Savants Create Conditions To Make Warp Bubble In Laboratory

In a recent paper published in The European Physical Journal C, a team of engineers and physicists led by former NASA engineer Harold “Sonny” White say they have discovered the right conditions to — theoretically — create a small warp bubble in a lab.

Photo Insert: An Alcubierre warp drive bubble, showing spatial compression ahead of the bubble, and spatial expansion behind.

A warp bubble is like a car traveling along a warp drive highway, Sarah Wells reported for Inverse.

While White and colleagues have experimentally evaluated part of the science behind this discovery, the warp bubble itself currently exists only in theory as computations — White and colleagues haven’t proven that experimentally.

But if they do, White says it could completely revolutionize the study of warp-speed space travel. “This has not been done before in the literature and hence is significant,” White tells Sarah Wells of Inverse. “It is a matter of precedence for the idea of a space warp analogous to the Chicago pile for nuclear reactors.”

The key here lies in two of Einstein’s pivotal papers, published in 1905 and 1915 respectively, on special and general relativity.

Among other things, these papers lay down three fundamental theories of physics: The universe has a speed limit and it is the speed that light travels — 299,792,458 meters per second or just 3x10^8 meters per second among friends.

At velocities approaching the speed of light, the passage of time will change relative to an observer. In other words, space travelers moving faster age slower relative to their less speedy counterparts — like in Interstellar when they visit the water-world planet. Space and time are knitted together in a fabric creatively called space-time that ebbs, flows, and bends around mass. This curvature is gravity.

White explains that “space warp” is one of two loopholes within the theory of general relativity and noted in a 1994 paper by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre. “[It] allow[s] one to cover arbitrarily long distances in arbitrarily short times without ever locally breaking the speed of light — e.g., get to Proxima Centauri in, say, a month as measured by clocks on the spacecraft and clocks in mission control.”

A warp bubble is a kind of loophole that could theoretically help spacecraft travel faster than light. Similar to a wormhole — which theoretically lets you skip across space-time by “walking” through a region where the fabric is folded together like a fan —warping space-time would look like the fabric bunching up in front of the bubble and then stretching out behind it in a train.

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