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.

Problems with Warp Drive

After reading several articles in various magazines, newspapers and online about scientists working on the idea of a “Warp Drive” engine as envisioned by the writers of Star Trek (television series and movies), I thought I might weigh in on why Warp Drive will not work. I know that very few people read this blog and my ideas may go unnoticed by everyone but since the internet tends to keep information forever, perhaps I will one day be proved to be right.

First, for those who are unaware of how a Warp Drive would work, let me explain what I know based on my own observations of the Star Trek t.v. series, the movies and scientists’ speculation.

Since scientists tend to believe that Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is pretty much a law (NOTE: if you read my earlier blogs you will find that I do NOT agree with the Theory of Relativity as it stands at the moment), then there isn't a way to travel faster than the speed of light, making any trips to planets outside our solar system a trip that would take centuries. Since this doesn't work for a television show that is an hour long, the writers of Star Trek came up with a bold idea. What would happen if you could slip out of the universe and therefore avoid those pesky rules of physics? 

What came from this was called, “Warp Drive”, where a ship in space would create a ‘bubble’ surrounding it that would cut itself off from the rest of the universe! Using this bubble, the spaceship would be free from the constraints that the speed of light has on matter and make it possible to move many times the speed of light allowing a trip that would take centuries to be done in a few days!

The writers can’t explain fully how you could create a “Warp Bubble” or "Warp Field" other than saying it takes an anti-mater power source and some fancy engineering but apparently this “bubble” is strong enough to cut all contact off from the universe to whatever is inside the bubble. However, if there is no contact from the outside universe, how can people in the bubble see the stars as shown in all of the movies and television series?

If the rules of physics can only be generated in the universe and things in the bubble are no longer in that universe, then all rules of physics would no longer work in the bubble, not just the convenience of breaking the speed limit imposed by relativity. That means that the gravity plates under the feet of the people in the ship would not work so they would be floating in space instead of walking around freely. Plus there wouldn't be light, air, electricity, or anything that works through the laws of physics. In fact, without these laws the molecules holding together the spaceship would fall apart and so would the molecules of anyone in that spaceship! So what would actually happen if a spaceship created a bubble that was cut off from the rest of the universe and the laws of physics is that at best, the entire contents of the bubble would quickly turn into an amorphous cloud. At worst the unraveling of molecules could cause an explosion that could cause some unknown issue in that part of the universe.

Another major problem with Warp Drive is how do you move? If you could create an active Warp Field around your spaceship and figure out how to stop your spaceship from unraveling, how do you plan on moving the bubble through space? Your spaceship has no connection to the outside of the bubble, so it can't push against anything and it can't pull at anything to get it moving. You could try pushing the spaceship against the bubble to force it forward but since you are cut off from the universe how do you know you are going in the right direction and since the Warp Field is so small you won't get enough distance to move around in the bubble and generate any velocity.

Then there is the fact that, if a spaceship inside a Warp Field is beyond the laws of physics, the bubble itself is not. The bubble has to travel through the universe and obey all laws of physics just like a bubble in water cannot ignore the fact that it is in water. So the spaceship can take advantage of a lack of physics only in the bubble which makes it the bubble useless to the spaceship.

So, although the Warp Drive is a great creation of imagination from a writer, it couldn't become a reality to make spaceships fly through space at great speeds. Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there who grew up with Star Trek and are spending a lot of time and money trying to develop this unreachable technological advance. They believe that if the writers of Star Trek thought it up, it could be achieved. I believe that people in the future will look back at Warp research the same way people of my age look back on the study of phrenology; well-meaning but an utter waste of time.

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.

The Einstein Effect: How Einstein Got Relativity Wrong but Discovered Something Else Entirely (Part Two)

If you read my last blog, you will see a very simplified version of the Theory of Relativity. If you also read my other previous blogs, you will note how I questioned the existence of time as the way scientists treat it today and the creation of artificial gravity, two things the Theory of Relativity deals with. Time is a necessary component of relativity and the creation of artificial gravity is the result of a calculation made using the Theory of Relativity. However, as I am about to redefine the Theory of Relativity, you will see why I question the existence of “time” as we define it today and why calculations using the Theory of Relativity can be called into question.

