Related papers: The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general r…
The serious study of such science fiction staples as wormholes, time travel, and the warp drive, as a means of understanding and constraining possible realistic solutions within General Relativity is reviewed.
"Warp drive" spacetimes and wormhole geometries are useful as "gedanken-experiments" that force us to confront the foundations of general relativity, and among other issues, to precisely formulate the notion of "superluminal" travel and…
Over the last decade, there has been a respectable level of scientific interest regarding the concept of a warp drive. This is a hypothetical propulsion device that could theoretically circumvent the traditional limitations of special…
The warp drive envisioned by Alcubierre that can move a spaceship faster than light can, with modification, levitate it as if it were lighter than light, even allow it to go below a black hole's horizon and return unscathed. Wormhole-like…
Wormholes have been advanced as both a method for circumventing the limitations of the speed of light as well as a means for building a time machine (to travel to the past). Thus it is argued that General Relativity may allow both of these…
It is commonly accepted that superluminal travel may be used to facilitate time travel. This is a purely special-relativistic argument, using the fact that for observers in two frames of reference, separated by a spacelike interval, the…
Certain classes of higher dimensional models suggest that the Casimir Effect is a candidate for the cosmological constant. In this paper we demonstrate that a sufficiently advanced civilization could, in principal, manipulate the radius of…
Looking at current proposals of so-called `warp drive spacetimes', they appear to employ General Relativity only at an elementary level. A number of strong restrictions are imposed such as flow-orthogonality of the spacetime foliation,…
The problem is discussed of whether a traveller can reach a remote object and return back sooner than a photon would when taken into account that the traveller can partly control the geometry of his world. It is argued that under some…
The question of whether it is possible or not to surpass the speed of light is already centennial. The special theory of relativity took the existence of a speed limit as a principle, the light postulate, which has proven to be enormously…
''Warp drive'' spacetimes are useful as ''gedanken-experiments'' and as a theoretician's probe of the foundations of general relativity. Applying linearized gravity to the weak-field warp drive, i.e., for non-relativistic warp-bubble…
In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre proposed that the well-known special relativistic limitation that particles cannot travel with velocities higher than light speed can be bypassed when such trips are considered globally within specific general…
"Warp drive" spacetimes are useful as "gedanken-experiments" that force us to confront the foundations of general relativity, and among other things, to precisely formulate the notion of "superluminal" communication. We verify the…
In this paper the problem of the quantum stability of the two-dimensional warp drive spacetime moving with an apparent faster than light velocity is considered. We regard as a maximum extension beyond the event horizon of that spacetime its…
We assume the spacetime foam picture in which vacuum is filled with virtual wormholes. In the presence of an external field the distribution of wormholes changes. We consider an anisotropic distribution of wormholes and analyze its relation…
Warp-drives are solutions of general relativity widely considered unphysical due to high negative energy requirements. While the majority of the literature has focused on macroscopic solutions towards the goal of interstellar travel, in…
While General Relativity ranks undoubtedly among the best physics theories ever developed, it is also among those with the most striking implications. In particular, General Relativity admits solutions which allow faster than light motion…
The idea of constructing a time machine is not new and even received a boost thanks to the realization that a traversable wormhole could be converted to a time machine. It was shown in a recent paper that the time-travel paradoxes can be…
If a traversable wormhole smoothly connects two different spacetimes, then the flux cannot be separately conserved in any of these spaces individually. Then objects propagating in a vicinity of a wormhole in one space must feel influence of…
I show how a minor modification of the Alcubierre geometry can dramatically improve the total energy requirements for a `warp bubble' that can be used to transport macroscopic objects. A spacetime is presented for which the total negative…