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.

Newton and Gravity

After going through Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and its take on how gravity in the universe does not work in reality in my last blog, I would now like to go over Sir Isaac Newton’s Law of Gravity and explain why this is much better at explaining how gravity works in real life.

Newton came up with the theory that an object with mass is attracted to other objects that have mass. He came up with a set of formulae to predict the force of the attraction between two masses (which I won’t go into) and his theory was incredibly successful. It was so successful and he was so sure that he was correct, that he called his theory on gravity a law. Since many other scientists of his day and since have agreed with him, no one bothered to put up much of a challenge to try and dispute this “law” of gravity until Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity came around. This theory changed gravity from being an attraction of two objects, to space being twisted and curved to bring two objects together. The reason why people started to believe Einstein’s theory of gravity is because it explained many things that puzzled scientists through the ages like why time seems to change with the speed of an object. It also explained why Mercury seemed to have an odd orbit around the Sun. It also explained away Newton’s one major flaw; how was gravity produced? To Einstein, gravity was a result of “curved” space. To Newton, gravity was an unexplainable attraction between two objects.

If you have read my earlier blogs on the Theory of Relativity, you will note that I broke Einstein’s theory into two parts, Relativity and the Einstein Effect. It is my firm belief that the Einstein Effect explains how people see things and it is not how things actually are. It is in essence, an effect that explains how the universe is seen; how light can be changed by events and therefore changes what we see. This effect explains why we see Mercury’s orbit as different as what Newton’s law of gravity explains it to be. It is just an image, it is not reality. It also explains why time appears to change speed when objects go faster. Again, this is the appearance of time moving at a different rate, not reality. You can speed up or slow down time through speed the same way you can speed up and slow down time by changing the time on your clock. It is just an illusion. 

While the effect is great at explaining why we see something the way we do, it does not explain what actually happens, especially when we are talking about gravity.

For an explanation on gravity, Newton’s law is really the best one out there. The attraction of two objects and the strength of that attraction based on the mass of each object… I can’t see how anyone can top that. The only problem is where does that attraction come from? Well, wouldn’t you know it, I have a theory.

My theory about the cause of gravity is …wait for it…molecular or atomic bonds. Now this might sound odd but think about it, what happens when you take something massive like the iron core of Earth and calculate the collective power of all of those bonds? You get a substantial amount of collective power that is trying to attract other bonds and or atoms. It’s the power of the collective that reaches out and attracts another object. Newton himself always thought that the core of a planet would have a higher amount of gravity because that is where the densest mass would be. It is the power of the collective atomic bonds that explains gravity.

Science has embraced the power of the collective as they know that this collective can be just as powerful if not more than building something big. New telescopes are rarely being built out of one large piece of material, they are now being made up of different segments that work together. A new space-based camera has recently been built that has dozens and dozens of smaller cameras instead of just one big one as each camera is so powerful that it increases the ability for the camera to focus on multiple objects at the same time yet still keep an overall picture intact. Then there is your television set. It is made up of many little pixels that overall generate a sharp clear picture that can be as much as 100 inches across or more.

If I am correct about gravity, then it is just a form of the electro-magnetic force. This also means that the number of Fundamental Forces is now down to three and makes our universe a little easier to understand.

Now, you might be thinking, if gravity and the electro-magnetic force are actually the same, why is gravity so weak? Good question.

I believe that the electro-magnetic force is channeled and directed to a specific area, so it can become much more powerful than gravity. Gravity is more diffuse and less channeled so it takes a lot of mass in order for it to become felt.

Anyways, I will go into the electro-magnetic force and gravity in a later blog. What I wanted this blog to be about is why I believe gravity can be explained through Newton’s law much better than through Einstein’s Relativity. Einstein’s Relativity is fundamentally flawed and needs to be split into two distinct theories; Relativity and the Einstein Effect. Newton’s law on gravity is missing the why or how gravity exists and my theory that the cumulative effect of atomic bonds in the mass of an object can explain this missing piece.  

