Topic: Van Den Broek's alcubierre metric variant warp space configuration

[prometheus]

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/socanwe.html

Their words, not mine...

[Stormbringer]

Thier words not yours:

We need visionaries to forge science into technical realities

[Tus-XC]

just out of curosity prom, how is man kind supposed to advanced if people don't try to tackle these crazy "pie in the sky" ideas?  has not every advanced happend because one man dared to dream?  Even more, how can the search for knowledge and understanding be fully attained if we just take the straight and narrow path of science and not take all the little side roads that in themselve contain a wealth of knowledge?  It seems that if every scientist had your view we would not being flying, we would not have satelites in orbit, we would have never made it to the moon.  As you said your view is not based on pessimism (sounds like it at times) but based on the facts present.  you forget to include those facts which are unknown, and those facts that will be disproved or corrected.  

[Tus-XC]

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/warpstat.html

""Why can’t we break the light speed barrier too, what’s the big difference?" It is too soon to tell if the light barrier can be broken, but one thing is certain -- it’s a wholly different problem than breaking the sound barrier. "

hmmm, to soon to tell if we can break to speed of light, hmmm.  their words not mine

[prometheus]

just out of curosity prom, how is man kind supposed to advanced if people don't try to tackle these crazy "pie in the sky" ideas?  has not every advanced happend because one man dared to dream?  Even more, how can the search for knowledge and understanding be fully attained if we just take the straight and narrow path of science and not take all the little side roads that in themselve contain a wealth of knowledge?  It seems that if every scientist had your view we would not being flying, we would not have satelites in orbit, we would have never made it to the moon.  As you said your view is not based on pessimism (sounds like it at times) but based on the facts present.  you forget to include those facts which are unknown, and those facts that will be disproved or corrected. 

Most advances have happened because of practical nuts and bolts thinking...  If more people had my view then I can assure we would have done a lot more space exploration, because the people who preferred a repeat of the Lucy Show to Pete Conrad's landing would have been told that unfortunately they were not going to be catered for...  Newton was practical studying why objects fall, Maxwell was practical uniting the theories of two common place phenomena, Einstein was practical envisioning a Universe where time was not absolute...  Indeed the phenomena these great men who created pardigm shifts in thought and technology studied were common place to the point of ubiquity...  Your orbital maths that you gave me a hand with are the same, good solid matter of fact science...

In the words of Dave Scott, there's a fundamental truth to our nature, man must explore, and we always will make new innovations and discoveries, but I don't see why saying we will never breach lightspeed is pessimistic...  I don't believe I'll ever be able to turn myself into a seagull and fly off for a jaunt to the Ailsa Craig either, I don't see how that makes me a pessimist?

[prometheus]

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/warpstat.html

""Why can’t we break the light speed barrier too, what’s the big difference?" It is too soon to tell if the light barrier can be broken, but one thing is certain -- it’s a wholly different problem than breaking the sound barrier. "

hmmm, to soon to tell if we can break to speed of light, hmmm.  their words not mine

Well there's the fact that mass isn't infinite and time doesn't slow to a stand still at the speed of sound...  That makes breaking it a little easier...

[prometheus]

Thier words not yours:

We need visionaries to forge science into technical realities

I concur 100%...

[Tus-XC]

see this is where i think we differ.  i consider these theories at the fore front of human thinking.  And i don't see them as impossibiliites or even as things likely never to happen.  I have faith that human endevours will allow us to do anything we dare dream of as long as we have dreamers out there willing to put forth the effort to make such things reality.   And further, like you said, relativity is a very sound theory. and to me that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to fully understand it or disprove it, but the opposite as it should be encouragement to show us that by further pushing and proding will take our understanding to new levels.  this theory is such pushing and proding because even when proved wrong it has expanded human understanding (its been said you learn more from bad examples than of good ones) and in the end thats all science is there for.   its those baby steps that lead to somthing fantastic. 

[prometheus]

see this is where i think we differ.  i consider these theories at the fore front of human thinking.  And i don't see them as impossibiliites or even as things likely never to happen.  I have faith that human endevours will allow us to do anything we dare dream of as long as we have dreamers out there willing to put forth the effort to make such things reality.   And further, like you said, relativity is a very sound theory. and to me that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to fully understand it or disprove it, but the opposite as it should be encouragement to show us that by further pushing and proding will take our understanding to new levels.  this theory is such pushing and proding because even when proved wrong it has expanded human understanding (its been said you learn more from bad examples than of good ones) and in the end thats all science is there for.   its those baby steps that lead to somthing fantastic. 

