in the proton, and the reminder is the transfer of information by bosons of the Strong Nuclear force. While they juggle around which of the three is the Down Quark, the set as a whole remains unchanged. this keeps them stable, and keeps quantum fluctuations out.

So, basically the quarks "talk to each other" by the interplay of forces upon each other, and the talk is "im an Up, you're a Down" over and over again since the beginning of time. This is what keeps a Proton a Proton.

Protons also talk to other atoms via the electromagnetic force- "I'm a proton, youre a proton. so we repel". This interplay of reminders actually affects the reality of what each participant "is", and thus forms the underlying cement of what is reality.

The whole Universe had been saying the same story, and things remain stable and "real". Atoms can form, Protons are stable, Stars can fuse atoms, on, and on. But add exotic matter to the mix... and it will change the reality: "Your an Up, I'm EXOTIC"- "Im and Exotic, Youre an Exotic". "Your a proton, I'm an Exotic", etc. and VERY rapidly- in rapid fire plank-time succession, the "exotic" wildcard will spread like a virus throughout reality, wiping out our universe in a phase transition of what matter "is" into this new state- much the same as how a glass of water phase transitions to Ice.

Only its not Ice. Its exotic, something not from our Universe, sharing its poisonous "reminders". and there is no guarantee it will hold anything together at all. Lets say Exotic matter has the infinite range of gravity force, but with the strength of a Strong nuclear force: FWOOMP!! Or its strong nuclear force is 5% weaker than ours: we all fizzle away as Exotic Gamma Rays as all matter simply dissolves.

Its not good. Not at all. Such a consequence is not nearly worth the effort to try to break the speed of light for a football, and should never be attempted.

My $.02

Only exotic matter with a flavour other than Up/Down would trigger this. It is far from clear that the required exotic matter would require a flavour other than Up/Down, so that is not really a good objection to the principle.

Really, the main problem with all of this is that our toolkit for understanding the quantum world, the Standard Model, is objectively wrong, and we don't know why. It may be that it just needs a few tweaks, or that it needs one or more fundamental bits adding to it, or even, like Newtonian mechanics, it is just fundamentally flawed and we are on the wrong track entirely. Time will tell

 

[Shigawire]

Only its not Ice. Its exotic, something not from our Universe, sharing its poisonous "reminders". and there is no guarantee it will hold anything together at all. Lets say Exotic matter has the infinite range of gravity force, but with the strength of a Strong nuclear force: FWOOMP!! Or its strong nuclear force is 5% weaker than ours: we all fizzle away as Exotic Gamma Rays as all matter simply dissolves.

Its not good. Not at all. Such a consequence is not nearly worth the effort to try to break the speed of light for a football, and should never be attempted.

My $.02

Nobody is talking about trying to break the speed of light. A theoretical warp field would not be breaking the speed of light. I also think you extrapolate too much from the term "exotic matter." It's White's way to say that we need to find some way to contain a dense concentration of negative vacuum energy. We have observed it with the Casimir Effect, and now recently again with the zero-propellant Q-Thrusters, which Harold White has also worked on. Of course it's theoretical. All of this is in the realm of the scientific pioneers.

Faraday showed a microscopic instance of electromagnetism to queen Victoria, in the form of a small needle rotating when he turned the power on. She asked him what it would be good for. Little did she know that the foundations of electricity had been laid. Several decades later, most streets and houses would be lit with it.

Proving a small instance of something in a lab can become big later on. Of course, it might as well not. But it is certainly worth pursuing.

All of this is very much at the theoretical stage at the moment, and even if the theory all pans out, it may be that the required matter is forbidden, or because of the implications relating to time paradoxes it just won't work the way we want, because it casts any affected object into a different timeline, or an alternate reality or any number of other pitfalls, but right now, there don't seem to be any deal breakers inherent in the concept.

Regarding timeline problems and time dilations, from page 3 of the paper "Warp Field Mechanics 101":

Some additional appealing characteristics of the metric is that the proper acceleration α is zero, meaning there is no acceleration felt in the flat space-time volume inside the warp bubble when the field is turned on, and the coordinate time t in the flat space-time volume is the same as proper time τ, meaning the clocks on board the spacecraft proper beat at the same rate as clocks on earth.​

 

[TallTroll]

>> Regarding timeline problems and time dilations, from page 3 of the paper "Warp Field Mechanics 101":

The potential problems would occur long before you got to the point of turning on the drive. Negative mass is at best a strange beast, and a lot depends on what you mean by "mass". Again, the Standard Model lets us down, because it isn't clear where the sign change applies, and therefore what actual effects it would or could have are also unclear.

Until we either improve our theoretical model, or even better get to conduct experiments on particles with negative mass, we really don't know how it would behave. FWIW, I suspect that it won't be a problem, as we have never seen any evidence to suggest there would be problems. Maybe we haven't been looking in the right places, or in the right ways though. We just don't know

 

[Calaban]

Mass and momentum- and related time dialation- with regards to relativistic speeds, would have nothing to do with a spacetime warp wave surfer, or even the frameshift drive in-game, because technically, intrinsically and physically, it is not moving, nor accelerating.

Mass rears its mysterious head when you try to accelerate it- whether in a faster movement direction, or a slower, it is the change in momentum where mass comes into play.

So if a ship is at rest, its mass is irrelevant. How can a ship move if it is at rest? By space/time surfing, or by tweaking its frame of reference bit by bit [very rapidly]. This way in our macro universe, the ship is clearly seen to be moving around, but in the quantum universe, it never really accelerated anywhere.

So, the big good news is: nearing or passing the speed of light this way would not increase mass to infinity, or, as a byproduct of that troublesome mass, experience any relativistic time warping.

Because after all, it never changed out of its resting state. It merely.. translocated.. in a way that does not violate any physical laws. Getting to be able to actually DO any of this is the trick.