Warp-engine - unattainable luxury or a real vehicle?

At the very beginning of the 20th century, a young employee of the patent bureau from the city of Bern shook the world community with his new proposed picture of the surrounding world. The clerk was called Albert Einstein, and his idea today is widely known as Theory of Relativity. The fact is that at the turn of the century in the world of physics there was a popular opinion that all the secrets of nature are already, in general, known, and scientists have only to solve a few minor problems.

The theory of relativity literally turned all the ideas about the laws of physics. Its main achievement was finding the exact relationship between space and time. Thanks to Albert Einstein, these two quantities are now presented and presented to physicists as clearly connected and interdependent. The constant connecting time and space is the constancy of the speed of light propagation in a vacuum. However, the same Theory of Relativity claimed that the speed of light is the maximum possible speed in nature. Since photons are massless quantum particles, no particle with a positive mass (and of which the surrounding matter is composed) can not approach the light speed. After all, for this overclocking, it would take an infinite energy, which by definition is impossible. But the nearest stars are a few light years away. And to many of them hundreds and thousands of light years! So, any, even the fastest possible space vehicle, is doomed to spend centuries on overcoming interstellar spaces?

The saving "warp-speed"

The laws of physics can not be violated, but it turns out that they, like any legal laws, leave us loopholes that allow us to circumvent them, outwit the very nature. And the answer lies in the same theory of relativity. Developing his ideas, Einstein and some of his contemporaries also succeeded in discovering the connection between space-time and gravity. Briefly, this connection is that gravity distorts time and space.

So, near objects in space, possessing a monstrous gravitational influence, the course of time is greatly slowed down, and the space itself literally shrinks. This discovery is due to its appearance as a warp engine - as a popular image in science fiction of the second half of the 20th century, and as a promising idea of modern scientists. In space it is impossible to move faster than the speed of light, but theoretically the space itself can be deformed so that it contracts between two objects. For example, a spacecraft and a coveted star. The warp engine, therefore, could not quickly overcome long distances, but with the help of a specially created curvature field it could make these very distances surprisingly close. Of course, while this is just a fantasy, nothing like this exists in the technologies of people. The Warp engine is better known for serials such as Star Trek, Stargate, Star Wars and the like. After all, there he is an important element of fantastic stories, explaining the very possibility of them.

Warp engine NASA

However, such a technology can theoretically be implemented in the future. Moreover, research in this area is already underway. The idea was first proposed in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre. Actually, it was he who proposed to create a kind of bubble that will surround the ship and deform space around it in the necessary way. The main problem with the current calculations is that the warp engine may require too much and still unattainable energy for its work. However, NASA is already carrying out many experiments designed to solve important problems concerning the possibilities and physical properties of the phenomenon.