Well, slowly. They were completely shutdown during the government furlough, which slowed things considerably. Now that they're funded again, they need to prove the idea is even viable, and to do that they need to prove they can trigger the Casimir Effect that the concept is based on. The Casimir Effect involves pumping a bunch of electricity into a metal donut, and in theory that should expand space time. The way the donut is shaped means that expansion of space time forms a warp bubble. So, does it?
The amount of energy required is massive, so they're trying to create as small an effect as possible - so they can run it over and over without say, taking out the entire electrical grid or building their own neighboring nuclear reactor. The current experiment uses a 1cm-wide donut with enough power to produce a space-time expansion of just 6nm, which is not measurable with today's instruments.
So, they've spent a lot of time and money developing higher-resolution measurement devices. In the meantime they've seen effects that could be noise or could be nothing - the effect is either too small to see, or non-existent. Why don't they just increase the amount of energy to increase the size of the effect instead of wasting all this time developing better measurement devices? They do plan to, but only after they've exhausted the better measuring option, with no timeline on when they'll make the switch. They haven't stated how much electricity they're having to blast into the donut in current tests, but I'm guessing it's incredible.
A talk in which NASA's Harold White discusses the above (1 hr)
A quick glossary of terms discussed in the video:
Exotic Matter/Exotic Mass: A somewhat confusing term meaning the expansion of space-time. We know that a large mass, like the Earth, creates a field of Gravity around it. Gravity warps space-time by shrinking it - bunching it up, pulling it towards the center of the mass. Expanding space-time then would require Negative Gravity, often abbreviated NEG, and the general term for stuff that would create Negative Gravity is Exotic Matter, which has an Exotic Mass. So, Exotic Matter is a confusing term that means Expansion of Space-Time, or negative gravity. You don't gather up exotic matter.
The method of expanding space-time in the proposed warp drive involves creating no mass or matter of any sort. It involves applying crazy amounts of electricity to a metal donut, which creates a large amount of potential energy, triggering the Casimir Effect and expanding Space-Time in a bubble around it. Some call this "creating exotic matter," which seems like a misleading phrase but perhaps a physicist can explain otherwise.
"Fee" (Phi) or York Time: The Greek character Phi is used to represent how much you've expanded Space-Time. This measurement of expansion is also called York Time. You'll hear him say phi (pronounced "fee") a lot in the video.
1 comment:
I did read a site that had a theory related and the author claimed that a smarter us developed a space drive and left the rest of us here.
Doubt that. But .....
My own theory is that a water veil was suspended over a sere Earth. If we can transmute energy then that might explain how we live at the bottom of a gravity well. Miles Mathis notes we have a deficiency of antimatter over matter here on Earth. If this transmutation of energy takes a colossal amount of energy, say a planet full, then such a departure might be possible. That would imply then the only possible outcome of leaving is to never be able to return.
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