Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Did NASA accidentally invent a warp drive?
Episode Date: January 12, 2023Daniel and Jorge dissect research articles claiming sudden progress in warp technologySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
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Hey, Daniel, what's your first reaction when you see a dramatic science headline?
I guess it's a superposition of excitement and skepticism.
It's a quantum reaction.
What do you mean by skepticism?
It's part of you soon.
The study is not real?
No, it's more skepticism because I think the news coverage might not be fair.
Wait, what?
Are you saying the news media is biased?
I get this constant stream of articles sent to me by listeners who ask me like,
is this for real?
Can I believe this headline?
But somehow they believe you?
Well, I think we've earned more trust than some of those websites called like
coffee or die.com or linkzilla.org.
I've never been to those sites, but thanks for the
reference. I'm always looking for ways that Einstein was wrong. I hear there are 10 reasons. You
won't believe the seventh one. Hi, I'm Jorge Am a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm dying to find
out why Einstein was wrong.
You're dying to find out.
You would give up your life to find out
why Einstein was wrong?
I guess it's more figuratively dying to find out.
But I do get a lot of emails from people who say
they have figured out how Einstein was wrong.
And every time inside me, there's this little flash of hope.
Maybe this is the person who has figured it out.
Yeah, you never know, right?
I mean, Einstein was just some dude working in a patent office.
And he figured out that everybody else was wrong.
Einstein was a very smart dude, but yes, you're right.
was just a human being with a human brain thinking about the way the world works and coming up with a more
beautiful, a more compact, a more effective description of reality. But we're also pretty sure his
ideas weren't the final ideas. So you think he is wrong? I'm very sure that Einstein is wrong.
I just don't know who's right. So what do you do with those emails? Do you fact check them? Do you go through
them? Yeah, absolutely. I read them. I scan through them. I give them some feedback on the science.
Do you encourage them to submit it to a journal or at least a coffee or die.com?
Most of them aren't really in journal ready format yet.
So I give them some tips about how they might get there.
I see.
Give them latex or word processing tips.
Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge,
Explain the Universe, a production of IHeartRadio.
In which we try to figure out how Einstein was wrong and also how he was right.
Our goal is to explore how the universe works,
to wonder about all of its crazy mysteries,
those fundamental questions about the very nature of reality,
what rules all those particles are following,
we want to weave them all together
into a deep and beautiful understanding of this cosmos.
And we want to explain all of it to you.
That's right. It is a vast universe full of mysteries
and our understanding of these mysteries
is constantly changing.
Science is not a constant thing and science is not done.
Still working hard to figure out how things actually work
because the way we think it might be working doesn't always pan out.
That's right. And it also doesn't make progress in a steady fashion.
It's not like every day we get five more units of science.
There are moments in the history of science when somebody has a flash of insight,
when years of struggle finally coalesce into some progress and we make a great leap forward in our understanding.
And you never know what day is going to be one of those days.
Yeah, everybody tunes into the science news of the day to see if a great new discovery has been made or if scientists have figured out.
how to do some amazing thing or if it's just linkzilla.org spamming us again giving us clickbait but there are
always interesting news headlines sometimes on the on the regular news and sometimes they spill over
onto the mainstream media right yeah and sometimes they seem like clickbait but they are real you know
scientists measure gravitational waves ripples in the fabric of reality that sounds like it was made up by
a copy editor working in a basement somewhere but that was real yeah science does make a lot of
progress and people are excited when something really big happens, but sometimes those headlines are a little
bit overblown. That's right. You can't believe everything you read in all of the popular media
about scientific progress. Sometimes they're just trying to get you excited and make you click on their
link. We had a whole episode about how to critically read popular science articles, the upshot of which
was develop a few sources of information that you really trust and check those. Wait, wait. Are you trying
and tell people that you're the only person they can trust? Is that what it is? Isn't that how cults
work? I do think we are a pretty reliable and even-handed source of information about science
progress, but there are other places you can get your science news. I like the coverage in the New York
Times and in the LA Times and also in Quantum Magazine, often very insightful and always very well
informed. But also false and non-informed at the same time because it is a quantum magazine.
They try to deliver one quantum of understanding at a time.
But there's a lot of information and news out there.
And it's kind of like you say, it's hard to figure out what is real or what is not or maybe what is real but exaggerated.
I think that's maybe a lot of what happens in these news headlines, right?
There's like some nugget of truth, but they sort of emphasize the extreme interpretation of these things.
Yeah. Often they have removed the copy-outs and the qualifiers.
And so, you know, somebody does like a simulation of a black hole universe.
on their computer one afternoon
and writes a paper about it
and then the news headline is like
graduate student plunges
entire universe into a black hole
or something similar.
Well, that's probably only exciting
for that grad student.
Well, you have a whole TED talk once,
I think, about the scientific news cycle
and how this happens,
how real scientific research
gets sort of filtered and amplified.
Yeah, and then how it all comes back
to your grandma
and how she ends up wearing tin foil hat.
So we do think it's very important
that everybody out there have a sense for what's real and what's exaggerated.
So when a bunch of listeners all send me the same article,
I think maybe it's time to do an episode about one particular piece of research.
Yeah. And then months later, the episode comes out.
Sometimes we rush it, right?
Sometimes we, if it's a hot topic, we'll ask eye heart to put it out quickly.
That's right.
We do sometimes try to be responsive to the real world.
And so recently there's been a pretty incredible sounding headline that a lot of people
wrote to you about, right?