I understand this and I agree with it in a lot of cases, where I lose my enthusiasm is when you get to stuff like Kaluza Klein variants with 5, 10, 18, 26 dimensions, like superstring theory for example, that a clever man has to specialise in for years to follow the maths of, and the whole thing could be based on a completely false premise in the first place, and your man has just wasted his prime years on nothing...

[Chris Johnson]

If you ask me, that's just like saying man can't fly because someone invented some giant replica bird wings and tried flapping in the sky and yet just fell out of the sky and accomplished only getting a headache, with the man saying "It can't be done."  And yet, the Wright Brothers proved us wrong over a century ago.  If you ask me, FTL drive may be a different can of worms than just getting off the ground and into the sky, but what makes you think we still can't do it, ever?  Sure, we probably might not do it in our lifetimes, but please, justify the pessimism in your statements; I may not be an expert in science babble, but I'm still as yet not convinced.

(Again with the absolutes, Mr. Johnson... *sigh* *hits head* Doh!)

[prometheus]

If you ask me, that's just like saying man can't fly because someone invented some giant replica bird wings and tried flapping in the sky and yet just fell out of the sky and accomplished only getting a headache, with the man saying "It can't be done."  And yet, the Wright Brothers proved us wrong over a century ago.  If you ask me, FTL drive may be a different can of worms than just getting off the ground and into the sky, but what makes you think we still can't do it, ever?  Sure, we probably might not do it in our lifetimes, but please, justify the pessimism in your statements; I may not be an expert in science babble, but I'm still as yet not convinced.

(Again with the absolutes, Mr. Johnson... *sigh* *hits head* Doh!)

At the speed of light, mass is infinite and time comes to a stand still....  This means that when you try to traverse the light barrier, not only will every computer on board the ship including the human brains of the pilots cease to function, but the area of spacetime the ship and it's surroundings are in will collapse into a black hole...

Or, to use stormbringers method, you have to twist spacetime into some kind of Spacetime Mandelbrot set that encompasses you and your spacecraft and move space and time itself across the void, oh yeah, and again you have to be bloody careful that the spacetime around you doesn't implode into a black hole or or that the space time metric doesn't undergo some bizarre shift in 4 dimensional tidal forces that rip you apart...

I love watching episodes of Start Trek, particularly any involving T'pol or 7 of 9, as much as the next person, but you must admit, this is a pretty stern obstacle course...

And please, I am not pessimisstic...  Frankly, even if we could, I really don't see how travelling faster in light is going to make mankind happier or healthier in any way...  Hell, I'm happy as a pig in sh*t and I haven't left my own town in the last eight weeks...

And another thing, don't you think it's a bit pathetic to remove (not that I care) two Karma points in eighteen hours from someone who's only offense towards you is not believing in the possibility of FTL space travel?

[Stormbringer]

You think that's bad? someone got me at a time when i had not posted anything political for days. in advance i have not neged anyone in the last several months perhaps since i first got back into posting here at dyna. As a mod i could find out who it was that dinged me with ease but i have not bothered. it's just not important to me.

now I'll admit coaxial nested artificial space times is a bit complicated but there are other more scientifically fanciful schemes to get around the FTL limit. quantum tunneling (in series) over macroscopic lengths, tachyons, exotic materials with negative mass, gravity drives and so on. there is almost no scientific backing for most of them whereas there is some for mucking about with space-time. for example inertial framedragging has been verified using laser traps and slowed light. thus space time can be "grabbed" and folded spindled or mutilated. it is just a question of how much and is it ultimately useful for what we think it is.

[Tus-XC]

see this is where i think we differ.  i consider these theories at the fore front of human thinking.  And i don't see them as impossibiliites or even as things likely never to happen.  I have faith that human endevours will allow us to do anything we dare dream of as long as we have dreamers out there willing to put forth the effort to make such things reality.   And further, like you said, relativity is a very sound theory. and to me that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to fully understand it or disprove it, but the opposite as it should be encouragement to show us that by further pushing and proding will take our understanding to new levels.  this theory is such pushing and proding because even when proved wrong it has expanded human understanding (its been said you learn more from bad examples than of good ones) and in the end thats all science is there for.   its those baby steps that lead to somthing fantastic. 

I understand this and I agree with it in a lot of cases, where I lose my enthusiasm is when you get to stuff like Kaluza Klein variants with 5, 10, 18, 26 dimensions, like superstring theory for example, that a clever man has to specialise in for years to follow the maths of, and the whole thing could be based on a completely false premise in the first place, and your man has just wasted his prime years on nothing...

you realise how kepler's laws were formed?  by another mans work who died before he could do anything w/ it (granted brahe couldn't do math worth shyt but its an example) and who literally wasted his life tracking stars.  galileo thought that the earth wasn't the center of universe (and he did shyt loads more than that) but in that time he was declared a hertic and would have been thought of as wasting his life for nothing.  So in my view a man whos research may be proved wrong will undoubtly help another man in the end find the correct solution as it eliminates a wrong route.

btw i haven't neg ya.

