Miguel alcubierre warp drive equation
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The Alcubierre Warp Drive
"The Alternate View" columns of John G. Cramer
by John G. Cramer
Alternate View Column AV
Keywords: Alcubierre Warp Drive FTL spacewarp solution Einstein's equations general relativity
Published in the November issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine;
This column was written and submitted 4/15/96 and is copyrighted &#; by John G. Cramer.
All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form without
the explicit permission of the author.
The theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre was born in Mexico City, where he lived until when he traveled to Cardiff in the UK to enter graduate school at the University of Wales. He received his PhD from that institution in for research in numerical general relativity, solving Einstein's gravitational equations with fast computers. He continues to work in this field, devising numerical techniques for describing the phy
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Part I Qualitative discussion.
The idea of traveling to distant stars and galaxies is, to many, ganska appealing. Just hop on a rocket and go, right? Well, no, not really. First of all, it would require an awful lot of bränsle to accelerate the rocket to high velocities so that the trip could take place in a reasonable amount of time for the astronaut. Here also lies the crux of another problem, namely, time dilation. You see, relativity tells us that if you travel close to the speed of light on the fartyg and then come back to Earth, the time which passes on the ship fryst vatten much less than that which has elapsed on Earth. In other words, if the trip to a distant star and back takes a few years for the astronaut, many years have passed on Earth. When the astronauts get back, human society may well have experienced thousands of years (or more). Heck, enough time may have passed for us to have evolved second heads if the astronauts travel at a high enough speeds and far enough distances. T
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physics
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/Working notes by Michael Nielsen, released September 30, Rough and incomplete. Requires a basic background in general relativity. My own understanding of general relativity is very patchy, so correction of misapprehensions is appreciated. There's also a lot I don't understand about the Alcubierre solution, so these notes contain many questions, as a placeholder for future work./
Intuitively, we think of space and time as fixed – an arena for action, but not the action itself. But in general relativity this is not the case: spacetime changes in response to mass and energy and motion; it is a mutable, dynamic quantity. It's as though the action of the players changes the arena in which they play.
In this viewpoint, fundamental questions are: what spacetimes are possible? What spacetimes can we, in principle, engineer? Or, from a different point of view: what spacetimes can we design and then realize1?
I do not know the answer to these questions. However, in these