What's Stopping Us From Building a Warp Drive?

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A faster-than-light (FTL) warp drive would arguably represent the most important invention of all time. In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre gave all of us hope as he found a solution within general relativity that would cause the necessary warping of space. But after nearly 30 years of further study, what does our current understanding of physics say about the feasibility of a warp drive?

Written & presented by Prof. David Kipping. Thanks to Bobrick Martire for clarifications and to John Michael Godier and team for audio from their interview with Alcubierre (). Thumbnail image by Zamanday Yolculugunu (www.zamandayolculuk.com)

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REFERENCES

► Alcubierre 1994, Class. Quant. Grav. 11, L73

► Everett 1996, Phys. Rev. D 53, 7365

► Krasnikov 1998, Phys. Rev. D 57, 4760

► Pfenning & Ford 1998, Phys. Rev. D 57, 3489

► Van Den Broeck 1999, Class. Quant. Grav. 16, 3973

► Bobrick & Martire 2021, Class. Quant. Grav. 38, 22

► Fell & Heisenberg 2021, Class. Quant. Grav. 38, 16

► Lentz 2021, Class. Quant. Grav. 38, 14

► Santiago et al. 2022, Phys. Rev. D 105, 064038

► McMonigal et al. 2012, Phys. Rev. D 85, 064024

► Finazzi et al. 2009, Phys. Rev. D 79, 124017

► Coule 1998, Class. Quant. Grav. 15, 2523

► Van Den Broeck 1999, arXiv

► Gast 2021, Scientific American www.scientificamerican.com/article/star-treks-warp-drive-leads-to-new-physics/

► Hawking 1992, Phys. Rev. D 46, 603

► Alcubierre & Lobo 2017, Wormholes, Warp Drives and Energy Conditions, Fundam. Theor. Phys. 189, 257

MUSIC

Licensed by SoundStripe.com (SS) [shorturl.at/ptBHI], Artlist.io, via CC Attribution License () or with permission from the artist.

► 0:00 Sid Acharya - Searching for Answers

► 3:18 Falls - Life in Binary

► 501 Hill There is but One Good []

► 9:49 Chris Zabriskie - Cylinder Four

► 11:42 Falls - Ripley

► 14:00 Chris Zabriskie - We Were Never Meant to Live Here

► 17:06 Caleb Etheridge - Always Dreaming

► 1852 Hill The Promise of You []

► 21:11 Joachim Heinrich - Y

► 23:34 Indive - Trace Correction

CHAPTERS

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