I guess people look to you to know if something is overblown or real because I'm certainly not getting those emails.
How would you know? Are you reading your emails these days?
But every morning in my inbox, I certainly get a pile of email from listeners who say, I saw this headline.
Is this real?
Or can you do an episode explaining this to me because I still don't understand it?
Yeah, and pretty recently, there's been a pretty exciting sounding headline about warp drives and NASA.
So the question we'll be tackling today is.
Did NASA just accidentally build a warp drive?
And Daniel, which part is maybe not real?
The accidental part?
Did they build one on purpose, actually?
Let's see.
The parts about this headline, they're not real are the NASA part,
the accidental part, and the warp drive part.
So they did build something.
Someone did build something.
No, they didn't even actually build anything.
So let's see which words are left here.
Um, might have. Did something might have happened?
So I'm looking at a webpage from coffee or die.com.
And the headline is DARPA and NASA scientists accidentally create warp bubble for
interstellar travel.
There's no might or maybe.
Well, we'll dig into this headline.
But first, we were wondering how many people out there had heard about this or think it's real.
So thank very much to everybody who volunteers to answer these questions for this section
of the podcast.
We really appreciate you speculating about things.
haven't had a chance to prepare for and hope everybody else out there enjoys them.
If you would like to participate for future episodes, please don't be shy.
Write to me two questions at danielanhorpe.com.
So think about it for a second.
Do you think NASA just accidentally or on purpose build a warp drive?
Here's what people had to say.
I'm pretty sure they did not discover a warp drive only because that would be pretty big news.
And as far as I know, I've heard nothing about it.
So I'm going to say no.
No, they definitely did not accidentally discover a warp drive.
I would love that to be true, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
Since you're asking, I think the answer is yes, but I haven't heard about it.
I don't think NASA can do mistakes like this, at least not now, probably in the future,
but I don't think this accident just happened.
I don't know, but I kind of hope so, because I think that would be amazing to be able to travel really far, really fast.
a lot of excitement in either way.
People are like, I don't know, but that sounds awesome.
Yeah, just like me, everybody wants this to be true.
And I think that's one of the reasons that these articles are successful,
is that it touches the excitement inside people.
People are hopeful for this kind of leap forward in technology.
Yeah, I mean, I guess at least the people who read science news,
probably also are fans of Star Trek.
And so that's where kind of maybe the idea of warped rise first got spread into the popular culture.
and so people are excited for this to happen
because a lot of exciting things happen in Star Trek.
Do you think people are more excited about warp drives
or like the holodeck?
Well, the holodeck already exists, Daniel.
What? You have a holodeck?
It's called the Metaverse.
Oh, that's right.
And we recently took a trip to the Metaverse,
so we should know all about it.
Yeah, it's nice and cozy there.
But War Drives would be pretty amazing, right?
Because they would let us travel to other stars
and other planets and maybe other galaxies.
It would be really incredible
because one of the disappointing things about the universe
is that it's so big, that everything is so far away.
We're limited to travel slower than the speed of light,
which seems really fast,
but even in comparison to the vast distances between stars or between galaxies,
it's not really fast enough to get us interesting places in reasonable amounts of time.
So warp drive would be a wonderful way to like zip around the galaxy or the universe
and just learn so much about what's going on out there.
That would be super cool.
Although, Daniel, I feel like you shouldn't be disappointed at the universe for being so big.
that feels a little mean, you know, like maybe it's our fault for not being fast enough or big
enough. Yeah, maybe disappointed is too judgmental. I'm just frustrated. I feel like there's
information out there. You know, there are either aliens living on other planets and crawling around
on those surfaces or not. The facts are out there. They either are or they aren't. And we could
know it if we could just like get there and see these things. But everything is so frustratingly distant.
It's like somebody has answers to the deepest questions about the universe, but they're keeping them
in a locked box and you can't see them.
Yeah, unless you go to coffee or die.com,
they seem to have the key.
It would be pretty cool,
and it is pretty prevalent
in science fiction movies,
warp drives,
because I guess it solves pretty much any plot
that you probably might have
in setting up a space story, right?
Because without a warp drive,
you pretty much can't have any space stories
because it would just take too long
to get between planets
or between parts of the galaxy.
Well, it's an interesting question
with a few nuances.
I mean, in one hand,
you can't realistically have like a galactic empire.
You can't like make decisions for a set of stars that are many, many light years apart
because when you make a decision, it takes like years and years even for that information
to propagate across the galaxy or how can you like move your army from one star to another
or gather resources in one place and move them somewhere else.
It really effectively limits you to operating in a single solar system.
Yeah, like even just to send an email to the other side of the galaxy would take 100,000,
years, right? That's right. So you can't really coordinate across different parts of the galaxy
due to the speed limit of the speed of light. But, you know, if you're patient, you could send
out explorational teams, which could discover those other star systems. So you could realistically
still have like first contact stories, but you can't zip back and forth between stars that are
really far apart. I wonder if it just maybe our point of view about time. Like if we live to be
a million years old, you know, maybe 100,000 years old to send an email, wouldn't be that bad.
Yeah, that's a really good way of thinking about it.
The speed of light really is a relationship between time and distance.
And so if time isn't much of an issue for you because you're going to live to be a million years old,
then the universe is a lot more local than if you live very short lives like we do.
Well, regardless of how old you live, having a war drive would be pretty handy
for exploring the universe, for sending emails to the other side of the galaxy.
