It's every Star Trek fan's dream. Stand behind Sulu, Data, or young Wesley Crusher, and tell him to set course for the second star on the right at maximum curvature. Deploying every last ounce of antimatter left in the tanks of the most famous warp-powered starship in history: the USS Enterprise. The good news for tech enthusiasts is that scientists have found a loophole in Special Relativity, that Albert Einstein theory that rules out the possibility of traveling where no one has ever gone faster than light before.
By folding and manipulating the fabric of space-time, explain physicists Richard Obousy and Gerald Cleaver of Baylor University, a sort of bubble could be created that the spaceship could ride while remaining apparently stationary with respect to the rest of the Universe (the so-called reference system ), while the bubble would move at over 300,000 kilometers per second. No inertial shock absorbers to shield passengers from accelerations impossible for the human body to sustain, everything would apparently remain motionless while the ship would actually travel at sidereal speeds.
The idea of the warp engine had been scientifically formalized as early as 1994 by the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who today works at the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam (Germany). According to Alcubierre's theory, space should be curved (to warp in English) to form a wave that a spacecraft could "surf" in a very similar way to what was described by the two scientists of the Texan university: "There is no it is nothing that theoretically prevents the creation of a warp engine ”the latter insist.
The problem with Alcubierre's idea, as with that of Cleaver and Obousy, is the amount of energy needed to succeed in the enterprise of distorting space. An enormous amount, at least for the current capabilities of mankind, estimated by the calculations presented in the article entitled Putting the Warp into Warp Drive in no less than 10 ^ 45 joules for a ship of a thousand cubic meters of volume: "Roughly the mass-energy equivalent contained in the planet Jupiter - they explain - obtained through the famous relation E = mc2 ”.
Not that it's an insurmountable obstacle: previous calculations were much more pessimistic, and even assumed there wasn't enough energy in the entire universe to set the Warp in motion. This new study, although still "highly theoretical", offers instead "a glimpse of how the problem of vast distances related to interstellar travel could be solved, and opens up exciting new avenues for future research". All thanks to the recent formulation of the M-Theory, which brings together the previous elaborations of the different theories on strings, and which introduces the concept of 11th dimension exploited by the two scholars to generate the energy necessary for the jump. How this can be done, however, Cleaver and Obousy still don't know.
It is useless, therefore, to dream of "dabbling in hyperspace" in this life. NASA, on its website, explains well that there are many problems to face before heading towards the unknown, not least the space-time paradoxes linked to movements that exceed the speed of photons. Of course, if tomorrow the aliens decided to fax the assembly instructions for a dark matter generator, with neutrino turbo, everything would be easier. A bit like Ikea.
Luca Annunziata