Alabama engineering student tells scientists 'warp drive' might work (al.com)
Posted Sep 25, 2019
By Lee Roop | lroop@al.com
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Warp drive, as Star Trek fans know, is the ability to fly through space at speeds faster than light. A report on University of Alabama in Huntsville student Joseph Agnew’s work succinctly explained the value of speeds like that: Unless we can do it, we’re not going very far from home.
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"Mathematically, if you fulfill all the energy requirements, they can’t prove that it doesn’t work," says Joseph Agnew, a mechanical engineering senior at UAH and an undergraduate research assistant with UAH’s Propulsion Research Center.
“Suppose you have a craft that’s in the bubble,” says Agnew in an article on the UAH website. “What you would do is, you’d compress space-time ahead of the craft and expand space-time behind it.”
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"People used to say, ‘You’re dealing in something that would be great, but it takes the mass of the entire universe to do it,’" Agnew says. "Now, we’re down to where, it is still an immense amount of energy and exotic matter is still a problem, but if we had that energy, we could do it."
The energy requirement reductions came after five to eight years of theoretical work, he says. “It’s been reduced by many, many orders of magnitude.”
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more: https://www.al.com/news/2019/09/alabama-engineering-student-tells-scientists-warp-drive-might-work.html
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