And this headline that people are sending you seems to say that NASA may have accidentally built a war drive.
I wonder where they accidentally comes from.
Are we going to cover that?
We are going to cover that, absolutely, yes.
So it's a pretty tantalizing headline.
And so let's dig into this idea.
First of all, let's start with the basics.
Daniel, what is the technical definition of a warp drive?
So a warp drive sounds like science fiction because we hear about it in science fiction.
And usually you hear scientists saying that it's impossible, that you can't go faster than the speed of light.
And so a warp drive just sounds like you say a science fiction plot saver,
a way to just like dot, dot, dot your way to distant stars without worrying about the limitations
of the speed of light. But in the last few decades, there has been a lot of progress in imagining
how we might build a warp drive using actual science, using real technology. It's not like we have
plans for a warp drive right now, but we have sort of a direction that theoretical physics points us
towards that suggests it might be possible. Wait, are you saying that NASA has accidentally
proven that warp drives are possible? I'm saying that we're like step one out of three
million towards building a warp drive.
Wait, are you saying that NASA has taken the first steps towards building a
warp drive?
There are some theoretical physicists that have laid the foundation, yes, which may eventually
lead to actual warp drives being constructed.
Wait, are you saying that NASA will eventually build a warp drive?
I think you've had too much coffee or die this morning.
Yeah, I'm just kidding.
Let's maybe be super clear about this, right?
This is an idea where you have something aboard your spaceship, right?
And this device that you have on your spaceship somehow lets you
cut through space, right, or go faster than the speed of light.
That's the idea of warp drives, right?
Because it's maybe different than like the wormhole gate that some science fiction
stories use to go between spots in the galaxy.
Yes, so you do have to follow the rules of relativity.
And the cool thing about the warp drive is that it does follow the rules of relativity.
We're used to relativity telling us that you can't move through space faster than light.
And that doesn't change.
We can't avoid that.
But relativity also tells us that space isn't just flat,
that it can do weird things,
that the relative distances between points in space can change.
When we talk about space curving or bending, that's really what we mean.
We're changing the relative distances between points.
Remember that space isn't like relative to some external rulers.
So when we talk about the distances between things,
these are really just intrinsic bending of space.
You often see this rubber sheet analogy where somebody puts like a bowling ball on a rubber
sheet and it bends the rubber sheet.
That's helpful for thinking about bending,
but it's also quite misleading because in that example, the rubber sheet is bending in relation
to some third external dimension.
Here we're really just talking about changing the relative distances between points in space.
And that's something that we know can happen.
That's something that we have observed.
We see it happen in gravitational waves, which are ripples in space.
We see it happen in gravitational waves, which are ripples in space.
We see it happening in the expansion of the universe, which is increasing the relative distance
between points in space.
So there was a guy named Al-Cubierre a few decades ago
who came up with a sort of arrangement of space
that would allow you to move like a chunk of space
relative to other bits of space
to sort of like create a warp bubble
which would itself move relative to space.
So you could sit inside that warp bubble
and it would transport you to your destination.
Yeah, there's this idea, I guess,
that space is not like empty and immovable
and fixed and super-stitch.
or rigid, but space is kind of squishy, right?
Like, for example, black hole sort of squishes the space around itself,
bending space and maybe creating some weird kind of shortcuts through space.
Yeah, Einstein's big idea was that the whole concept of gravity is not a force the way Newton imagined it.
It was just that things move in response to the shape of space,
that space has a shape that's not just flat.
And so because we can't see that shape directly, like you can't look at space and say,
oh, I see that it's curved, but we,
We can see how space changes the motion of things that go through it.
We discover that gravity is just like an apparent force.
It looks like there's a force on stuff, but it's really just stuff moving through curved space.
And it can do much more than just curves so that the Earth goes in a circle around the sun, for example.
It can ripple like gravitational waves and it can expand like dark energy and maybe even more amazing things like warp drives and wormholes.
Yeah, you're saying that scientists in recent years have taken these ideas about relativity and figure out maybe a way that you can.
can make a warp drive using relativity, and it's specifically something called a warp bubble
that might let us use it to actually get to other places in the galaxy or even the whole universe.
And so let's get into the details of this warp bubble. But first, let's take a quick break.
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Or I were talking about the headline, did NASA accidentally build a warp drive?
Pardon me, so big yes.
You know, you are giving too much credit to this headline.
It's not asking the question, did NASA?
It says NASA scientists accidentally create warp bubble for interstellar travel.
Did they say might have or did they actually did it?
It says they created it.
That's what the headline says.
Well, we are digging into this headline to see if it's true or not.
And we talked a little bit about what a war drive would look like and what it would be.
And it sounds like so far scientists have only come up with one possibility for making a warp drive,
and that is to make a warp bubble.
And it's based on a special concept you were talking about.
Yeah.
So a few decades ago, there was a gravitational theorist Miguel Alcubier who said,
what if you could bend space in a very particular way?
And so he took a spaceship and he bent space around that spaceship so that the space around the ship itself was flat.
But then there was a bubble around the ship that moved that.
that flat space through space itself.
So it's like you take a chunk of space,
and you sort of slide it through other space.
And so that you can just sort of sit inside that bubble,
and then you get to your destination and inside the bubble,
you don't feel like crazy acceleration or anything.
It just feels like you're sort of floating there.
So his question was like, what shape of space do we need
in order to accomplish that?
And the cool thing was that he figured one out.
