Jet Castilian
For centuries, people didn’t think it was possible to travel faster than light. They didn’t even think it was very practical to travel a noticeable percentage of the speed of light. The theory of special relativity (which isn’t wrong–just limited) taught them that the law of physics would conspire against them if they tried it. A spaceship traveler would get heavier, and time would slow down, and distances would change, and all kinds of terrible things would happen.
Sometime in the 20th century, a guy named Miguel Alçubierre (Al-SOO-bee-air) had a slightly crazy idea for how to get around that, but he was a respectable physicist and he and all the other scientists of the time quickly explained to themselves why he was wrong. Only, he wasn’t! Not entirely. A few centuries later, Martinez and Chao picked up on Alçubierre’s ideas and reworked them, creating the principles now embodied in Alçubierre Drives.
Here’s the analogy. Say a fisherman is on a boat in the middle of a large, still lake. He has a powerful outboard motor in the back that pushes the boat through the water at high speeds. But there is a limit to how fast he can go, because the water dams up in front of his boat, and at some point the propeller just can’t get enough traction to push hard enough to overcome the drag. This is like trying to go faster than the speed of light with conventional means.
But luckily, the fisherman has a supply of large rocks in his boat. These rocks are so large that if he throws one out of the boat behind him, he creates a giant wave behind him. His boat can surf on this wave and go extremely fast without any water resistance. There is a still a speed limit–it’s the speed of the wave–but it’s a much higher speed limit. He keeps throwing out more and more rocks, and he surfs all the way across the lake in record time.
In Alçubierre Drives, dark matter particles serve the role of the rocks. They contort the spacetime fabric around the ship and allow it to “surf” through (or should I say across?) space without disturbing the substance of space itself. There’s still a speed limit (6.22 light-years per hour, known as the Chao limit), but it’s a lot faster. Also, because we’re surfing on top of the water rather than pushing it around, the problems of special relativity don’t apply.
Cool, isn’t it?
DOUG WALKER WRITES 