Negative energy and matter carry with them an amazing array of fundamental issues. To date, we haven’t been able to isolate negative energy independent of a burst of positive energy (in any form), and there have been a few arguments (not proofs) that there may be an uncertainty-principle sort of thing that forces this to always be the case. ![]() Warp drive research always hinges on the idea that we should be able to arbitrarily manipulate stunning amounts of energy, and moreover, that a hell of a lot of that energy can be negative (essentially, “magical freeze-ray” powered warp drives). This diagram is from page 145 of “Gravity”, by Hartle. The arrangement of matter and energy that allows for this is unfortunately impossible. But these equations can be turned on their head if you want spacetime twisted up in a particular way, you can find out how matter and energy need to be arranged to make that happen.īy bending spacetime in a particular way you can make it so that locally you move slower than light, but that the overall effect is faster-than-light travel. These equations tell you how spacetime will be stretched and curved in the presence of a distribution of matter (for example, put a bunch of matter in one place, and spacetime will “pucker” in such a way that we get gravity). Back in the day Einstein figured out how mass/energy and the curvature of spacetime relate to each other with the narcissistically named “ Einstein field equations“. There has been some theoretical research into Warp drives for about 20 years starting, not surprisingly, within months of the end of TNG. Physicist: It is for real, but don’t go reserving flights. Given that, it’s understandable that we’re not packing the SPF 5000 for our super fast trip to Alpha Centauri Bb. This smells suspiciously like perpetual motion, and would break the well established principle of conservation of energy. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you could theoretically accelerate those two chunks off into the stars forever. The negative mass would fall towards the regular mass, but at the same time create “repulsive gravity” which would then push the normal mass away. It’s probably best negative mass doesn’t exist, because it’s incredibly creepy! For example, imagine you had a chunk of normal mass and a chunk of negative mass in space. You can make really tiny amounts of negative mass/energy for very short periods of time in the lab, by “borrowing energy from the uncertainty principle,” but it’s not clear this could be scaled up to the macroscopic level like it would need to be to create a useful warp bubble. Too bad nobody has ever discovered any negative mass floating around out there or made any substantial amount it. ![]() Negative mass, which is fundamentally different than anti-matter, would experience gravity as a repulsive force. Know where I can get some negative mass? Didn’t think so. In the equations that describe the Alcubierre metric, one of the mass terms has to be negative for things to work out. There is no theoretical reason to think space couldn’t bend in this way, except for one very major problem. The Alcubierre metric is a real solution to Einstein’s equations, which describe the ways in which space is allowed to bend or warp. ![]() Bend some space like this and you can head for the second star to the right, and go straight on till morning!
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