Quark's

1102 readers

1 users here now

Come to Quark’s, Quark’s is Fun!

General off-topic chat for the crew of startrek.website. Trek-adjacent discussions, other sci-fi television, navigating the Fediverse, server meta (within reason), selling expired cases of Yamok sauce, it’s all fair game.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

New warp drive concept does twist space, doesn’t move us very fast (arstechnica.com)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

2 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The researchers did indeed discover a warp drive solution: a method of manipulating space so that travelers can move without accelerating. There is no such thing as a free lunch, however, and the physicality of this warp drive does come with a major caveat: the vessel and passengers can never travel faster than light. Also disappointing: the fact that the researchers behind the new work don't seem to bother with figuring out what configurations of matter would allow the warping to happen.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

I strongly suspect all solutions will either be invalid, or be limited to the speed of light.

The universe seems to have a lot of weird quirks (the speed of light being 1) what they have in common is that they make time paradoxes impossible. This points to some deeper physics causing these disparate effects. Anything travelling faster than C can be configured as a time machine, and so create paradoxes.