First of all, I believe that the top speed of light could be infinity and not what it is currently, 299, 792, 458 metres per second. The reason I believe this is because of the inherent problems with keeping the speed of light to a top speed. For this to work, the universe would have to know how fast the observer of that particular ray of light was moving and then precisely slow down time in the path of the light in order to keep the light from going above the nearly 300, 000, 000 metres per second threshold. If you have multiple observers, from multiple angles moving at different speeds, how does the universe manage to slow down time just enough in the pathway of the light for all the observers not to see the speed go above the magical limit? How does the universe calculate this? Why does it calculate this and is there a god of light that is everywhere in the universe making sure no one observes light going faster than 299, 792, 458 metres per second? I don’t think so but this brings me to another question.

What about the Theory of Relativity itself and its calculations stating that the mass of an object moving at the speed of light will become infinitely massive? If that is true, then photons (the name scientists give to particles of light) should be infinitely massive! Scientists have gotten around this inconvenient fact by saying that photons have no mass. Well, how can you exist without mass? If the answer is that photons are made of energy and not mass, then what about E=mc²? If energy equals mass, then why doesn't that translate into photons becoming infinitely energetic?

Another question that comes up deals with the core of relativity itself. If everything is relative than I can say that from the point of view of the observer holding a flashlight, the photons coming out from the flashlight are moving at nearly the speed of 300, 000, 000 metres per second and the observer is not moving. But, since everything is relative, I can also say that the photons are sitting still and that the flashlight and the observer are moving away from the photons at nearly 300, 000, 000 metres per second and this statement is also true! If this statement can be said to be true, then why isn't the observer and his flashlight not becoming infinitely massive? Why doesn't this work?
Well, I’ll tell you why.

The Theory of Relativity is flawed.

You see, when Einstein first came up with his theory, he used a lot of thought experiments to help him think through how things move at the speed of light because he had no way to experiment at those speeds. One of these “experiments” he used was having an observer stand beside the tracks of a train that moved at a very high rate of speed. That observer had a specially made mirror in front of him that was folded in the middle at an angle so that the observer could look into the mirror and see one half of the train on one side of the mirror and the other half of the train on the other side of the mirror without needing to move his head as the train passed by. Another observer is on the train in an open train car at the middle of the train and also has a special mirror like the observer on the ground.

As the train zips by the observer on the ground at a high speed, two lightning bolts strike at the exact moment the two observers pass each other and the lightning strikes both the front of the train and the end of the train at the exact same time. At the exact moment of the lightning strikes, the two observers are lined up exactly in front of each other and the train is exactly at the halfway point to the observer on the ground. The observer on the train sees the lightning bolts from the front of the train and the end of the train at the same time in his mirror. However, the observer on the ground sees something different because he is watching a moving train. He sees the lightning strike the end of the train first and then hit the front of the train second because the front of the train in moving away from the observer on the ground and the end of the train is moving towards the observer.

Now this thought experiement is used by Einstein to prove that events that seem to happen simultaneously for one person might not be seen as simultaneous events for all observers of the same event. With the speed of light not able to speed up, time has to be malleable in order for the mathematical equation to work properly. This thought experiment also “proves” that an object’s size can be distorted by the speed of an object. The end of the train car will appear to be shorter to the observer on the ground as it moves toward the observer on the ground and the front of the train will appear to be longer as it moves away. This illusion of shortening and lengthening of an object will increase as the speed of the train increases. However to me, when I think of this experiment I think this actually proves that the speed of light can speed up and that the distortion of an object’s size is actually a distortion of light or an “effect”.

You see, in Einstein’s experiment above he doesn't change the speed of light when making calculations as he believes the speed of light to be constant and cannot increase, therefore it is time that slows down to accommodate the distortion the observer on the side of the tracks witnesses. If you allow for the speed of light to increase, leave time alone, it accounts for this distortion and becomes an optical illusion. The apparent shrinking of the train is only a trick of the light, so I have dubbed this the “Einstein Effect”.

