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The
Star Ship Enterprise could achieve faster
than
light travel due to its warp drive. Only the
saucer
was the ship, everything else was just for
creating
the warp bubble.
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The warp drive on Star Trek allowed them to travel faster
than light, a phenomenon now believed to be at least possible. For decades
physicists believed that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light,
that light speed was the upper limit of out universe. It was an idea put forth
by Einstein, so people tended to accept it.
While the limit may still be true for the parameters that
Einstein placed on it (traveling in space-time), there may be ways around it.
For instance, what if you expanded or contracted space-time itself? Or what if
you attached yourself to the power of the expanding universe, it's speeding up
to such a degree that it will at some point be traveling faster than the speed
of light.
So - right off the bat we have a Star Trek concept (faster than light travel) that at
one time seemed silly, but now - not so much. Maybe there is more to this warp
drive than we imagine. Let’s see how Star Trek imagined it and then how it may
actually come to be.
Mr. Scott’s babies – his warp core, dilithium crystal,
matter/antimatter engine and warp drive really break down to two basic
principles. The energy to create the warp was derived from harnessing the power
of matter/antimatter collisions.
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In
Star Trek, dilithium crystals somehow gave them
control
of the matter/antimatter annihilations in
the
engine. In real life, dilithium is usually a gas
made
of two lithium ions. But University of
Huntsville
(AL) scientists have made a stable form
of
lithium, that, along with deuterium, can be used
as
fuels for an impulse engine. Not the same thing,
but
still dang cool.
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Some chemical elements naturally give off small amounts of positrons,
and we can use the energy of their annihilating collisions with electrons to
achieve positron emission tomography (PET) scans of the human body. PET is a
powerful tool for visualizing the 3-D functional ability of human organs and
tissues and is important for diagnosis of many diseases.
So don’t scoff at antimatter – Star Trek had it exactly
right. In fact, CERN in Europe made anti-hydrogen atoms last year – although
they didn’t last long. And the Santilli telescope has confirmed the presence of antimatter galaxies at the edges of the visible universe. That issue resolved, let’s move on to
how antimatter was used in Star Trek.
When a particle of matter meets its opposite, they
annihilate one another and release lots of energy. The warp antimatter engine
on the Enterprise used heavy hydrogen, called deuterium, and its antimatter
equivalent as their power source.
They had to keep the antimatter in a strong magnetic field
so that it wouldn’t touch any matter (except the deuterium they wanted it to),
otherwise it would annihilate the warp core and destroy the ship. This is the
containment Scotty was always yelling about.
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Because
E=mc2 can go both directions, the
annihilation
of a up quark and an anti-up quark
produces
energy, but that energy can fuse into
gluons
and the release matter in the form of a top
and
anti-top quarks. So the universe is till producing
antimatter.
Look up how quarks help form protons,
neutrons
and electrons.
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Matter/antimatter engines are coming
closer to being real. A Case Western/Kent State paper from 2012 described the
concept for a beamed core antimatter propulsion engine using annihilation
products to produce thrust. The computer simulations stated that the engine
could be produced with today’s technology. This is another example of how Star
Trek got it right - and had it first.
The whole purpose of the matter/antimatter energy was to use
the released energy to run the ship’s systems and to produce plasma. Plasma isn’t science fiction either – it’s matter that has
been stripped of its electrons. A positive hydrogen ion is just a single proton
that has lost its electron – this is plasma, although you could do it with
larger atoms as well. Neon lights glow because the electricity strips the
electrons from neon gas – that’s plasma as well. On a very large scale, plasma
repels matter with electrons, so it can create sort of a vacuum around whatever
is creating it.
The Star Trek plasma was sent through the warp nacelles
(those cigar shaped pieces to each side of the hull) to generate a plasma
bubble around the ship. This bubble would warp
space-time around the ship and allow it to travel faster than the limits within
space-time. Again, not so far from possibility.
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NASA
and others are developing wings and
fuselages
that generate plasma bubbles on their
own.
This creates lift, reduces drag, eliminates a
radar
signal, and….. glows!
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In 1994, a Mexican physicist named Miguel Alcubierre did the
math to determine if this possible. Called the Alcubierre hypothesis, or
Alcubierre warp drive, his math says it is possible to warp space-time around a
ship, while leaving unwarped space-time inside the ship, so that the crew would
experience normal time flow. About 10 years ago NASA rated this at the
conjecture level, but it has moved to reasoned speculation. For scientists, this is a big change.
The reasons for the move was that the original calculations
suggested that a huge amount of energy would be needed – equal to that released
if all of Jupiter’s mass was converted to pure energy. But more recent changes
to the shape of the warp disc need (more round than football shaped) reduced
the amount of energy needed to a few thousand pounds (converted to energy –
that’s still a whole bunch).
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This
is conceptual design of the IXS Enterprise, and
warp
drive ship. The circular parts will generate the
warp
bubble instead of the nacelles behind and on
each
side of the original Enterprise. Despite that
difference
in shape, Roddenberry’s Enterprise
was
pretty doggone close.
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Even if the warp allows you to travel faster than light
within the bubble, the front edge of the bubble would have to be maintained,
meaning that you would have to keeping building the bubble in front of the ship
at a rate faster than light speed. Since that would be outside the warp bubble,
it would then break the laws of physics in space-time. We’re back to the limit that nothing can move faster than light. Darn
you, Einstein!
Next week, yet another Star Trek idea that is coming closer
to reality – is a transporter just a pipe dream, or a pipe from one place to
another?
Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD
As Many Exceptions As Rules
S. Beghella-Bartoli, P.M. Bhujbal, A. Nas (2015). Confirmation of Santilli's detection of antimatter galaxies via a telescope with concave lens. America Journal of Modern Physics, 4 (1)
Alcubierre, M. (1994). The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity Classical and Quantum Gravity, 11 (5) DOI: 10.1088/0264-9381/11/5/001
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