…it was noticed that to an observer within the warp-drive bubble, the backward and forward walls (along the direction of motion) look, respectively, like the horizon of a black hole and of a white hole. In particular, Finazzi’s team finds that the quantum field known as the renormalized stress-energy tensor (RSET) becomes a problem.
While that issue has been kicked around in the literature for some time (and various solutions introduced to lower the requirements), it is also necessary to take quantum effects into account, which is what Stefano Finazzi (International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste) and colleagues have done in their paper. There’s always a catch, of course, and the first to be noticed was the huge demand for negative energy to support the warp drive. And Alcubierre saw that if spacetime could be made to contract in front of a vehicle while being expanded behind it, the craft would remain within a conventional spacetime ‘bubble’ while being carried to its destination at speeds that would allow fast human transport among the stars. That notion is more or less built into the theory of inflation, which demands a vast expansion of the infant cosmos that would have far outstripped any lightspeed restriction. Specifically, Alcubierre noted that although nothing can move faster than the speed of light through spacetime, spacetime itself has no such restriction. The Star Trek echo in the choice of names was playful and intentional on Alcubierre’s part, and the physicist kicked off a cottage industry in exotic spacetimes and their geometries when he used it in a 1994 paper on superluminal flight. Warp drives as in Miguel Alcubierre’s notion of a method of reaching speeds that are faster than light. Paul Titze, who somehow finds time to write the excellent Captain InterStellar blog when not preoccupied with his maritime duties in Sydney, passed along a 2009 paper on warp drives yesterday that I want to be sure to consider before the year is over.
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