If you don’t understand what I am saying, you can do another thought experiment.

Think of a large clock on Earth facing the sky. You are in a spaceship with its own clock and you have your special telescope trained on the large clock outside the spaceship as you are shot into space. As your spaceship goes faster and faster, you will notice how the clock on Earth slows down. When you get to the speed of light (remember, this is a thought experiment) the clock on Earth that you are looking at through the telescope has stopped but your clock in the spaceship is still going at its normal pace! Are you now a master of time? Have you slipped out of the “timestream”?

If you continue to go faster than the speed of light, you should notice the clock on Earth start to go backwards and time will seem to go in reverse!  How is that possible? Well, if we use the Theory of Relativity, the people in the spaceship are actually meddling with the flow of time and have traveled into the past. If you are interested, look up the so-called "Twin Paradox" for a good example of what happens if you left your twin on Earth while you travelled in a spaceship moving at nearly the speed of light when Relativity is involved.

If you use the Einstein Effect, what you are seeing is an optical illusion. You are catching up to and seeing light that has already been sent on its way into space. If you decided to then turn around the spaceship and go back towards Earth, you will notice the large clock on Earth moving at a normal speed at first. Then, as you increased speed, you would see the clock move forward faster and faster as the speed of the spaceship increased. Eventually, when you got back to Earth, the clock on Earth and the clock you have in your spaceship should be similar (please read my blog on time as to why I say the clocks “should be similar” instead of "exactly the same").

I do agree with Einstein’s view in the Theory of Relativity that speed is “relative” (that is it is based from your own perspective and not from an "absolute rest" that is the same in the entire universe) but I don’t agree that the top speed of light is only 299, 792, 458 metres per second. I believe that it can go much faster but we are unable to observe it. Just like infrared light was invisible to humanity for most of our existence, I believe that humanity will eventually be able to observe light going faster than its “speed limit” of 299, 792, 458 metres per second. I think that that top speed is only the speed that we are able to “see” light and one day I will be proven right.

Now you may say that there have been many experiments that show that light can’t go any faster than its current limit. For example, the CERN particle accelerator in Europe cannot move particles at the speed of light, no matter how much energy they put into the system. Well, since that system uses electromagnets to move the particles and electricity can only go as fast as light, you will never get them to go faster than light since the system will not be able to go that fast. Also, if they did get particles to fast enough, we don’t seem to have anything to detect it, as our current detectors are limited by our current knowledge.

Another example that you might try and use to show the top speed of light cannot go any faster is the studied super Novae (exploding stars) that scientists have observed. One in particular was observed recently before it exploded and the scientist gleefully proclaimed that he wasn't able to detect the explosion sooner than he saw it, so light cannot go faster than Einstein stated or else he should have been able to detect it before seeing it. Well, the problem with that is that the star was several dozen light years away. If light moved faster than its current limit, the light from that explosion would have reached Earth years ago, well before the scientist started studying that star in particular, plus, how would he have been able to detect it?

In conclusion, the Theory of Relativity has its flaws and the chief one being that the speed of light cannot be limited to roughly 300, 000, 000 metres a second or you end up throwing logic out the door so that you can come up with a theory that doesn't work at slower speeds. The only way you can account for both the equations to be correct and for the rest of science to be correct is to accept that these calculations explain an optical effect and not reality. Therefore we need to split the Theory of Relativity into two sections; relativity and the Einstein Effect.

The Einstein Effect: How Einstein Got Relativity Wrong but Discovered Something Else Entirely (Part One)

The Theory of Relativity has practically become a law today in modern physics. New students who go on to take courses that deal with this theory are pretty much told by their teachers that this “theory” has been proven in every case and that it would become a law if we could travel closer to the speed of light to once and for all confirm Albert Einstein’s work. It’s a done deal, now we just have to understand why this wonderful theory doesn't work with the rest of physics. Why doesn't this spherical object (the Theory of Relativity) fit through the square hole of Physics?