Gravity and the Theory of Relativity

According to the Theory of Relativity, gravity does not exist in the same way as Sir Isaac Newton believed it did. Newton believed that gravity was a force between two objects that attracted them together whereas Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity says that gravity is just a matter of curved space-time (I write “space-time” because the Theory of Relativity now blends space with time to give four dimensions). That is, an object bends and “curves” space around the object itself with the more massive the object, the greater the bend in space-time. This would mean that the Moon orbiting our Earth is following a curved path in space that is invisible to our eyes.

This also means that “gravity” bends our three dimensional space into a two dimensional invisible “curve” in space.

Since both the Moon and the Earth are quite massive, under the Theory of Relativity they must each “curve” space-time around each object but since the Earth is more massive, the Moon orbits it. At least, that is how I understand it. The more massive object wins and its “curve” in space-time is the one that is used. This raises a lot of questions.

If a massive object curves space-time then why don’t all of the planets orbiting the Sun orbit in the same path? According to the Theory of Relativity an object can create one curved path as its mass doesn’t change, so how do multiple objects in different sized orbits occur? Why don’t the moons of Jupiter, for example, break away from their orbit of Jupiter and follow the Sun’s orbit instead? Why does Jupiter’s “curve” override the Sun’s when it comes to its moons? What curve in space-time are humans following when they obey the laws of gravity by walking across the Earth?

If you think about gravity as “curved space-time” and only think very simplistically of one object’s gravity and its effect on another object (for example, the Earth’s gravity effect on the Moon), then it is very easy to see how the Theory of Relativity can apply. However, life is not that simplistic and there are many more objects in the universe than that and many different combinations that Relativity cannot seem to address.

Also, what allows objects to breakout of that curve? Are you punching a hole in the curve or riding over the curve? That would indicate a two dimensional curve and changing three dimensional space into a two dimensional curve is not possible. You can’t throw one of our three dimensions away because it is more mathematically pleasing.

I have seen a lot of people try and explain this phenomenon of gravity being “curved space-time” by having four people hold a flat bed sheet at the corners. A fifth person takes a heavy ball like a shot-put and drops it on the bed sheet. If the people at the corners of the bed sheet keep pulling on the edges to keep the bed sheet near as flat as they can, the ball rolls to the middle of the sheet where it has made a dent or curve in the bed sheet. This is how, the presenter would say, that an object “curves” space. Then they would take another ball, this time a much smaller, lighter one and drop it on the bed sheet only to see the second ball make its way to the first. The presenter would say that this is how gravity works. The second ball is just following the “curve” and doesn’t need to be attracted to the large ball in the centre of the bed sheet.

There are two major problems with this presentation. One is that you need gravity to pull on the shot-put to cause the curve in th efirst place and also to cause the second ball to move towards the first. If you tried this presentation in space, there would be no gravity to aid you, causing the balls to do not much of anything. The second is that you are trying to show three dimensional space as a two dimensional field (the bed sheet is the representation of two dimensional space). Again, there are three dimensions, so you can’t get around that one. Plus the ball is in three dimensions, so how can can you have a three dimensional object and a two dimensional object interact? You can't!   

If you believe that the bed sheet presentation is a true representation of how gravity works under the Theory of Relativity, then how do objects circling another object like a satellite circling the Earth, fall from its orbit? In the presentation the bed sheet has a downward plane caused by the first ball and this downward plane is what causes the second ball to move towards the first. In the presentation, Earth’s gravity is actually working on the second ball and forcing it down the plane of the bed sheet. If this was reality, there is no gravity to force an object down the plane of the “curved space-time” because “curved space-time” is gravity, so how does the curve force a satellite towards Earth? It doesn’t.

The simple truth is that the Theory of Relativity does not explain gravity but Newton’s theory of gravity does.

Artificial Gravity: Will a Spinning Space Station Really Create Gravity for Astronauts?

