A warp drive or a drive enabling space warp is a fictional superluminal (faster than the speed of light) spacecraft propulsion system in many science fiction works, most notably Star Trek, and a subject of ongoing physics research. The general concept of "warp drive" was introduced by John W. Campbell in his 1957 novel Islands of Space and was popularized by the Star Trek series. Its closest real-life equivalent is the Alcubierre drive, a theoretical solution of the field equations of general relativity.
Warp drive, or a drive enabling space warp, is one of several ways of travelling through space found in science fiction. It has been often discussed as being conceptually similar to hyperspace. A warp drive is a device that distorts the shape of the space-time continuum. A spacecraft equipped with a warp drive may travel at speeds greater than that of light by many orders of magnitude. In contrast to some other fictitious faster-than-light technologies such as a jump drive, the warp drive does not permit instantaneous travel and transfers between two points, but rather involves a measurable passage of time which is pertinent to the concept. In contrast to hyperspace, spacecraft at warp velocity would continue to interact with objects in "normal space".
The general concept of warp drive was introduced by John W. Campbell in his 1957 novel Islands of Space. Brave New Words gave the earliest example of the term "space-warp drive" as Fredric Brown's Gateway to Darkness (1949), and also cited an unnamed story from Cosmic Stories (May 1941) as using the word "warp" in the context of space travel, although the usage of this term as a "bend or curvature" in space which facilitates travel can be traced to several works at as far back as the mid-1930s, for example Jack Williamson's The Cometeers (1936).
Einstein's theory of special relativity states that speed of light travel is impossible for material objects that, unlike photons, have a non-zero rest mass.
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In theoretical physics, negative mass is a hypothetical type of exotic matter whose mass is of opposite sign to the mass of normal matter, e.g. −1 kg. Such matter would violate one or more energy conditions and show some strange properties such as the oppositely oriented acceleration for an applied force orientation. It is used in certain speculative hypothetical technologies, such as time travel to the past and future, construction of traversable artificial wormholes, which may also allow for time travel, Krasnikov tubes, the Alcubierre drive, and potentially other types of faster-than-light warp drives.
Negative energy is a concept used in physics to explain the nature of certain fields, including the gravitational field and various quantum field effects. Gravitational energy Gravitational energy, or gravitational potential energy, is the potential energy a massive object has because it is within a gravitational field. In classical mechanics, two or more masses always have a gravitational potential. Conservation of energy requires that this gravitational field energy is always negative, so that it is zero when the objects are infinitely far apart.
The Alcubierre drive (alkuˈβjere) is a speculative warp drive idea according to which a spacecraft could achieve apparent faster-than-light travel by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, under the assumption that a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum (that is, negative mass) could be created. Proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, the Alcubierre drive is based on a solution of Einstein's field equations.
Encoding quantum information onto bosonic systems is a promising route to quantum error correc-tion. In a cat code, this encoding relies on the confinement of the dynamics of the system onto the two-dimensional manifold spanned by Schrodinger cats of oppos ...
This research deals with self-supplied navigation systems (SNS), a combination of the technology of gathering travel time using floating car data (FCD) and dynamic route guidance (DRG). Using similar on-board equipment, these two systems can easily be comb ...
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We present a bent ray reconstruction algorithm for an ultrasound tomography (UT) scanner designed for breast screening. The scanner consists of a circular array of transmitters and receivers which encloses the object to be imaged. By solving a nonlinear sy ...
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