I’ll give you a shocking answer to that question. It doesn't work with the rest of physics because the theory isn't correct. Yes, the math is correct and the some of the outcomes too are correct, but when Einstein’s theory is applied to light and light speeds, what the theory really does is explain an effect similar to the Doppler Effect, except with light. This is why I have named it the “Einstein Effect”. I will discuss this effect later in the blog.

Now, if you pull apart Einstein’s theory you will find flaws with it but in order to find those flaws, you have to understand the original theory. So, for the lay people in the audience (and hopefully I am not writing this just for myself), I will break it down to the absolute core in order to bring a simple understanding to this complex theory.

The core of this theory is this; physics is the same everywhere throughout the universe but certain things, like speed and what an object looks like, are relative. By “relative” I mean different from one place in the universe as compared to another place in the universe. Sir Isaac Newton’s law of absolute rest no longer applies as an object that seems to be at rest can now have motion and those in motion can be at rest. For example: a rock sitting on the ground seems to be at rest and under Newton’s laws, it would be. However, relative to someone in the International Space Station orbiting the Earth, the same rock is moving because it is on the Earth and the Earth is rotating on its axis. The speed of an object now depends on where you are observing it from, not from an absolute state of rest. This changes things when you are doing calculations and has deeper implications than I care to get into but I will give you one more example so that you understand.

If you are driving along a road at 55 km per hour and another car comes from behind you at 60 km per hour, with the Theory of Relativity you can say that, “relative to me, that car is going at 5 km per hour” and you would be correct. The 55 km per hour you are driving is relative to the pavement you are driving on (or what Newton would have called “absolute rest”) but the 5 km per hour is relative to the speed of the car passing you. The person in the car passing you could say that, relative to them, your car is moving backwards at 5 km per hour and this too would be acceptable. It is all from your point of view.

Now, I also mentioned that Relativity changes the way an object can look. This has to do with the speed of light and this is where it gets a lot more complicated.

The speed of light which stands at 299, 792, 458 metres per second in a vacuum hasn't been observed going any faster, no matter where it has been observed. In an airplane, in a car, in space, no one has seen the speed of light go faster than 299, 792, 458 metres per second. Light can be slowed down by passing it through objects but it doesn't seem to speed up. Even when the laws of physics demand that it speed up, it still does not do so. For example, if a man on a train is pointing a flashlight in the direction he is travelling and someone standing still next to the train tracks has a device that can measure the speed of light coming from the flashlight, the result should be the speed of light plus the speed of the train. This doesn't happen. The laws of physics don’t seem to fully apply to light.

When Einstein thought of how the speed of light did not increase and he applied it to relativity, he ran into a huge problem. The speed of light has to be able to increase in order for relativity to work properly, so what can he do? Well, he looked at the formula for speed (S=D/T (speed equals distance over time)) and came to the conclusion that if the speed doesn't change and the distance doesn't change, then time must change. That was the only logical solution. Now, instead of light speeding up or slowing down, time sped up or slowed down to accommodate a consistent speed for light to move. Mathematically it worked and after years and years of people running successful experiments, eventually most of the scientific community relented and accepted his theory.

It was this theory that brought us the famous E=mc² where mass and energy are interchangeable and also helped bring about the Nuclear Age where humans were able to harvest the energy stored in the mass of certain types of material; sometimes for good and sometimes for bad.

Yet this theory doesn't quite fit with the rest of physics. When approaching the speed of light, this theory works great but slow things down to normal everyday speeds and the calculations don’t seem to work as well. The core concept works (remember, everything is relative) but if you look into the actual mathematical calculations involved, they are mind-numbingly complex. They also have a speed limit built into them. This speed limit is 299, 792, 458 metres per second, the same speed as light. You can put numbers into the calculations, but the resulting speed at the end will not be higher than 299, 792, 458 metres per second because as speed increases, so does mass until it reaches infinity at the speed of light!

Why would a theory need a built-in limiter like this and why are people so proud of that fact? It’s like putting a top speed on all speedometers around the world of 100 km per hour and then telling everyone how your theory that cars cannot go faster than 100 km per hour is true.

It is the inconsistencies that brought me to believe that something was wrong with the Theory of Relativity and I will go into this more in my next post.