Help I Accidentally Build A Spaceship (NASA Might Have Developed FTL by Accident)

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Source
Source (via NASA)

“Star Trek” introduced the world outside of rocket science circles to the concept of warp drive – the propulsion system that allowed the starship Enterprise to travel faster than the speed of light. Warp speed is the holy grail that would let us explore the universe safely surrounded and protected by a space-distorting warp field. After watching the SpaceX rocket recently just try to land on a platform, you’d think this ability is years if not decades away. Yet the buzz on space websites is that NASA may have accidentally discovered a way to create a warp field. Wait, what?

Check out episode 13.15 of the MU Podcast for a in-depth discussion of the warp drive HERE.

To get around the theory of relativity, physicist Miguel Alcubierre came up with the concept of a bubble of spacetime which travels faster than the speed of light while the ship inside of it is stationary. The bubble contracts spacetime in front of the ship and expands it behind it. The warp drive would look like a football inside a flat ring. The tremendous amount of energy it would need made this idea prohibitive until Harold “Sonny” White of NASA’s Johnson Space Center calculated that making the ring into a donut shape would significant reduce the energy needs.



Meanwhile, in the lab, NASA and other space programs were working on prototypes of the EmDrive or RF resonant cavity thruster invented by British aerospace engineer Roger J. Shawyer. This propulsion device uses a magnetron to produce microwaves for thrust, has no moving parts and needs no reaction mass for fuel. In 2014, Johnson Space Center claimed to have developed its own low-power EmDrive.


A prototype of an EmDrive

Which brings us to today’s warp field buzz. Posts on NASASpaceFlight.com, a website devoted to the engineering side of space news, say that NASA has a tool to measure variances in the path-time of light. When lasers were fired through the EmDrive’s resonance chamber, it measured significant variances and, more importantly, found that some of the beams appeared to travel faster than the speed of light. If that’s true, it would mean that the EmDrive is producing a warp field or bubble. Here’s a comment from a space forum following the tests.

That’s the big surprise. This signature (the interference pattern) on the EmDrive looks just like what a warp bubble looks like. And the math behind the warp bubble apparently matches the interference pattern found in the EmDrive.

Another surprise is that the discovery was accidental, as this comment attests.

Seems to have been an accidental connection. They were wondering where this “thrust” might be coming from. One scientists proposed that maybe it’s a warp of the spacetime foam, which is causing the thrust.

What happens next? To prove that the warp effect was not caused by atmospheric heating, the test will be replicated in a vacuum. If the same results are achieved, it seems to mean that the EmDrive is producing a warp field, which could ultimately lead to the development of a warp drive.

What does that mean? I’ll let the physicists, propulsion experts and space scientists answer that. All I know is, it will cause a lot of wet seats at the next Star Trek convention.

Alright, so this could just be a programming error or atmospheric error (a la the CERN Neutrinos). However, if it isn't just an error then we could be on the cusp of something really big (Industrial Revolution big).

 

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Source is no longer working, the vast influx of users gave it the "Hug Of Death." Added a second source (directly from NASA).

 

[Djinn]

As long as all they do is discover a possible FTL and not open a portal to the Warp or whatever the hell that place in Event Horizon was then good job all around.

Besides the damn thing was already breaking the law of conservation of energy, what's a lightspeed barrier.

 

[Emma]

It's a hoax. This is just a case of the internet getting carried away with a story that didn't happen. Fundamentally this proposed EM drive violates Newton's Third Law of Motion. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The drive is supposed to work by bouncing light around the tapered end of the cone and it is supposed to generation thrust on the wider end of the cone. Which is exactly like trying to get a car to move by pushing on its walls with your hands, from the inside, while you're sitting in it. It never was going to work. The actual story was that there was a prototype EM design that supposedly produced a force somewhere between 30 and 50 micronewtons. This is a tiny amount of force. Only a few millionths of the force exerted on your hand when you hold a one kilogram mass. And the accuracy (a margin of error of about 15 micronewtons) of their sensors are not that reliable at that level of force. With such a low number, with that level of accuracy, it's unlikely the force even came from the device. It could have simply been an unexpected change in air pressure. Or any other number of different causes. It's physically impossible for an EM device to generate any thrust whatsoever because there's no violating the Third Law. You can't move something by pushing on it from the inside. And even if for the sake of argument it did, it absolutely it not an faster-than-light drive. That was just something the internet made up. It was intended to be a an unconventional way of generating traditional thrust which would be just as subject to relativity and limiting you to less than the speed of light. Even if this ever worked, FTL was NEVER an issue on the table. At all.

Here's an article going into more depth about it: No, NASA Did Not Accidentally Invent Warp Drive