He figured out a way to be consistent with Einstein
equations and also compress space in front of this bubble and expand space behind the bubble.
So the bubble effectively moves relative to the rest of space.
Yeah, I know we've covered this in our book.
Maybe both books frequently ask questions about the universe and we have no idea.
And I have to say, this always kind of puzzled me a little bit.
So maybe let's step people through it.
So the idea is that you're on your spaceship, you're in space, and you flip the switch
or you pull the lever forward on your warp drive device.
And what it's doing, you're saying, is that it compresses the space in front of you and it expands the space behind you and somehow that moves you through space faster than the speed of light.
Remember when we say compress or expand, we're not like making space more dense or anything.
What we're doing is changing the relative distances between points.
That's what general relativity in Einstein's equations do.
They start from a certain distribution of matter and energy and they say, if you have a blob of stuff here and a blob of stuff there, how will space occur?
What are the relative distances between any two points?
So that's called the metric.
The solution to Einstein's equations is the metric,
which is just another word for like how to space curve
or another way to think about like the relative distances between two points.
So Alcubier's warp bubble says,
is there a way to shrink distances in front of this warp bubble
and expand distances behind it?
Okay, so let's say I'm in my spaceship.
I'm orbiting the Earth.
And let's say I just want to take a short hop over to Jupiter.
So I engage my war drive.
I pushed the lever forward, I put on my seatbelt, and suddenly the space in front of me between me and Jupiter, instead of being millions of miles, suddenly it's three miles.
Is that what you're saying?
Like somehow I am affecting the space between me and Jupiter so that what used to be millions of miles is now just a few miles.
Is that the idea?
That's the idea.
And that only works for me or for anyone like caught in the middle or anyone who hops in behind me.
Do you know what I mean?
Am I just affecting the space relative to me as an observer?
Or am I actually affecting the space between here and Jupiter?
So it works for anybody within the war bubble.
It creates this sphere around the spaceship.
And that sphere then gets slid along through space.
So it sort of gets moved.
So it gets rearranged.
Its relationship to the rest of space changes.
Right.
It's now closer to Jupiter and further from Earth.
And so anything inside that war bubble has,
the same experience. Does that mean that the bubble needs to encompass Jupiter? Or am I just
compressing the distance between here and the edge of the bubble? Inside the bubble, everybody
hangs out and sips their coffee. The bubble's edge is where space is being compressed. So
between the bubble and Jupiter, space is being compressed. That distance is being shortened.
And between the other edge of the bubble, which is sort of behind you, that space is being expanded.
What if there's something right in front of me outside of the bubble, but between
me and Jupiter. Like, let's say there's a satellite there or an old grandma crossing this
interstellar street. Like, what happens to that person in between? Do they get squished? Or do they
not even see this bending of space that's happening to me or to my bubble? Yeah, this would be
bad news for space grandma for sure. I mean, this is very destructive changing of the shape of
space, basically anywhere between your warp bubble and Jupiter. And the same thing between you and
behind. It would get squished. It would get squished. Yeah, absolutely.
Oh, so between, so I'm in a bubble.
Let's say my bubble is the spaceship.
So anything inside the spaceship is normal.
Anything outside gets bent around.
And so the space between the spaceship and Jupiter gets compressed.
And then wouldn't that affect the other planets as well?
You're saying anything caught in the middle will get squished.
But would it affect like the orbits of planets and everything else?
In the near vicinity of your ship, it certainly does affect things.
So things in your path definitely do get affected.
So, you know, warnings to all the space grandmas out there taking a walk.
And anything very close by is going to get affected, but the shape of the warp bubble is quite tight.
So it doesn't affect the gravity of things very far away.
Well, let's get into what would happen to grandma?
Would she get like squished flat or what?
Or would she even notice because, you know, space is just changing around her.
And so her molecules also change.
Space grandma would be very unlikely to survive this encounter because the space she's in, its metric would be changing.
And so that's likely to tear her apart.
Changes in the shape of space can have an effect.
on the objects in that space. That's how, for example, we discover gravitational waves.
We see that space is shaking a little bit, changes the relative distance, for example, between
mirrors that are hanging underground miles apart. And so you probably don't want that to happen
to your space. It's happening all the time right now. Space is expanding out from under us because
of dark energy, but it's very, very gentle and our molecules are powerful enough to hold ourselves
together. If that was much more rapid, then you would get torn apart. And so that's what's going to be
happening behind the warp bubble and the opposite is what's happening in front of the warp bubble.
So yes, that will be quite destructive.
I guess that's why you need crosswalks, even in space.
So then the space in front of me between here and Jupiter suddenly goes from a few million
miles to two miles.
And then you're saying the space behind me, you know, I was in orbit around Earth, but now
suddenly the space behind me, me and Earth goes from a few miles to a few million miles.
Is that the idea?
Exactly.
And that's basically travel, right?
You've gone from far away from Jupiter to close to Jupiter.
Yeah, but then I guess what's the next step?
Do I then move the few miles and suddenly I'm in Jupiter?
Or do I just turn it off and suddenly I'm there?
Yeah, you just turn it off.
I mean, your goal was to get close to Jupiter, right?
So you've rearranged space and now you're close to Jupiter, right?
You're two miles from Jupiter and two million miles from Earth instead of the opposite.
I guess it's weird because I compress space in front of me, but don't I need to expand it again?
Remember that compressing space is changing the relative distance, right?
