Warp Drives

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Science fiction often features spacecraft that can seemingly move across space and get between the place of departure and the destination much faster than light could have done. This appears to contradict the theory of relativity, which predicts unequivocally that nothing can move through space faster than light. Because relativity has been incredibly successful at describing nature, with its many other predictions regularly being confirmed to extraordinary accuracy and within the bounds of uncertainty of all the experiments that tested them, it gives confidence that relativity is a correct description of reality. Which seems to rather throw a wet towel on our hopes for rapid travel between stars.

However, while relativity does not allow things to move through space faster than light, it places no such restrictions on how fast space-time itself can expand, contract, or move around. This leads to the idea of a warp drive – the spacecraft remains stationary within a region of highly curved space-time, and that region moves at super-luminal speeds rather than the spacecraft.

The Alcubierre warp drive

The first warp drive geometry that satisfied the Einstein field equations of relativity was proposed by Miguel Alcubierre. In this geometry, a sphere of space-time moves at an arbitrary speed (potentially but not necessarily a speed much faster than light). Objects within the sphere are moved along with the sphere; an object at rest within the sphere would be moved along with the sphere indefinitely. Space is expanding at the rear boundary and contracting at the front boundary in order to keep the sphere moving. In order to satisfy the Einstein field equations, the boundary of the sphere must have a negative energy density. The challenges of space-time geometries with negative energy densities are described in our page on wormholes, for our purposes it is enough to note that negative energy densities can pose problems if not handled carefully, there are limits on how much negative energy you can have without nearby positive energy density, and it may not be possible to get enough negative energy to support a warp drive; although none of this is rules out by physics – yet!

Almost as soon as Alcubierre proposed his warp drive, others began picking it apart. Van Den Broeck identified several issues.

• If the negative energy density wall around the bubble obeys quantum energy inequalities, then for warp speeds of around light speed the shell thickness would be on the order of a hundred Planck lengths; which is starting to get so small as to make thickness a meaningless concept.
• For a bubble a hundred meters in radius, a warp speed of around the speed of light, and the required thickness of about 100 Planck lengths the energy in the bubble shell would be E ≈ -10⁶³ kg c². The magnitude of this latter value is ten orders of magnitude larger than the energy of the entire visible universe.
• As with any method of faster than light travel, the warp drive could be used to make a time machine.
• Perhaps most seriously, if the warp drive is going faster than light speed, the negative energy regions on the outside of the shell won't be in the warp parts of the bubble. They will have to be moving through space at faster than light speed if the bubble is to maintain its integrity, which is the very problem that the warp drive was designed to avoid.

Credit

Author: Luke Campbell