In this episode, we’ll be talking about space travel at the speed of light - the kind of thing you see in Star Trek. For the first time, a new theory of “dark energy” shows us how we might actually build a warp drive. But, it won’t go faster than light speed.
You can listen to this podcast or read the article, below.
The Alcubierre Drive
For the new edition of my 2016 book on Randell Mills’s monumental new theory of nature, I did a little research into futuristic space propulsion. Miguel Alcubierre first proposed a warp drive in 1994, according to which, a spacecraft may be able to achieve faster-than-light velocities by creating a kind of “warp bubble” around the craft – a region of distorted spacetime.
By expanding spacetime behind the bubble, and contracting it in front of the bubble, the bubble would slip through space without the spacecraft feeling any forces whatsoever; the occupants of a ship inside the bubble would remain in free fall. In this scheme, the expansion would need to be accomplished either with “exotic matter” that has negative mass, or utilizing the inflationary force that expands the universe as a whole: “dark energy.”
We don’t know if “exotic matter” exists, but we do know that “dark energy” is real. We just don’t know what it is. Or, how to make it. Until now.
What is Dark Energy?
In the early 1990’s, Mills had a new theory of matter. Mills then extrapolated his theory to gravitation. This makes sense: gravity is caused by particles.
When a particle is born, light becomes matter. Light moves at the speed of light in all frames of reference, but matter does not. When a particle is born, it must move at a sub-light velocity, an escape velocity that allows the particle to separate from its antiparticle. In order that the speed of light is not violated during this transition, spacetime “bends” around the new particle.
It is analogous to when an object moves at near-light velocity in Special Relativity, it experiences length contraction and time dilation. Except in this case, both are experienced by spacetime itself, in a radial field.
This is the origin of gravity: relativity. Relativity is, essentially, electrodynamics. This unifies gravitation with electrodynamics.
This minor modification to Einstein’s theory allowed Mills to do a lot of useful work. It allowed him to calculate the masses of fundamental particles, allowing him to predict (and publish) the top quark mass several months before it was discovered in supercolliders.
Mills makes a fundamental prediction about the nature of space: When a particle is born, spacetime contracts. When a particle dies, spacetime expands. Overall, spacetime is conserved.
Mills introduced a new fundamental equation for spacetime-energy equivalence, one that may become as iconic as Einstein’s equation for matter-energy equivalence. The amount of mass you need to convert to energy to produce one second of spacetime expansion (yes, expansion is measured in units of time) is:
Q = c3 / 4 π G
Any event that creates matter, such as the creation of a particle, contracts spacetime. And any event which releases matter as energy expands spacetime. This is true for chemical and nuclear reactions.
And, it is an epiphany.
Look up at the night sky, and what do you see? Small glimmering dots. Stars are the universe’s factories, enormous fusion engines that turn stellar fuel into starlight. When two nuclei fuse together, it produces a new element that has slightly less mass than the sum of the original nuclei. Our Sun, a modest yellow dwarf, loses about 4 billion kilograms of mass every second, converting hydrogen into helium (as well as other elements), and releasing the mass balance as energy.
According to Mills’s theory, to conserve spacetime, every fusion event must push out space a little bit. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone, and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. Every minute, the combined power output of the universe is enough to produce about one second of spacetime expansion. Mills realized that the universe is not simply coasting outward from a primordial explosion, but actively pushing itself out. Stellar fusion, the most abundant physical process in nature, expands the universe.
Mills’s theory allowed him to predict (prior to its discovery) that the universe should be accelerating in its outward expansion - what physicists began to call “dark energy.”
It also predicts why the early universe shows no sign of a “Big Bang” when observed with the James Webb Space Telescope. Rather, Mills believes the universe oscillates in size over trillion-year cycles.
It also allowed me to infer, in an early version of my manuscript, that we ought to observe gravitational waves coinciding with energetic events in space, such as Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB). As it turned out, the first gravitational wave observed was simultaneous with a GRB. My mind was blown. I had made my first confirmed prediction about the universe.
Can we harness dark energy?
Mills’s theory now tells us what dark energy is and how to manufacture it on demand.
To expand space, it is necessary to convert matter into energy. This could be achieved by the annihilation of a particle and antiparticle (positrons and electrons, or protons and antiprotons) into bursts of high-energy light.
In a Mills-type Alcubierre drive, one could imagine a warp bubble produced by two processes:
First, matter is annihilated into light. This process produces very high energy gamma ray photons;
Second, light is made to undergo pair production back into matter, ideally utilizing the very same gamma rays. Although this process can be observed in a cloud chamber, is not yet controllable with modern technology.
Particle production events would need to happen in front of the craft, particle annihilation events in the rear. This would warp the fabric of spacetime, as they pass along a ring around the spacecraft.
It is important to note that (Q) is very big, 3.22 x 1034 kilograms; that’s thirty four zeroes on the end. It is 16,000 times the mass of our sun. It takes the combined power output of the entire universe, for about 40 seconds, to produce one second of expansion. That’s simply huge.
Those who considered the Alcubierre drive also realized that the amount of energy (dark energy or exotic matter) needed to make the drive work would be truly staggering, but subsequent research has brought down the amount to something within the realm of plausibility, something potentially equivalent to the total mass-energy of the ship itself. This is still a huge amounts of energy: if an object the size of a spaceship annihilated from matter into energy on Earth, it would be an extinction-level explosive event.
Alcubierre believed that if a craft is traveling at near-light velocity through expanding space, the movement would be faster than light. But Alcubierre didn’t know how expanding space worked. In Mills’s theory, dark energy is a local influence on spacetime, and it propagates outward at the speed of light (just like gravitation). As a result, a Mills-type Alcubierre drive could not move faster than the speed at which spacetime was “warped” by the drive. It would still be useful for allowing a spaceship to travel at near-light velocities without the need for the slow acceleration of fragile human occupants.
In a universe governed by classical laws, the speed of light is the maximum velocity for the propagation of any wave capable of carrying signals, including gravitation.
Sometimes, it is nice to be grounded.
Thoughts and questions? Join the conversation.
For further reading, this topic is covered in the chapters: The Oscillating Universe and The Path to the Stars in the forthcoming book: The End of Fire: how the hydrino sparks a revolution in physics and clean energy by Brett Holverstott.
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