[Stormbringer]

+1 for prom coming up. i told you in pm the other day i do not hold your views against you. if i was upset i would not engage in the discussion or if i did back before i was a mod you'd certainly not have to guess about it.

[prometheus]

see this is where i think we differ.  i consider these theories at the fore front of human thinking.  And i don't see them as impossibiliites or even as things likely never to happen.  I have faith that human endevours will allow us to do anything we dare dream of as long as we have dreamers out there willing to put forth the effort to make such things reality.   And further, like you said, relativity is a very sound theory. and to me that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to fully understand it or disprove it, but the opposite as it should be encouragement to show us that by further pushing and proding will take our understanding to new levels.  this theory is such pushing and proding because even when proved wrong it has expanded human understanding (its been said you learn more from bad examples than of good ones) and in the end thats all science is there for.   its those baby steps that lead to somthing fantastic. 

I understand this and I agree with it in a lot of cases, where I lose my enthusiasm is when you get to stuff like Kaluza Klein variants with 5, 10, 18, 26 dimensions, like superstring theory for example, that a clever man has to specialise in for years to follow the maths of, and the whole thing could be based on a completely false premise in the first place, and your man has just wasted his prime years on nothing...

you realise how kepler's laws were formed?  by another mans work who died before he could do anything w/ it (granted brahe couldn't do math worth shyt but its an example) and who literally wasted his life tracking stars.  galileo thought that the earth wasn't the center of universe (and he did shyt loads more than that) but in that time he was declared a hertic and would have been thought of as wasting his life for nothing.  So in my view a man whos research may be proved wrong will undoubtly help another man in the end find the correct solution as it eliminates a wrong route.

btw i haven't neg ya.

I have almost never negged anyone for any reason, and certainly not over them having a different POV than me...  Anyhow, I do understand where you're coming from, but Galileo wasn't branded a heretic by other scientists, it was the church that did that, and their reasons, if misguided, are easily understood since man was to be the center of creation living on the immovable firmament according to doctrine.  One doesn't have to bend or break any physical laws to track stars, and I do agree with you that eliminating wrong routes is important, I just seriously think that we're trying to run before we can walk with all this stuff...  I think it's important to accept that we have limitations and to push the envelope of them from inside rather than to say this is what might happen if we could only do this about that...

Tycho Brahe, incidentally, poisoned himself to death by consuming liberal quantities of alcohol during a conference that he did not want to miss to the extent that he refused to urinate till it was finished.  He died of the resulting Kidney problems...

[prometheus]

+1 for prom coming up. i told you in pm the other day i do not hold your views against you. if i was upset i would not engage in the discussion or if i did back before i was a mod you'd certainly not have to guess about it.

Thanks old friend... 

Believe it or not, I do enjoy these discussions...  And let's be honest, if there wasn't a bit of banter between people with different points of view, this thread would probably have died three pages ago...

[Tus-XC]

which is a tip for all u booze drinkers... take a piss or prepare for the consiquences .  btw it wasn't that he didn't want to miss it, it was that it was not proper to leave before the royalty left the room, think it was under the penalty of death... he should have found a good balcony...

[Stormbringer]

Oh, I read in one of the 80's populizer books about quantum physics wormholes and so on that someone somewhere had ran an experiment where they successfully turned an object about 1 centimeter cubed into a single particle as far as quantum effects were concerned. effects such as tranmission of information or signals from one side to the other. it occured to the author that this demonstrated macroscopic level quantum wierdness and might be useful for FTL purposes.

have you perhaps heard of it? as i have been unable to remember where i saw it or find independent verification of it. And i would like to read up on it again.

[prometheus]

which is a tip for all u booze drinkers... take a piss or prepare for the consiquences .  btw it wasn't that he didn't want to miss it, it was that it was not proper to leave before the royalty left the room, think it was under the penalty of death... he should have found a good balcony...

Ah, I see...  I'd read that it was a matter of propriety... 

[Stormbringer]

I believe the Alcubierre metric is what the "warp field" is.  The trick is to create the field from the inside.


Everything related to negative energy could possibly be related to an instance of "subspace", another sci-fi idea that has yet to be discovered.  Negative energy existing "below" space just makes sense to me.

Or it could be that negative energy doesn't actually exist outside some lovely frilly mathematical models that we've invented...  I'd much rather get back to exploring the solar system than waste time on outlandish mysticism...

This is not true. science admits the actual existance of negative energy. I have given to examples where negative energy is accepted to exist; the casimir force and squeezed light. both  but particularly the casimir force have been demonstrated in the lab thousands of times.