So that is already accomplishing your goal, right?
Your goal is, I want to be close to Jupiter and far from Earth.
And so that's what the warp bubble has done for you.
It's to rearrange space so that now you are close to Jupiter and far from Earth.
Feels kind of like magic.
Like you just said, like, hey, I want to be there.
So you're there.
It's not exactly magic, but it's also not exactly science yet.
I mean, what Al-Cubier did was just say, is there a way to arrange space in a manner that still is the solution to Einstein's equations?
Like, do Einstein's equations prohibit this from happening?
And the answer is no.
What he didn't do is figure out how to make it happen.
Like Einstein's equations go in one direction.
They say, if you have this arrangement of mass and stuff in the universe, what is the shape of space around it?
Cool.
And then how does things move in that space?
What they don't do is tell you if you want a certain shape of space, how do you build it?
And so Alcubier just said, well, is it possible to have this shape of space?
and Einstein's equations say, yes, that would satisfy the equations, but it doesn't tell you
how to arrange stuff in the universe to make space do that. That might be impossible. And in Al-Cubier's
paper, he discovers that the only way he could come up with to make this happen was to have some weird
kind of matter that has negative mass or negative energy density, which as far as we know, doesn't
exist in the universe. I see. You're saying Einstein's equations, what we know to be true. We know it works,
but it doesn't tell us that we can't do magic, basically.
Like, it tells you that it's possible to be here close to Earth,
and it's also possible to be there close to Jupiter.
And so technically, you might be able to figure out a way
to make those two things sequential in time very quickly.
Yeah, and it's a little bit more than that, right?
He did show that it doesn't violate Einstein's equations,
which means space says, sure, I can do that
if you assemble mass and energy in the right configuration to make me do that.
I won't tell you how to arrange it, right?
I won't tell you what the recipe is, but in principle, that's not off the table.
So that's like a big hole in the argument.
We don't know how to build this thing, but the universe's list of rules don't explicitly
prohibit it.
But what is the recipe?
What does it actually say?
You're saying it needs like negative energy or negative mass.
And then what do I do with that?
Do I just put it in front of me?
Do I need to lay it out between here and Jupiter?
Do I need to, you know, spit it out in front of me?
You know, like, what does it say about how to use this or how you would need to use this negative energy?
So since the original paper, there's been a proliferation of really cool ideas about how to do this and how to do it more efficiently.
So far, every solution, every paper I've read requires using some kind of negative energy density matter behind you in order to expand space and some sort of positive energy density matter like normal matter like me and you in front of you to compress space.
So basically you have to build a track of matter in front of you that compresses the space.
And then you have to have negative matter behind you to expand the space.
So I do, I do have to lay out the whole track, the whole highway for the word drive to work.
And you need to have positive energy mass in front of you and negative energy mass behind you.
Right. We talked about this once on an episode about whether you could use a warp drive to escape a black hole.
Basically you have to build the track out of the black hole first in a over.
order for this to work.
All right.
So then I have to build a track.
I guess I would have to build it.
But to build the track, I have to get to Jupiter first.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, you know, to lay out a highway between here and Jupiter,
I have to go from here to Jupiter.
Yes, exactly.
Huge caveat there, right?
You have to build this track somehow.
I mean, it's possible that somebody else could come up with another way to make space do this
that doesn't require you to visit that place in advance and sort of build the track
along the way. Remember that Einstein's equations just say space can do that if you can figure out
how. And now people are trying to be creative about figuring out how to do that. And so that's one
obstacles like laying this track in front of you. The bigger obstacle is that we've never seen
anything with negative energy density before. We don't even know if that's possible to do in the
universe. It sounds like it's more of like a warp train than a warp drive. Right? Like you kind of have
to lay out the tracks. Or are you going to be like those cartoons where you're like going and
and laying the tracks down at the same time.
Leave it to the engineers to figure out some way to make this very effective.
The physicists are just like, well, space says we can do this
if somehow we can arrange this strange matter in the right configuration.
Right, but as the engineer, I would be mad if you told me like,
hey, I come up with a way to make a warp drive, but it's actually a warp train.
You know, then we brought all the wrong tools to make it.
You'd be disappointed in a warp train.
I'd still be pretty excited about a warp train.
I mean, you're right.
It's not a warp drive, but a warp train, still pretty awesome.
Yeah, no, I think both would be exciting, but, you know, if I'm going to pay for a ticket, I want to know what I'm getting, or if it's going to be a train ride or I'm going to see some fancy star show.
All right, so then it seems like it is possible, at least from a theoretical perspective, to make a warp something, warp drive or train or, I don't know, tram, perhaps.
How about a warp zip line? That would be pretty cool.
Oh, there you go. So it seems possible, but the question is how you would make it.
And there's this idea of a Casimir effect that might be able to do it.
And that's kind of where this headline all originated, right?
So what exactly did this study that the headline is based on do?
This study is trying to make progress on the stickiest part of the warp drive or warp train project,
which is negative energy density.
By energy density, we just mean like how much stuff is there in a certain part of space.
Matter has energy to it, right?
E equals MC squared.
And so if there's a blob of stuff in space, that's positive.
energy density. So the warp drives need something with negative energy density in order to expand the space behind you. And so this project was trying to figure out like, well, is it possible to build things with negative energy density? And here's the accidental part. They weren't actually trying to crack this problem of the warp drive. They were just studying the Casimir effect, which is a well-known and actual thing, which we have proven is real. And they were looking at the energy density of the Casimir effect. And they noticed something interesting to them, at least, which
They connected with warp drives.
