Sun
British researchers devise theory that would allow spaceships to travel faster than speed of light without breaking laws of physics
LONDON — Two physicists have boldly gone where no reputable scientists should go and devised a scheme to travel faster than the speed of light.
The advance could mean that Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilizations and voyages powered by warp drive are now no longer the exclusive domain of science fiction writers.
Gerald Cleaver, an associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy have come up with a new twist on an existing idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics. In their scheme, published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, a starship could “warp” space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it.
By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at fasterthan-light speeds.
All this feat requires, says the study, is for scientists to harness a mysterious cosmic antigravity force, called dark energy.
Dark energy is thought to be responsible for speeding up the expansion rate of our universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light for a very brief time.
This may come as a surprise since, according to relativity theory, matter cannot move through space faster than the speed of light, which is almost 300 million metres per second. But that theory applies only to unwarped “flat” space. And there is no limit on the speed with which space itself can move.
In the scheme outlined by Cleaver dark energy would be used to create the bubble. “Think of it like a surfer riding a wave,” said Cleaver. “The ship would be pushed by the spatial bubble and the bubble would be travelling faster than the speed of light.”
The new warp-drive work also draws on “string theory”, which suggests the universe is made up of multiple dimensions. We are used to four dimensions — height, width, length and time — but string theorists believe that there are a total of 10 dimensions and it is by changing the size of this 10th spatial dimension in front of the space ship that the Baylor researchers believe could alter the strength of the dark energy in such a manner to propel the ship faster than the speed of light.
