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Despite its ubiquity in science fiction, warp drives have long since disappeared. Author John Campbell first introduced the idea in his science fiction novel Space Islands. These days,
Despite its ubiquity in science fiction, warp drives have long since disappeared. Author John Campbell first introduced the idea in his science fiction novel Space Islands. These days, the term is all too familiar, especially thanks to Star Trek.
This is a near-universal reference to hyperspace travel. Whether warp drive will ever exist is a physics problem that researchers are still trying to solve, but for now it’s a theoretical problem.
Two researchers recently investigated what would happen if a ship equipped with warp drive tried to enter a black hole. The result is an interesting imaginary experiment. It may not lead to ship-sized warp drives, but it could allow scientists to one day create smaller versions.
Remo Garattini and Kyrylo Zatrimailov theorized that such a drive could survive inside a Schwarzschild black hole, provided the craft would pass the event horizon at less than the speed of light.
Theoretically, the gravitational field of a black hole would reduce the amount of negative energy needed to maintain propulsion. If it did, the ship could pass through and somehow use it to get somewhere else without getting crushed. The math behind the idea also points the way to the possible creation of mini-deformable actuators in the lab.
Could scientists build micro or mini warp drives in the lab? Good questions. To understand the team’s work, let’s look at the main players in this research: warp drives and black holes. The idea is inspired by the fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Given the distances in space, it would take years to get to the nearest star (if we could travel at the speed of light). A trip across the galaxy or to more distant galaxies would take years and many lifetimes. So if you want to be a space species, you have to travel faster than light (FTL).
How would you do that? That’s where warp drives come in. In theory, they allow you to place your spaceship inside a bubble that can float through space at FTL speeds.
This is why starships in Star Trek (and other science fiction stories) can travel such great distances so quickly. Star Trek ships use a power source in the “warp core” to power warp field generators. They create a warp bubble in subspace. The ship uses this to get where the crew needs to go.
Such a warp drive is an appealing idea with many caveats. For example, creating a warp field would require an incredible amount of energy. Some physicists argue that it would require more energy than we can produce. To create that energy, you would need a lot of exotic matter—something like “unobtanium.” That’s the problem.
Others say that creating such a nudge would contradict our current understanding of the physics of space-time, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from thinking about how to do it.
For example, the idea of such an event came to the mind of Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. He suggested that the object could create a bubble that would change the area around it. He continued to research a ship that could go somewhere faster than light.
But he and others still point to a number of problems with both the creation and maintenance of warp drive. This includes the idea that such a drive effectively isolates itself from the rest of the universe. Among other things, this means that the ship cannot control the drive that propels it. So there are still a few bugs to be worked out.
We are most familiar with black holes in terms of stellar mass and supermassive objects. They also have accretion disks that funnel matter into the black hole. For example, the central supermassive black hole in our Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, periodically sucks in material. It then belches out radiation. Other, more active galaxies expel jets of material produced by the constant feeding of the central supermassive black hole.
A black hole is a concentration of mass with such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape. The authors used Schwarzschild black holes in their studies of black holes and warp drives.
These black holes, called simple “static” black holes, bend spacetime, have no electric charge, and do not rotate. In fact, they are good approximations for mathematical studies of the properties of slowly rotating objects in space.
A Schwarzschild black hole is the “ideal” black hole to use in this theoretical study of a warp drive crossing the event horizon. To understand the scenario, Garattini and Zatrymalov decided to mathematically combine the equations describing the black hole with the equations describing the warp drive.
Among other things, they discovered that it is possible to “place” a warp drive in the outer region of a black hole. The deformed bubble itself is much smaller than the black hole and must move towards it. The gravity of a black hole affects the energy conditions required to create and maintain a warp drive.
This means that you could theoretically reduce the amount of negative energy required to maintain a warp bubble. Additionally, the researchers suggest that if the warp bubble were moving at less than the speed of light, it would effectively erase the horizon of the black hole.
The research team also outlined the idea that such an event could cause virtual particles to transform into real particles in an electric field. If so, it could lead to the creation of mini warp drives in the laboratory.
Interestingly, the team also suggests that if the warp bubble were to move slowly and be much smaller than the black hole’s horizon, the entropy of the black hole could increase. But as they noted in their closing arguments, “there are also potentially problematic issues in other physical situations: namely, that a warp drive could reduce its mass, and hence its entropy, if it were to be completely absorbed by a black hole.”
“Similarly, when a larger distorted bubble passes through a black hole, it will create a ‘shielding’ effect, effectively removing the horizon and making it impossible to determine the entropy of the black hole, according to Hawking’s understanding. If warp drives are possible in nature, these problems show that we still do not understand them thermodynamically.”
So, this research could be valuable in theory and could lead to the production of mini black holes in the laboratory, but there are still many questions. Maybe in the future, when we understand the quantum mechanics behind these two objects, we can consider warp technology to be a failure. If so, we may encounter strange times when ships pass through black holes.
For example, signals from inside a black hole could come from inside a distorted bubble merging from a singularity. This would allow us to send images or recordings of what’s happening inside the event horizon, something no one knows about today. There’s also the possibility that these monstrous black holes would make warp drive less difficult to achieve, as they wouldn’t require so many exotic “negative energy” sources.
Source: Port Altele
As an experienced journalist and author, Mary has been reporting on the latest news and trends for over 5 years. With a passion for uncovering the stories behind the headlines, Mary has earned a reputation as a trusted voice in the world of journalism. Her writing style is insightful, engaging and thought-provoking, as she takes a deep dive into the most pressing issues of our time.
