Problems with Warp Drive, Part 2

After my original post on Warp Drive problems, I found an article in Popular Science dated April 4, 2013 that discussed a Warp Drive proposed by Miguel Alcubierre (http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-03/faster-light-drive?src=SOC&dom=tw). Since his version of Warp Drive is slightly different than the one I discussed in my last blog, I thought I would look at what his version offers and if it could be built would it work.

Figure 1: Spaceship with Warp Drive as envisioned by Miguel Alcubierre (Popular Science Magazine, April 4, 2013)

What Alcubierre proposes is a Warp Drive that would create a bubble in space-time by using negative energy. I imagine this would be like what happens when you take a cup of water, for example and blow onto the surface causing the surface to bend in the opposite direction. If you kept blowing, you would get the surface to look like a semi-circle. Once this semi-circle in space-time is created by a spaceship with Warp Drive, it would then keep pushing into space-time behind the bending and space-time would then envelop the ship like a sphere entering a body of water. The negative energy produced by the Warp Drive would keep pushing against space-time and would warp it so that a bubble keeps the spaceship out of space-time.

Now I see two potential problems with this part of Alcubierre’s proposal.

First, what is this “negative energy” that is discussed? If there was something in the universe that repelled space-time, wouldn’t it be outside of the universe and out of our reach?

Second, I don’t believe that you can peel back space like it was a physical object. I think it exists like the space in the eye of a needle exists; it only exists as an absence of matter. I also don’t think you could treat it like some sort of liquid that you can blow a bubble in. If it was, it would take an enormous amount of energy to create this bubble and if something like a supernova can’t rip a bubble or hole in the universe, then I doubt you could find the energy to do something like that with a spaceship.

Alcubierre then proposes that his Warp Drive would move the bubble with the spaceship in it by space-time closing in on one end as the bubble moves forward. It’s the force of the universe ‘pinching down’ on the one end of the bubble that has the force. If you have trouble imagining this, think of a marble stuck midway in a garden hose. If you take your fingers and squeeze the hose directly behind the marble, it forces the marble to move away from your fingers in the hose.

With this part of Alcubierre’s model, I see more problems.

How would you navigate? If space is warped around your spaceship then getting an accurate reading from looking at surrounding stars would be impossible. Even if you could calculate this ahead of time, how could your spaceship figure out that it was continuing to move in the right direction? There would be things out in space that float around that would cause you to need a change of direction because, although you have warped space around your spaceship, this won’t matter if your ‘bubble’ runs into a planet or a star. If warping space-time means you could go through these solid objects, what happens when your spaceship drops its bubble at the end of the journey while in the middle of an object like an asteroid? What about changes in gravity that pulls you off course, how would you know to correct for it if you can’t tell where you are?

Alcubierre believes that with this Warp Drive, a spaceship could go faster than the speed of light. Apparently this is because of the theory that when the Big Bang occurred, space-time expanded faster than the speed of light (which, by the way if true, means the Theory of Relativity isn’t correct), so distorting or warping space-time would also relax the rules of relativity as it did during the Big Bang. This might be correct if the spaceship went back in time to the time of the Big Bang but you are only warping a small section of the universe with this spaceship, not riding the expansion of a young universe! Also, if you warp space around your spaceship you are still subject to the laws of physics as you are still in the universe. If the Theory of Relativity really does exist the way Albert Einstein thought it did, then you can’t go faster than the speed of light! In this case, the warping of space is only used as a way to propel you through the universe and wouldn’t cut you off from the universe. Even if it did cut you off from the rest of the universe, the ‘bubble’ of energy surrounding the spaceship is still buffeting against space-time and would be subject to Relativity, just like an air bubble in water is subject to the physics involved in liquids. However, even if you could cut yourself off from the rest of the universe, what would keep your molecules together if the physics of our universe no longer applied?

With all of these questions, I do not believe that anyone will be able to build a Warp Drive like the one envisioned by Miguel Alcubierre. All of this trickery to get around the Theory of Relativity’s rules does not make any logical sense and, as I have shown, is easily picked apart on closer inspection.

