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| 1999/6/9-10 [Science/Space, Science/GlobalWarming] UID:15926 Activity:high |
6/9 Warp drive coming soon to a planet near you...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_364000/364496.stm
I love science. Every couple of months you hear something like: "We
thought it would take us 100000000*X to do Y, but with this new
discovery we can now do it in only X!" Once in a while I get giddy
thinking that every wildly positive sci-fi conjecture will be reality
in my lifetime (assuming that life-extension technolgy keeps up with
everything else!)... -mogul
\_ This is some awesome news! However, did Chris Van Den Broeck also
researched on what kind of effects the distortion of the
time-space continuum has on other things, such as our universe?
I was going to post this question at the site, but couldn't find
the right place to do so there.
\_ This is by someone from a Catholic University? I thought they're
still busy arguing that human didn't evolve from apes.
\_ what ever happened to that dude (it was Rivest I think) that
came up with some factoring algorithm - I saw some legitimate
wire reports a month ago but didn't follow up on them - although
I imagine if it were true media info was quickly squashed
I imagine if it were true media info was quickly squished
\_ if I remember correctly, he had a linear speed-up that simply
pushed the crackable key size forward a few years. there was
no real theoretical breakthrough that would invalidate
public-key technology. the moral of the story was to start
using >1500 bit keys today. |
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| news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_364000/364496.stm -> news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/364496.stm The analysis of the concept of a warp drive by Chris Van Den Broeck of the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium means that building a starship Enterprise is a little closer. The fabric of space Dr Van Den Broeck was reanalysing ground-breaking calculations made five years ago by Mexican mathematician Miguel Alcubierre. Alcubierre said that it was possible to imagine how a warp drive would work by distorting the fabric of space. Starships would ride along waves in so-called spacetime, like surfers do along waves in the sea. The idea relies on the concept that, to physicists, space is not empty. Strange as it may seem, space has a shape that can be distorted by matter. In fact the force of gravity is actually due to the curvature of space - recognising that was the greatest triumph of Albert Einstein's career. So you could use matter to distort the space around a starship to create a "ripple" in spacetime. The starship would have to be microscopically small on the outside but large enough on the inside to carry passengers, just like the Tardis in the British sci-fi series, Dr Who. The starship would rest in a "warp bubble" between the two spacetime distortions. The result would be a wave in spacetime along which the starship would surf. There would be no limit to the velocity that a starship could attain. It could travel faster than the speed of light because the starship would, strictly speaking, be stationary in the space of its warp bubble. Also, the starship and its crew would be weightless and would therefore not be crushed by the enormous G-forces of acceleration and deceleration. What's more, the passage of time inside the warp bubble would be the same as that outside it. The crew would not suffer from Einstein's "time dilation" effect where time passes at different rates for people travelling at different speeds. The time dilation effect means that anyone travelling to the stars at speeds approaching that of light would experience a journey of a few years. But when they came back to Earth they would find that thousands of years had passed and all their friends were long dead. Massive energies Alcubierre's idea was a good one, but his work seemed to suggest that building a warp bubble would be impossible in practice. More energy than the entire universe could supply would be needed to create the spacetime distortions. However, Dr Van Den Broeck's analysis suggests a far lower amount of energy is required, reduced by a factor of one followed by 62 zeros. This is not to say that it is time to go out and start building a warp drive. |