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I\u2019m sure many readers of Universe Today are like me, fans of the science fiction genre. From the light sabres of Star Wars to the neuralyzer of Men in Black, science fiction has crazy inventions aplenty and once science fiction writers dream it, scientists and engineers try and create it. Perhaps the holy grail of science fiction creations is the warp drive from Star Trek and it is fair to say that many have tried to work out if it is even possible to travel faster than the speed of light. To date, alas, to no avail but if the warp drive eludes us, what about faster than light communication!\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with the warp drive.\u00a0 The concept is a drive that can propel a spacecraft at speeds in excess of the speed of light. According to the Star Trek writers, the speed was described in factors of warp speed where they are converted to multiples of the speed of light by multiplication with the cubic function of the warp factor itself! Got it! Don\u2019t worry, it\u2019s not crucial to this article. Essentially \u2018warp 1\u2019 is equivalent to the speed of light, \u2018warp 2\u2019 is eight times speed of light and \u2018warp 3\u2019 is 27 times the speed of light and so it goes on! Therein lies the problem; achieving faster than light travel.\u00a0<\/p>\n In attempts to try to understand this, numerous experiments have been undertaken, of note Bill Bertozzi at MIT accelerated electrons and observed them becoming heavier and heavier until they couldn\u2019t be accelerated any more! Once at the speed of light, it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object further! The maximum speed he achieved was the speed of light. In other experiments, synchronised atomic clocks were taken on board airliners and found that, after travelling at high speed relative to a reference clock on Earth, time had run slower! The upshot is that the faster you go, the slower time passes and at the speed of light, time stops! If time stops, so does speed! hmmmm this is tricky.\u00a0<\/p>\n The science of faster than light travel aside, In a number of potential warp drive designs have surfaced like the Alcubierre Drive proposed in 1994. However, the common factor to provide the faster than light travel is something called negative energy which is required in copious amounts. The study of quantum mechanics shows that even empty space has energy and anything that has less energy than empty space has \u2018negative energy\u2019.\u00a0 The problem (among many) is that no-one knows how to get negative energy in huge amounts to power the warp drives.<\/p>\n It seems the warp drive is some time away yet but what about faster than light communication, could that work? Accelerating macroscopic objects, like spacecraft requires high amounts of negative energy but communication, as a recent paper explains, which operates at much smaller scale requires less energy. Quite a bit less in fact, less than is contained inside a lightning bolt.\u00a0 Perhaps more tantalising is that we may just be able to create small amounts of negative energy using today\u2019s technology.<\/p>\n One of the ways this can be achieved is to ensure the proper configuration and distribution of negative energy to channel communication.\u00a0 The paper proposes a tubular distribution of negative energy in so called hypertubes to enable the acceleration and deceleration of warp bubbles for superluminal communication.\u00a0 Achieving this for long distance communication will require special devices to be designed and built but as the papers author Lorenzo Pieri concludes \u201cit is tantalising to consider the fabrication of microchips capable of superluminal computing\u201d.\u00a0 Yes, that is an exciting proposition but the thought of firing messages out to the cosmos at speeds faster than that of light.. Just wow!<\/p>\n Source : Hyperwave: Hyper-Fast Communication within General Relativity<\/p>\nLike this:<\/h3>\n