I have spent a long time thinking about various scientific subjects and one of the subjects I think about a lot is artificial gravity. If humanity continues to search the stars, then there will need to be some form of gravity on our spaceships to make that travel more, "human friendly" or most of space travel will need to be done by computers. Without gravity near that of the Earth's pulling down on the human body, long-term exposure to a lack of gravity will eventually cause the human body to start to become ill. Bones become weak without gravity. Muscles, especially the heart muscles become weak. Digestive systems are impaired as they use gravity to aid in their processes.

So gravity is very important for humans and some sort of artificial gravity will need to be created to for humans to do long-term space travel.

One of the ways scientists believe they can create artificial gravity is by creating a ship with a torus (doughnut) shaped hull and spin that hull so that the ship spins like wheel on a car. Centrifugal force is supposed to be created and an object in the spaceship will be forced against the hull. The hull itself feels like it is pushing against the object (centripetal force) and if this object is a human being, it feels like gravity has been created. The faster the wheel spins, the stronger the centripetal force (the push against the feet of the human) and the more the feel of "gravity".

If this is confusing, think of a clothes washing machine.

The washing machine has a cylinder inside it that contains the clothes and this cylinder moves depending on the washing cycle. In the last cycle, the drying cycle, the cylinder moves at its fastest and if you looked inside while this was happening, the clothes get pinned along the inside of the cylinder. Since there are holes in the cylinder, the water get flung off the clothes through centrifugal force but the clothes stay pinned to the cylinder wall as they cannot fit through the holes.

If you take that scenario and expand it to the size of a spacestation, the theory is that humans will be the "clothes" and the cylinder is the interior of the spacestation.

Simple right?

However, there is one thing missing in space that the washing machine on Earth doesn't have: gravity.

What is happening in the washing machine is that is it manipulating gravity to cause the clothes to become pinned on the inside of the cylinder. Gravity is the force that is pulling the clothes down. That is why when the cylinder is moving slowly, the clothes tumble along the bottom of the cylinder. As the speed picks up, the clothes tumble higher and higher until the speed of the cylinder is fast enough to move the clothes faster than gravity can overcome the clothes and pull them down. The speed of the cylinder redirects gravity and uses it to pin the clothes to the inside of the cylinder. Without gravity, none of this is possible.

So, if someone builds a spaceship like a large doughnut or wheel where astronauts can walk around in, parks the spaceship in orbit or even somewhere in space, spins this "wheel" at a fast rate, there will be no artificial gravity created to pin astronauts to the floor of the spaceship. What will happen is the spaceship will spin around the astronaut.

Aha! some scientist will say, if the astronaut started with his/her feet firmly planted on the "floor" of the spaceship (perhaps tied down) when the spaceship was first started spinning, then the inertia of the spin will be transferred to the astronaut and he/she will feel gravity.

Sorry, this won't happen.

The astronaut will get pulled along with the wheel and will be in sync with the wheel but the astronaut will not feel "gravity" as there is nothing to pull the astronaut towards the floor. He or she will feel the wheel spin, but when the spaceship gets up to speed, and they unhook themselves from the floor, they will still float away. The act of spinning doesn't pull the astronaut towards the floor, it just spins. 

If this could actually work, then why aren't astronauts in the International Space Station currently in orbit not pinned to the side of a wall or the floor? They are spinning around the Earth at roughly 17,240 miles per hour, a speed that should be enough to create an artificial gravity through centrifugal force, so why are the astronauts still floating? 

The answer is, there is no gravity to manipulate so once the ship gets up to speed and is in a stable orbit, the lack of inertia causes the astronaut to float freely in space. The space station and the astronaut are both moving at the same speed, so without gravity or inertia, there is nothing to keep the astronaut from floating where he or she pleases.    

So there you have it... any movies that you see where they spin a spaceship or space station in order to create gravity is wrong and if anyone is dumb enough to create a spaceship and put it into space with one of those "wheels" to spin and create gravity, you will know the result well before they do.