I see.
So this is now jumping off from this idea of a warp train
that you can compress space and expand it behind you,
but to expand the space behind you, you need negative energy.
And so these folks were studying negative energy,
and you're saying they found something.
Well, they did find something interesting.
That's true.
I mean, I read their paper.
What they were doing is studying the Casimir effect,
which is a really interesting and super awesome quantum effect
that appeared between two plates that are very, very close to,
So imagine two like two sheets of metal and bring them like 10 nanometers apart.
What you discover if you do that is that there's a force between them.
Even if they have like no electric charge on them and we're ignoring gravity,
you can measure this force which appears between the plates because of this strange quantum effect called the Casimir effect.
Okay. So what is this effect?
What's happening in the Casimir effect is that we're actually interacting with and probing the vacuum energy of space.
Remember we talked about how space is not just emptying.
which is empty. It's filled with quantum fields. Like there's a photon in space that's a wiggle
in the electromagnetic field. There's an electron in space that's a wiggle in the electron field.
But even if you don't have a photon and even if you don't have an electron, space still has
these fields in them, these possibilities for particles to pass through them. And because they're
quantum fields, they can never actually go all the way down to zero energy. It's always a little
bit of fuzz, a little bit of energy. So we call that the vacuum energy, the lowest possible energy in a
quantum field, which is not zero. And so people wonder, like, is that real? Is it really happening?
Or is it just like part of our mathematics? Well, the cool thing about the Casimir effect is that when
you bring these two plates really close together, it cancels out some parts of those wiggles. Between
these two sheets, only certain kinds of wiggles can survive. So it suppresses some kinds of wiggles
and allows others. And so because it's suppressing some kinds of wiggles, it like lowers the energy
between these two sheets, which creates an energy differential, which is what creates a
force. So it squeezes these two plates a little bit closer together because that's a lower
energy state. So the Casimir effect is like deleting some vibrational modes of the quantum
vacuum between these two plates in a way that ends up pushing them together a little bit.
Right. It's sort of like you create a space that is so small that most particles can't even
fit in them. And so the universe can't create those particles in that space. And so therefore
it like creates almost like a void in space.
Right? We're like, oh, nothing can happen there. So there's sort of like an emptiness. And the rest of the universe is biased towards having a little bit of energy. Then that vacuum somehow creates like a, it sucks stuff in, basically. Yeah, it's really fascinating because it lowers the energy of space there below the vacuum energy. Right. Typically, we think the vacuum energy is the lowest. But if you create this special configuration, you can bring the energy of space below the vacuum energies. You say, prevents those fields from existing in certain modes. And so it's,
it lowers the overall energy.
You can either think about this in terms of fields,
if you like thinking about space is filled with fields,
or you can think about it in terms of virtual particles,
which is really equivalent.
If you like thinking about spaces filled with all these virtual particles
constantly popping in and out of existence,
between these two plates,
some kinds of virtual particles are not allowed.
And so the energy density is lower between the plates.
I see.
So you're saying you're not creating a spot of negative energy.
You're just creating a spot of lower energy
than like the normal amount of energy
that the universe has.
Sort of like sound, right?
Like you can't have negative sound,
but you can make a room that's lower sound
than like the average din
of your space, of your town.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And there's some really important nuances there.
As you say, it's not really negative energy.
It's just lower than the vacuum.
Now, if you define the vacuum to be zero,
then it's negative energy density, I suppose.
But that's a little bit arbitrary
just sort of like where you set your zero.
Really, it's lower energy than the rest of space around it.
It's an interesting puzzle there because all the physical phenomena we observe,
this actual force from the Casimir effect,
this just relates to the energy difference.
Like the fact that this is lower energy between the plates is what gets the force.
But if you try to do the calculations and ask like, well, how much energy is there in the vacuum,
you actually run into weird infinities.
Like if you try to calculate it, you say, well, there's an infinite number of different possible modes in space.
And so in principle, there should be infinite energy there.
which gets really weird and still nobody understands.
So we see the Casimir effect.
We know there's a lower energy density between the plates.
Even in the Casimir effect,
we don't really understand what the absolute energy is,
even in like normal empty space.
We just know that it's lower between the plates and the Casimir effect.
All right.
So we have this Casimir effect that might be able to give us negative energy,
which might let us make a warp chuchetrain.
That's how I think scientists should call it.
So let's get into whether or not someone has actually made this Casamir effect work
and whether it can be applied.
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All right, we are warping our way to...
examining news headlines, in particularly a very specific headline recently that said NASA might have accidentally built a war prime.
And the study that created this headline was actually looking at the Casimir effect, which is a way to maybe create zero energy or negative energy in the universe.
Now, Daniel, this is kind of a theoretical effect, right?
Something scientists think it might happen if you run this experiment.
Has anyone actually done this and measured this negative energy?
have actually measured the Casimir effect. So Casimir predicted it in like 1948 by doing a bunch of
calculations. And it's a very, very small effect. So it took a long time and some real virtuoso
experiments. But in 1996, Stephen Lamarro at Yale actually did this. He was able to measure the
force between two objects that really, really close together. And found that the forest was very close
to what Casimir predicted. And that's been verified since then? Yeah. There are
have been other experiments that verify it and they've done it with various different configurations.
It's really hard to actually do it with like two sheets that are like a nanometers apart.
So instead they use like one sheet and a sphere, for example, which experimentally is just sort of easier to manipulate.
And at separations of like 10 nanometers, which is like a hundred times the size of an atom,
the Casimir effect produces a force about equivalent to like an atmosphere of pressure.
So you're saying we can create spots of negative or zero energy in the universe.
And does that mean then that the space in that spot gets expanded, like in a war drive,
like it would do in a work drive?
So we can create spots which have lower energy density than normal empty space, right?
And it does cause the Casimir effect.
And we've measured that and that's real.
We don't know if that actually means they're negative energy density.
We don't know how to set the zero.
We try to calculate the energy of all the space.
You get infinities, which don't make sense.
So we don't know how to do those calculations.
So an open question about the Casimir effect is what it means for gravity.
Remember that gravity is a classical theory.
Einstein's theory of gravity doesn't even know how to deal with particles,
not to mention like an infinite number of virtual particles.
We don't actually know how to calculate the impact of this kind of arrangement
on gravitational fields and on the shape of space.
We don't know the answer to your question of does this expand the space between those two sheets.
But I guess in theory it is, right?
because energy in general, it compresses space.
So if you have something where a spa where you have less energy,
then technically that space would not compress as much,
which would be the same as expanding space.
It depends on whether the general relativistic concept of energy density
is the same as the quantum mechanical one.
Remember the quantum mechanical one here,
we don't know if this is negative or positive energy density.
And we don't know how to do those calculations
because we don't have a theory of quantum gravity.
People have tried to do those calculations.
and they get crazy predictions like, oh, there's infinite energy here.
So you get singularities everywhere in the universe.
And so it's just sort of an open problem in theoretical physics,
sort of gravitational implications of the vacuum energy.
So you can create a spot of almost zero or negative energy,
but you don't know if it's expanding or compressing space.
But the idea is that if it is,
then you could use it to maybe make a warp drive.
Maybe because we don't really even know
if it counts a negative energy density in a gravitational sense.
Again, it's just relatively lower energy.
than the rest of the vacuum.
And so in this paper, what they were doing was thinking about the energy density from the Casimir effect.
And they were doing a bunch of simulations.
So in this paper, they didn't build anything, right?
They didn't, like, create a lab and build something.
They were just doing calculations on the computer thinking about what is the energy density between objects that are really close together,
thinking about the Casimir effect.
So they were doing a bunch of calculations.
So then what did they find in their simulations?
And why did people use that to make the headline that NASA created a war drive?
So they were doing a bunch of calculations and they saw a plot and it had these funny shapes in it.
And one person who's working on the project is also really interested in warp drives and remembers seeing a similar shape in a paper about warp drives.
And we said, oh, this figure here, this shape of the energy density looks kind of like the shape you would need for a warp drive.
Well, maybe step us through with more detail here.
What is this a plot of?
It's just a plot of the energy density between two surfaces.
Like in the Casimir effect, you bring two surfaces very close together and you get lower energy density between the surfaces than around it.
Again, that doesn't necessarily mean actually negative energy density from a GR perspective, but had like an interesting shape.
And it had sort of the same shape as a figure from a warp drive paper that said, here's the negative energy density profile you would need to expand the space behind the warp bubble.
So it's just sort of like, oh, we have a crescent in this plot and we have a crescent in that plot.
maybe they're the same thing, but they're not at all, right?
It's just sort of vaguely similar.
And this is just a qualitative comparison of two things that might not even be related.
It's just like saying, oh, the Casimir effect creates this crescent shape negative energy density.
I also have a cookie of that shape.
So maybe the Casimir effect makes cookies.
Well, who doesn't want a warp cookie?
But I feel like maybe it's a little bit more than that, right?
Because, you know, what they saw in this simulation, it seems like it, is that if you bring these
two plates together and measure the Casimir effect, you get a dip in the energy between the two
plates, right? That's probably what they saw, like a dip in the energy. And if you plot the energy
between the two plates, you'll see a dip. And he's saying, well, to make a warp train, you need to
also kind of create this dip in energy behind you. You certainly do, but we don't know again if
the Casimir effects relative decrease in energy density would actually create the kind of expansion
of space we need for the warp bubble. The warp bubble needs to sort of
general relativistic negative energy density, which requires like particles of negative mass,
for example, whereas the Casimir effect creates a relative shift in the quantum vacuum,
and we don't know the impact of that gravitationally. All this paper is doing is saying,
oh, look, I made a shape of relative decrease of energy density that's similar to the actual
negative energy density in a warp bubble metric. Right. So then I guess what would be the idea is
that you somehow create a whole bunch of these plates really close together behind you,
and somehow that decreases the density behind you
and somehow that compresses space?
Is that kind of where they were going with this?
That's sort of where they were going with this.
But, you know, there's a lot of leaps there, right?
First of all, number one, this is just a simulation.
They haven't built anything.
They haven't demonstrated that their calculations are correct.
But you said that Casimir Effect has been proven experimentally.
Yeah, the Casimir Effect has been proven experimentally.
But that does mean that everybody who's doing Casimir Effect calculations is correct.
And this particular team has a bit of a spotty history in publishing papers.
This is the same team that was working on the EM drive, an attempt to build a rocket that violates Newton's third law, you know, propellant-less rocket.
So, you know, you've got to take everything they do with a bit of a grain of salt.
And they also haven't shown a really crucial step, which is that the Casimir relative decrease in energy density actually does provide the negative energy density you need for general relativity to create this warp bubble.
