We’ve dreamed for decades to visit other star systems, but we had only one problem, that they are so far away, and conventional spaceflights would take tens of thousands of years to reach even the closest star system. But physicists aren’t in the habit of giving up easily. If you give them an impossible dream, they’ll give you an incredible hypothetical way to make it a reality.
The mystery of traveling faster than the speed of light
According to study Conducted in 2021 by physicist Eric Lintz of the University of Göttingen in Germany, we may have a viable solution to this dilemma, one that makes more sense than the so-called imaginary warp drives.
This is an area that generates many great ideas, each offering a different approach to solving the mystery of superlight travel: achieving a way to send something through space at breakneck speeds. But there are some problems with this idea. In conventional physics, and according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, there is no real way to reach or exceed the speed of light, something we need for any light-year journey.
Moving matter faster than the speed of light
But this has not stopped physicists from trying to break the global speed limit. The movement of matter at a speed that exceeds the speed of light is unacceptable because space-time itself does not have such a rule. In fact, the far distances of the universe are already expanding at a speed that does not match the speed of light.
We need to bend a small bubble of space in a similar way for transport purposes to solve the equations of relativity to create an energy density lower than the vacuum of space, but this kind of negative energy occurs on a quantum scale, so buckling enough to form “negative mass” is still an area of anomalous physics.
Achieving faster-than-light travel
In addition to enabling other abstract possibilities, such as wormholes and time travel, negative energy may help power what’s known as the Alcubierre warp drive.
This concept takes advantage of negative energy principles to wrap space around a hypothetical spacecraft, enabling it to travel faster than light without challenging conventional laws of physics, except for the reasons described above, but we can’t fundamentally believe in such an imaginary fuel source.
Ultra-fast solitonic waves
But what if it was somehow possible to achieve faster-than-light travel in keeping with Einstein’s relativity without the need for any kind of anomalous physics that physicists have never seen before?
In the latest study, Lintz suggests one way we can do this, thanks to what he calls a new class of ultrafast solitons — a type of wave that maintains its shape and energy while moving at a constant speed (in this case, faster than the speed of light).
According to Lintz’s theoretical calculations, such hyperfast solutions may exist within general relativity, and result from positive energy densities, which means that there is no need to consider strange, yet unverified sources of negative energy densities.
With enough energy, these solitons could act as “warp bubbles”, able to move faster than light and, in theory, enable an organism to pass through spacetime while being protected from intense tidal forces.
The energy required to travel at the speed of light
This is an amazing theoretical feat, although the amount of power needed means that this warp drive is only a hypothetical possibility at the moment.
Lintz said in March of last year: “The energy required for this Journey at the speed of light which includes a spacecraft with a radius of 100 meters, is on the order of hundreds of times the mass of Jupiter.”
There are still many mysteries for researchers to solve, but the free flow of these kinds of ideas remains our best hope of getting a chance to visit those distant twinkling stars.
“This work has taken superlight travel a step further from theoretical research in fundamental physics and closer to engineering,” said Lintz. “The next step is figuring out how to reduce the staggering amount of energy needed within today’s technologies, such as the power plant. “Modern big nuclear fission. Then we can talk about building prototypes.”
Classical and Quantum Gravity