After watching the SpaceX rocket recently just try to land on a platform, you’d think this ability is years if not decades away. Yet the buzz on space websites is that NASA may have accidentally discovered a way to create a warp field. Wait, what?
Yes, lots of testing to be done, and it could turn out not to be what they think at any time. But if it is...
3 comments:
I have trouble believing they accurately and consistently measured a 1x10^-18 m/s difference in travel time over a 7.23 centimeter laser path length, even if this effect were real.
With a baseline of c = 300,000,000 (3x10^8), a difference of 1 meter per second would be 1 in 3 billion; no prob, radios do that all the time. But 1x10^-18 m/s is 1 part in 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (300 septillion; 300 _trillion_ trillion).
Super-cooled atomic clocks (which these guys would have to be using as a reference standard) typically are accurate to kept synchronized to an accuracy of 10^9 seconds per day (approximately 1 part in 10^14). They appear to be claiming a to have measured something to an accuracy of 12 orders of magnitude greater than their reference standard, and what I read there doesn't incline me to wade through the rest of the 100 pages of chatter.
Stop bringing troublesome numbers into this, dammit, I want a warp!
Heh. Be glad I didn't go into the issue of charging plates to 900 KV with no dielectric. Just how hard a vacuum did they get? [grin]
I want a warp drive, too. That's why I get annoyed with "reports" like that.
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