They just have not shown that at all.
So I passed this paper to an expert in a friend of the podcast,
and Parakshasheini, who's a professor of cosmology and gravitational physics,
and his review was, this paper is 100% pure nonsense.
How this paper passed pure review is completely beyond me.
Harsh.
I mean, let's not mean it's 100% pure nonsense.
That was his evaluation.
He was not very impressed with this paper.
Well, from a theoretical point of view, yes, I feel like,
from what I'm understanding here for me today is that, yeah, they skipped over the fact that
we don't have confirmation that lower energy leads to a expansion of space.
But everything seems to kind of point to that, right?
That's kind of how the universe works.
More energy you have, the more space gets compressed.
I suppose, but we don't know how to do the calculations to predict the impact on the
curvature of space of lower quantum field energy.
Remember, again, that GR is a classical theory.
It can't handle quantum particles, not to mention,
infinite towers of virtual particles, people have tried to do those calculations and gotten
crazy bonkers results, which suggests that what we need is a new theory of quantum gravity
that might let us do this. And it might work, right? It might be that the Casimir effect
does decrease the local energy density in such a way that a theory of quantum gravity would
predict the expansion of space in just the right way to give you a warp bubble. But this paper
doesn't show that. Right. It doesn't show that. But, you know, they're just presenting the results
of their simulation and saying there's maybe
a link to a word drive. Maybe the real
problem was that it got picked up by the media
and then the headline got overblown because
if you read the title of the paper
it's not like, hey, we made a warp drive. I have it
here because you sent them. Worldline
numerics applied to custom
Casimir geometry generates unanticipated
intersection with Alcabir warp metric.
Yes, absolutely. The title of their paper
is much better than the title
of the coffee or die article
that says that they accidentally create
warp bubble for interstellar travel.
I completely agree.
And they have the word numerics here.
So they are saying that it is a simulation.
No, that's right.
A lot of the misunderstanding lies in the coverage of this paper.
This paper definitely doesn't show that NASA accidentally created a warp bubble.
It just shows that the Casimir effect in certain configurations can generate decreases in local energy density that have a similar shape qualitatively to what you would need for a warp bubble.
And again, it's just qualitative.
They didn't even like analyze quantitatively.
to say, like, is this actually the shape they need?
It just sort of like looks the same on the page.
Right.
So then you might say that NASA might have accidentally built a war drive.
Well, also, these guys aren't at NASA.
Like, nobody here works at NASA.
Most people who work in NASA don't work at NASA, right?
They're not like working for NASA.
This is not a NASA funded study.
This was a study funded by DARPA, however.
So that's where the headline made the mistake.
Should have been the government might have accidentally built a war drive.
Some people in a garage that previously have made,
outrageous claims, did a calculation that looks to them on the screen similar to something
they remember being relevant to warp bubbles.
Oh, now you're being harsh, Daniel.
I thought anyone could come up with a great idea.
Absolutely.
Anybody can.
Are you saying if I work out in my garage, I can't come up with a good idea?
But now these people are at a university, right?
Some of these folks are.
Some of them are in the engineering department at Texas A&M.
Which is near NASA, kind of, right?
If any two places in Texas are adjacent to each other, then sure.
Maybe because they have a warp drive.
They can shorten the distance between spots in Texas.
Maybe they can't.
And absolutely, you're right.
Anybody could come up with a great idea.
And it might be that in somebody's garage one day a warp drive is built.
All right.
Well, it sounds like the very dead here is that the science, as it is, is not super exaggerated, right?
Because they are doing simulations and they are just saying there is a qualitative connection there.
But it sounds like maybe the headline that picked it up did overblow the implications of it.
or the probability that it might be translated into an actual warp drive.
Yeah, I think that's a generous reading of it.
Yeah, we already know your harsh reading of it and your friends.
Well, let's hope that somebody builds a warp train one day.
And, you know, we have like a new character on Thomas the train.
We have like the warp engine.
I think the conclusion here is that maybe these websites that picked it up warped reality a little bit.
Yeah, and not accidentally, I imagine.
So be careful where you get your science news.
but feel free to send us any headline you see that makes you wonder or gets you excited.
We're happy to digest it for you and give you a sense for whether or not it's the next big breakthrough.
That's right. I mean you need tips on how to use Word to make their paper or LaTax.
You can also email.
That's right.
Send us your questions about warp drives, about space physics, and about Latek to questions at Danielanhorpe.com.
You hope you enjoyed that?
Thanks for joining us.
See you next time.
Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio.
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Why are TSA rules so confusing?
You got a hood of you. I'll take it off.
I'm Mani. I'm Noah.
This is Devin.
And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing,
where we get to the bottom of questions like that.
Why are you screaming?
I can't expect what to do.
Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me.
I deserve it.
You know, lock him up.
Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
No Such Thing.
I'm Dr. Joy Hardin-Bradford, host of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast.
I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious.
In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, Dr. Angela Neil Barnett and I discuss flight anxiety.
What is not a norm is to allow it to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do,
the things that you were meant to do.
Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast.
Grasias, come again.
We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment
with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities.
You didn't have to audition?
No, I didn't audition.
I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years.
Oh, wow.
That's a real G-talk right there.
Oh, yeah.
We'll talk about all that's viral and trending,
with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs.
And, of course, the great vivras you've come to expect.
Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again.
On the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
This is an IHeart podcast.
