Arxiv link for people interested in the source rather than a journalists take.<p><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06824" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06824</a>
> warp speed travel is now a lot more likely in a much shorter timespan than we previously thought.<p>That is cool, but at the same time it only works for subluminal speeds so not really what "warp" speed usually refers to.<p>Offtopic, but it kinda reminds me of the science fiction story of a young scientist trying to get funding for hyperspace research. In the end it turns out that hyperspace has been explored decades ago but the speed of light is even lower in hyperspace than in real space.
Sabine Hossenfelder video specifically about this paper: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VWLjhJBCp0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VWLjhJBCp0</a>
The article is incorrect.<p>If you check the paper, they are clear that physical warp drive do not allow faster than light travel. It moves only at subluminal speeds. In any case, warp drives (physical or non-physical) are just theoretically interesting.<p>Taking mass of few solar systems and building a tiny microscopic vehicle that fits inside the bubble is not practical way to travel.
Perhaps a good time to post this short story “The Road Not Taken”:<p><a href="https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf</a><p>It’s a fun read. (20 pages)
I don't know about the physics of the article, but they get the lore of Star Trek wrong right off the bat. Warp drive is certainly not explained in Star Trek in terms of direct propulsion from matter-antimatter collision. That is how the impulse (sub-lightspeed) engines work. Warp is explained as a reaction involving exotic matter that creates a field surrounding the ship to warp spacetime.
If you’re saying traveling faster than the speed of light is possible, you’re also saying traveling backwards in time is possible. And yet people tend to be very skeptical of backwards time travel claims.
There is still the problem of FTL information transfer violating causality, but I have wondered if sub-light warp drive might not be physically possible.<p>It wouldn’t be FTL but it would be a kind of “massless” drive in that it would get around the propellant mass issues with accelerating to near light speed. It would “cheat” by warping space instead of accelerating at all in the conventional sense.<p>The Centauri system is a little under 5 years away with such a drive.
> Essentially, an Alcubierre drive would expend a tremendous amount of energy—likely more than what’s available within the universe—to contract and twist space-time in front of it and create a bubble.<p>What does this actually mean? We’d have two giant Tesla coils buzzing with a universe worth of electricity? Giant magnets? Super space lasers?
this paper is extremely annoying, they could have at least given some examples of the amount of energy that would be required to create their warp teardrop bubbles using their new equations