I do believe that it is possible to go faster than the speed of light and I know we will achieve that one day. The Theory of Relativity is flawed and the speed of light is not the speed limit of the universe. I think Miguel Alcubierre and others like him have great imaginations and someone one day will build a spaceship that will speed through the stars at speeds people today can’t imagine but it won’t be with a Warp Drive based on Alcubierre’s vision.

Is the Universe Really Continuing to Accelerate Its Expansion?



In 1998, three men Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess made a discovery that the universe was not only expanding but that this expansion was increasing.[i] Now this is shocking as one would think that after the Big Bang, the universe would slow down its expansion as it was this initial explosion that caused the expansion to begin with. Logic would dictate that the mass of the universe and the gravity associated with this mass would cause the universe to shrink. Just like throwing a rock into the air, gravity would eventually cause the rock to fall towards the Earth after gravity has overtaken the acceleration of the rock. So why doesn’t this seem to be happening to our universe? Why is the expansion increasing? I don’t believe that this accelerating expansion actually is happening. In fact, I think scientists have come to the wrong conclusion and I will explain why

First, however, let’s look first at how these men discovered the accelerating expansion.

Since we can’t go out into the universe and physically measure the speed at which an object is moving, something else needs to be used. In this case, the three men used a technique that is called, “Redshift” to determine the relative speed of objects moving in the universe. “Redshift” is when you look at an object that is giving off light and is moving away from you the light will start to look redder the faster it is moving away from you. If a star is moving towards the Earth, it will look bluer instead of red. This is like the Doppler Effect that gives you that distinct change in sound when a car comes at and then passes you. In the case of the Redshift, it is light that changes. By looking at specific bright stars and measuring their Redshift, scientists can determine if that star is moving away from the Earth faster or slower than a star in another part of the universe. That is what these three men did. They took measurements of supernovae (exploding stars that are very bright) and compared them to each other and found that the deeper they looked into the universe (that is, the farther away), the faster these supernovae were moving away from the Earth. Thus they came up with the notion that the universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating!

Now this is a very logical and well thought out thesis, however, they haven’t factored in the fact that the deeper you look in the universe, the further back in time you are seeing. Light takes its time to get from stars that are light-years away. If a star is roughly twenty light-years away, it takes roughly twenty light years for us to actually see that light. Even though I have argued that light is not limited to the Speed of Light (roughly 300,000 km per second), the visible light that humans can detect moves at the Speed of Light and takes time to reach us, just like it takes eight minutes for visible light to reach our eyes from the Sun. What we see in the night sky is an historical view of the universe, not the current way it exists. This is incredibly important to remember and needs to be factored into any theory that relies on observing stars and supernovae. This wasn’t done in when these three men came up with their theory that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. This is the fatal flaw in their theory.

When you look further and further into the night sky, you look further and further back in time, so what these three men are actually observing is the slowing down of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

I know that may seem confusing but think about it; the farthest we can see with the most powerful telescopes is billions of light years from Earth. This means we are looking billions of years into the past. Back then it would have been closer to the Big Bang and closer to the event that caused the massive expansion of the universe. The stars that we see from that time would be seen as getting farther away, faster than ones closer to us because expansion would have slowed down due to gravity, thus slowing down the stars closer to us. As you pull back the telescope to closer and closer stars, you end up closer and closer to our current time period and with it, a slowing down of the expansion.

I know that this flies in the face of a theory that was so good that it won the Nobel Prize but if you value logic then this current theory is flawed. It’s flawed because it ignores what teachers have been telling students for years; the starlight you see in the night sky is from a long time ago and could be from a dead star that hasn’t shone in years. I think it is time that we either completely trash the theory that it takes time for starlight to reach the Earth so that the theory of the accelerating expansion of the universe can work or we trash the theory the accelerating expansion of the universe theory. Both cannot be correct.    

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[i] These three men were later given the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery.