Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge dissect research articles claiming sudden progress in warp technology
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Hey, Daniel, what's your first reaction when you see a dramatic science headline?
Hmm, I guess it's a superposition of excitement and skepticism.
It's a quantum reaction. What do you mean by skepticism. It's part of you soon the study is not real.
No, it's more skepticism because I think the news coverage might not be fair.
Wait, what are you saying the news media is biased?
I get this constant stream of articles sent to me by listeners who ask me like, is this for real? Can I believe this headline?
But somehow they believe you.
Well, I think we've earned more trust than some of those websites called like coffee ordie dot com or linkzilla dot org.
I've never been to those sites, but thanks for the reference. I'm always looking for ways that Einstein was wrong. I hear there are ten reasons you won't believe the seventh.
Hi.
I'm Rham, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comments.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at u C Irvine, and I'm dying to find out why Einstein was wrong.
You're dying to find out. You would give up your life to find out why Einstein was wrong.
I guess it's more figuratively dying to find out. But I do get a lot of emails from people who say they have figured out how Einstein was wrong. And every time inside me there's this little flash of hope. Maybe this is the person who has figured it out.
Yeah, you never know, right, I mean, Einstein was just some dude working in a pen office and he figured out that everybody else was wrong.
Einstein was a very smart dude. But yes, you're right, he was just a human being with a human brain thinking about the way the world works and coming up with a more beauty, more compact, a more effective description of reality. But we're also pretty sure his ideas weren't the final ideas.
So you think he is wrong.
I'm very sure that Einstein is wrong. I just don't know who's right.
So what do you do with those emails? Do you fact check them? Do you go through them?
Yeah? Absolutely, I read them. I scan through them. I give them some feedback on the science.
Do you encourage them to submit it to a journal or at least a coffee or die dot com.
Most of them aren't really in journal ready format yet, so I give them some tips about how they might get there.
I see you give them attach or word processing tips. Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we try to figure out how Einstein was wrong and also how he was right. Our goal is to explore how the universe works, to wonder about all of its crazy mysteries, those fundamental questions about the very nature of reality, what rules all those particles are following. We want to weave them all together into a deep and beautiful understanding of this cosmos, and we want to explain all of it to you.
That's right. It is a vast universe full of mysteries, and our understanding of these mysteries is constantly changing. Science is not a constant thing, and science is not done still working hard to figure out how things actually work because the way we think it might be working doesn't always pin up.
That's right, And it also doesn't make progress in a steady fashion. It's not like every day we get five more units of science. There are moments in the history of science when somebody has a flash of insight, when years of struggle finally coalesce into some progress and we make a great leap forward in our understanding. And you never know what day is going to be one of those days.
Yeah, everybody tunes into the science news of the day to see if a great new discovery has been made, or if scientists a figure out how to do some amazing thing.
Or if it's just linkzilla dot org spamming us again.
Giving us clickbait. But there are always interesting news headlines, sometimes on the regular news, and sometimes they spill over onto the mainstream media, right.
Yeah, And sometimes they seem like clickbait, but they are real. You know, scientists measure gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of reality. That sounds like it was made up by a copy editor working in a basement somewhere, but that was real.
Yeah, science does make a lot of progress, and people are excited when something really big happens. But sometimes those headlines are a little bit overblown.
That's right. You can't believe everything you read in all of the popular media about scientific progress. Sometimes they're just trying to get you excited and make you click on their link. We had a whole episode about how to critically read popular science articles, the upshot of which was develop a few sources of information that you really trust and check those.
Wait, wait, are you trying to tell people that you're the only person they can trust? Is that what it is? Isn't that? How cults work.
I do think we are a pretty reliable and even handed sort of information about science progress. But there are other places you can get your science news. I like the coverage in the New York Times and in the LA Times, and also in Quantum Magazine, often very insightful and always very.
Well informed, but also false and non informed at the same time. Because it is a quantum magazine.
They try to deliver one quantum of understanding at a time.
But there's a lot of information and news out there, and it's kind of like you say, it's hard to figure out what is real and what is not, or maybe what is real but exaggerated. I think that's maybe a lot of what happens in these news headlines, right, There's like some negative truth, but they sort of emphasize the extreme interpretation of these things.
Yeah, often they have removed the cofeats and the qualifiers, and so you know, somebody does like a simulation of a black hole universe on their computer one afternoon and writes a paper about it, and then the news headline is like graduate student plunges entire universe into a black hole or something similar.
Well, that's probably only exciting for that gratitude well.
You have a whole ted talk once. I think about the scientific news cycle and how this happens, how real scientific research gets sort of filtered and amplified.
Yeah, and then how it all comes back to your grandma and how she ends up wearing tinfoil hat.
So we do think it's very important that everybody out there have a sense for what's real and what's exaggerated. So when a bunch of listeners all send me the same article, I think maybe it's time to do an episode about one particular piece of research.
Yeah, And then months later the episode comes out. Sometimes we rush it right. Sometimes if it's a hot topic, we'll ask buy Hard to put it out quickly.
That's right. We do sometimes try to be responsive to the real world.
And so recently there's been a pretty incredible sounding headline that a lot of people wrote to you about.
Right.
I guess people look to you to know if something is overblown or real, because I'm certainly not getting those emails.
How would you know? Are you reading your emails these days? But every morning in my inbox I certainly get a pile of email from listeners who say I saw this headline. Is this real or could you do an episode explaining this to me because I still don't understand it. Yeah.
Pretty recently there's been a pretty exciting sounding headline about warp drives and NASA. The question we'll be tackling today is did NASA just accidentally build a warp drive? And Daniel? Which part is maybe not real? The accidental part? Did they build one on purpose? Actually, let's see the parts about this headline. They're not real, are the NASA part, the accidental part, and the warp drive part. So they did build something, Actually they didn't built something.
No, they didn't even actually build it.
So let's see which works are left here. Might have did something might have happened.
So I'm looking at a webpage from coffee Ordie dot com and headline is DARBA and NASA scientists accidentally create warp bubble for interstellar travel. There's no might or maybe.
Well, we'll dig into this headline, but first we were wondering how many people out there had heard about this or think it's real.
So thanks very much to everybody who volunteers to answer these questions for this section of the podcast. We really appreciate you speculating about things you haven't had a chance to prepare for and hope everybody else out there enjoys them. If you would like to participate for future episodes, please don't RESHI write to me two questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
So think about it for a second. Do you think no, I said accidentally or on purpose build a warp drive. Here's what people had to say.
I'm pretty sure they did not discover a warp drive, only because that would be pretty big news, and as far as I know, I've heard nothing about it, So I'm gonna say no, No, they definitely did not accidentally discover a warp drive.
I would love that to be true, but I'm pretty sure that's.
Not the case.
Since you're asking, I think the answer is yes, but I haven't heard about it.
I don't thinkness I can do mistakes like this, at least not know and probably in the future. But I don't think this accident just happened.
I don't know, but I kind of hope so, because I think that would be amazing to be able to travel really far, really fast.
All right, A lot of excitement either way. People are like, I don't know, but that sounds awesome.
Yeah, just like me. Everybody wants this to be true, and I think that's one of the reasons that these articles are successful is that it touches the excitement inside people. People are hopeful for this kind of leap forward in technology.
Yeah, I mean, I guess at least the people who read Science News probably also our fans of Star Trek, and so that's where kind of maybe the idea of warp drives first got spread into the popular culture. And so people are excited for this to happen because a lot of exciting things happen in Star Trek.
You think people are more excited about warp drives or like the Holow Deck.
Well, the holid Deck already exists, Daniel.
You have a holidack.
It's called the metaverse.
Well, that's right, and we recently took a trip to the metaverse, so we should know all about it.
Yeah, it's nice and cozy there. But warp drives would be pretty amazing, right, because they would let us travel to other stars and other planets and maybe other galaxies.
It would be really incredible because one of the disappointing things about the universe is that it's so big, that everything is so far away. We're living to travel slower than the speed of light, which seems really fast, but even in comparison to the vast distances between stars or between galaxies, it's not really fast enough to get us interesting places in reasonable amounts of time. So a warp drive would be a wonderful way to like zip around the galaxy or the universe and just learn so much about what's going on out there.
That would be super cool. Although, Daniel, I feel like you shouldn't be disappointed at the universe for being so big. That feels a little mean, you know, like maybe it's our fault for not being fast enough or big enough.
Yeah, maybe disappointed is too judgmental. I'm just frustrated. I feel like there's information out there. You know, there are either aliens living on other planets and crawling around in those surfaces or not. And the facts are out there. They either are or they aren't, and we could know it if we could just get there and see these things. But everything is so frustratingly distant. It's like somebody has answers to the deepest questions about the universe, but they're keeping them in a locked box and you can't see them.
Yeah, unless you go to coffee Ordie dot com. They seem to have the key. It would be pretty cool, and it is pretty prevalent in science fiction movies warp drives because I guess it solves pretty much any plot that problem that you might have in setting up a space story, right, because without a warp drive, you pretty much can't have any space stories because it would just take too long to get between planets or between parts of the galaxy.
Well, it's an interesting question with a few nuances. I mean, in one hand, you can't realistically have like a galactic empire. You can't like make decisions for a set of stars that are many, many light years apart, because when you make a decision, it takes like years and years even for that information to propagate across the galaxy. Or how could you like move your army from one star to another, or gather resources in one place and move them somewhere else. Really effectively limits you to operating in a single solar system.
Yeah, like even just to send an email to the other side of the galaxy would take one hundred thousand years, right.
That's right, So you can't really coordinate across different parts of the galaxy due to the speed limit of the speed of light. But you know, if you're patient, you could send out explorational teams which could discover those other star systems. So you could realistically still have like first contact stories, but you can't zip back and forth between stars that are really far apart.
I wonder if it just maybe our point of view about time, Like if we live to be a million years old, you know, maybe one hundred thousand years old, to send an email wouldn't be that bad.
Yeah, that's a really good way of thinking about it. The speed of light really is a relationship between time and distance, and so if time isn't much of an issue for you because you're going to live to be a million years old, then the universe is a lot more local than if you live very short lives like we do.
Well, regardless of how old you live, having a warp drive would be pretty handy for exploring the universe, for send emails to the other side of the galaxy. And this headline that people are sending you seems to say that NASA may have accidentally built a warp drive. I wonder what where the accidentally comes from? Are we going to cover that?
We are going to cover that. Absolutely.
Yes, it's a pretty tantalizing headline. And so let's dig into this idea. First of all, let's start with the basics, Daniel, what is the technical definition of a warp drive?
So a warp drive sounds like science fiction because we hear about it in science fiction, and usually you hear scientists saying that it's impossible that you can't go faster than the speed of light, and so warp drive just sounds like, you say, a science fiction plot saver, a way to just like dot dot dot your way to distant stars without worrying about the limitations of the speed of light. But in the last few decades, there has been a lot of progress in imagining how we might build a warp drive using actual science, using real technology. It's not like we have plans for warp drive right now, but we have sort of a direction that theoretical physics points us towards that suggest it might be possible.
Wait, are you're saying that NASA has accidentally proven that warp drives are possible.
I'm saying that we're like step one out of three million towards building a warp drive.
Wait are you saying that NASA has taken the first steps towards building a warp drive.
And there are some theoretical physicists that have laid the foundation, yes, which may eventually lead to actual warp drives being constructed.
Wait, are you saying that NASA will eventually build a warp drive.
I think you've had too much coffee or die this morning.
I'm just kidding. Let's maybe be super clear about this, right. This is an idea where you have something aboard your spaceship, right, and this device that you have on your spaceship somehow lets you cut through space, right, or go faster than the speed of light. That's the idea of warp drives, right, because it's maybe different than like the wormhole gate that some science fiction stories used to go between spots in the galaxy.
Yes, so you do have to follow the rules of relativity. And the cool thing about the warp drive is that it does follow the rules of relativity. We're used to relativity telling us that you can't move through space faster than light, and that doesn't change. We can't avoid that. But relativity also tells us that space isn't just flat, that it can do weird things that the relative distances between points in space can change. When we talk about space curving or bending, that's really what we mean. We're changing the relative distances between points. Remember that space isn't like relative to some external rulers, So when we talk about the distances between things, these are really just intrinsic bending of space. You often see this rubber sheet analogy where somebody puts like a bowling ball on a rubber sheet and it bends the rubber sheet. That's helpful for thinking about bending, but it's also quite misleading because in that example, the rubber sheet is bending in relation to some third external dimension. Here, we're really just talking about changing the relative distances between points in space, and that's something that we know can happen. That's something that we have observed. We see it happen in gravitational waves, which are ripples in space. We see it happen in gravitational waves, which are ripples in space. We see it happening in the expansion of the universe, which is increasing the relative distance between points in space. So there was a guy named Alcubier a few decades ago who came up within a sort of arrangement of space that would allow you to move like a chunk of space relative to other bits of space to sort of like create a warp bubble which would itself move relative to space. So you could sit inside that warp bubble and it would transport you to your destination.
Yeah, there's this idea. I guess that space is not like empty and immovable and fixed and super stiff or rigid, but space is kind of squishy, right, like for example, black hole sort of squishes the space around self, bending space and maybe creating some weird kind of shortcuts through space.
Yeah. Einstein's big idea was that the whole concept of gravity is not a force the way Newton imagined it. It was just that things move in response to the shape of space. That space has a shape that's not just flat. And so because we can't see that shape directly, like you can't look get space and say, oh, I see that it's curved, but we can see how space changes the motion of things that go through it, we discover that gravity is just like an apparent force. It looks like there's a force on stuff, but it's really just stuff moving through curved space, and it can do much more than just curve. So that the Earth goes in a circle around the Sun. For example, it can ripple like gravitational waves, and it can expand like dark energy, and maybe even more amazing things like warp drives and wormholes.
Yeah, you're saying that scientists in recent years have taken these ideas about relativity and figure out maybe a way that you can make a warp drive using relativity. And it's specifically something called a warp bubble that might let us use it to actually get to other places in the galaxy or even the whole universe. And so let's get into the details of this warp bubble. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the headline did NASA accidentally build a warp drive? Part of use hoping Yes.
You know, you are giving too much credit to this headline. It's not asking the question did NASA. It says NASA scientists accidentally create warp bubble for interstellar travel.
Where did they say might have or they did they actually did it?
It says they created it. That's what the headline says.
Well, we are digging into this headline to see if it's true or not. And we've talked a little bit about what a warp drive would look like and what it would be, and it sounds like so far as scientists have only come up with one possibility for making a warp drive, and that is to make a warp bubble. And it's based on a special concept you were talking about.
Yes, So a few decades ago, there was a gravitational theorist, Miguel Alcubier, who said, what if you could bend space in a very particular way, And so he took a spaceship and he bent space around that spaceship so that the space around the ship itself was flat. But then there was a bubble around the ship that moved that flat space through space itself. So it's like you take a chunk of space and you sort of slide it through other space, and so that you can just sort of sit inside that bubble and then you get to your destination. And inside the bubble, you don't feel like crazy acceleration or anything. It just feels like you're sort of floating there. So his question was like, what shape of space do we need in order to accomplish that? And the cool thing was that he figured one out. He figured out a way to be consistent with Einstein's equations and also compress space in front of this bubble and expands space behind the bubble, so the bubble effectively moves relative to the rest of space.
Yeah, I know we've covered this in our book. Maybe both books frequently asked questions about the universe and we have no idea, And I have to say this always kind of puzzled me a little bit, So maybe let's step people through it. So datay is that you're on your space ship during space and you flip the switch or you pull the lever forward on your warp drive device, and what it's doing you're saying is that it compresses the space in front of you and it expands the space behind you, and somehow that moves you through space faster than the speed of light.
Remember when we say compress or expand we're not like making space more dense or anything. What we're doing is changing the relative distances between points. That's what general relativity in Einstein's equations do. They start from a certain distribution of matter and energy, and they say, if you have a blob of stuff here and a blob of stuff there, how will space cur What are the relative distances between any two points? So that's called the metric. The solution to Einstein's equations is the metric, which is just another word for like how to space curve, or another way to think about like the relative distances between two points. So all Kuber's warp bubble says, is there a way to shrink distances in front of this warp bubble and expand distances behind it.
Okay, So let's say I'm in my space ship, I'm orbiting the Earth, and let's just want to take a short hop over to Jupiter. So I engage my warp drive. I pushed the lever forward, I put on my seat belt and suddenly the space in front of me between me and Jupiter, instead of being millions of miles, suddenly it's three miles. Is that what you're saying, Like, somehow I am affecting the space between me and Jupiter so that what used to be billions of miles is now just a few miles. Is that the idea? That's the idea, and that only works for me or for anyone like caught in the middle or anyone who hops in behind me. Do you know what I mean? Am I just affecting the space relative to me an observer? Or am I actually affecting the space between here and Jupiter?
So it works for anybody within the warp bubble. It creates this sphere around the spaceship, and that sphere then gets slid along through space, so it sort of gets moved, so it gets rearranged, Its relationship to the rest of space changes, right, It's now closer to Jupiter and further from Earth, and so anything inside that warp bubble has the same experience.
Does that mean that the bubble needs to encompass Jupiter? Or am I just compressing the distance between here and the edge of the bubble.
Inside the bubble, everybody hangs out and SIPs their coffee. The bubble's edge is where space is being compressed. So between the bubble and Jupiter, space is being compressed, that distance is being shortened, and between the other edge of the bubble, which is sort of behind you, that space is being expanded.
What if there's something right in front of me outside of the bubble, but between me and Jupiter, Like let's say there's a satellite there, or an old Grammar crossing this interstellar street, Like, what happens to that present in between? Do they get squished or do they not even see this bending of space that's happening to me or to my bubble.
Yeah, this would be bad news for space Gramma, for sure. I mean this is very destructive changing of the shape of space. Basically, anywhere between your warp bubble and Jupiter and the same thing between you and behind would get squished. It would get squished. Yeah. Absolutely.
Oh so between so I'm in a bubble, Let's say in that bubble is the spaceship. So anything inside the spaceship is normal. Anything outside gets bent around, and so the space between the spaceship and Jupiter gets compressed, But then wouldn't that affect the other planets as well? You're saying anything caught in the middle will get squished, But would it affect like the orbits of planets and everything else.
In the near vicinity of your ship. It certainly does affect things, So things in your path definitely do get affected. So you know, warnings to all the space grammas out there taking a walk, and anything very close by is going to get affected. But the shape of the warp bubble is quite tight. It doesn't like affect the gravity of things very far away.
Well, let's get into what would happen to Gramma she gets like squished flat or what or would she even noticed because you know she's space is just changing around her, and so her molecules also change space.
Gramma would be very unlikely to survive this encounter because the space she's in itsymetric would be changing, and so that's likely to tear her apart. Changes in the shape of space can have an effect on the objects in that space. That's how, for example, we discover gravitational waves. We see that space is shaking a little bit, changes the relative distance for example, between mirrors that are hanging underground miles apart, and so you probably don't want that to happen to your space. It's happening all the time right now. Space is expanding out from under us because of dark energy. But it's very very gentle, and our molecules are powerful enough to hold ourselves together. If that was much more rapid, then you would get torn apart. And so that's what's going to be happening behind the warp bubble, and the opposite is what's happening in front of the warp bubble. So yes, that will be quite destructive.
I guess that's why you need crosswalks even in space. So then the space in front of me between here and Jupiter suddenly goes from a few million miles to two miles. And then you're saying the space behind me. You know, I was in orbit around Earth, but now suddenly the space behind me, me and Earth goes from a few miles to a few million miles. Is that the idea?
Mm hmm exactly. And that's basically travel, right, You've gone from far away from Jupiter too close to Jupiter.
Yeah, But then I guess what's the next step do I then move the few miles and suddenly I am in Jupiter? Or do I just turn it off and suddenly I am there?
Yeah, you just turn it off. I mean your goal was to get close to Jupiter, right, So you've rearranged space and now you're close to Jupiter. Right, You're two miles from Jupiter and two million miles from Earth instead of the opposite gus.
It's weird because I compressed space in front of me, But don't I need to expand it again.
Remember that compressing space is changing the relative distance, right, So that is already accomplishing your goal. Your goal is I want to be close to Jupiter and far from Earth. And so that's what the warp bubble has done for you, which rearrange space so that now you are close to Jupiter and far from Earth.
It feels kind of like magic, like you just said, like, hey, I want to be there, so you're there.
It's not exactly magic, but it's also not exactly science yet. I Mean what al Kubier did was just say, is there a way to arrange space in a manner that still is a solution to Einstein's equations? Like do Einstein's equations prohibit this from happening, and the answer is no. What he didn't do is figure out how to make it happen. Like Einstein's equations go in one direction, they say, if you have this arrangement of mass and stuff in the universe, what is the shape of space around it? Cool? And then how does things move in that space? What they don't do is tell you, if you want a certain shape of space, how do you build it? And so al Kubier just said, well, is it possible to have this shape of space? And Einstein's equations say yes, that would satisfy the equations, But it doesn't tell you how to arrange stuff in the universe to make space do that. That might be impossible. And in al Kubier's paper he discovers that the only way he could come up with to make this happen was to have some weird kind of matter that has negative mass or negative energy density, which as far as we know, doesn't exist in the universe.
I see you're saying, Einstein's equations what we know to be true. We know it works, but it doesn't tell us that we can't do magic. Basically, like it tells you that it's possible to be here close to Earth, and it's also possible to be there close to Jupiter, and so technically you might be able to figure out a way to make those two things sequential in time very quickly.
Yeah, and it's a little bit more than that. Right, He did show that it doesn't violate Einstein's equations, which means space says, sure, I can do that if you assemble mass and energy in the right configuration to make me do that. I won't tell you how to arrange it, right, I won't tell you what the recipe is. But in principle that's not off the table. So that's like a big hole in the argument. We don't know how to build this thing, but the universe's list of rules don't explicitly prohibit it.
But what does the recipe? What does it actually say? You're saying it needs like negative energy or negative mass, And then what do I do with that? Do I just put it in front of me? Do I need to lay it out between here and Jupiter? Do I need to you know, spit it out in front of me? You know, Like, what does it say about how to use this or how you would need to use this? Negative energy.
So since the original paper, there's been a proliferation of really cool ideas about how to do this and how to do it more efficiently. So far, every solution, every paper I've read, requires using some kind of negative energy density matter behind you in order to expand space, and some sort of positive energy dentity matter like normal matter like me and you in front of you to compress space. So basically you have to build a track of matter in front of you that compresses the space, and then you have to have negative matter behind you to expand the space.
So do I do have to lay out the whole track, the whole highway for the warp drive to work.
And you need to have positive energy mass in front of you and gative energy mass behind you.
Right.
We talked about this once on an episode about whether you could use a warp drive to escape a black hole. Basically, you have to build the track out of the black hole first in order for this to work.
All right, So then I have to build a track. I guess I would have to build it. But to build the track, I have to get to Jupiter first. Yeah, exactly, like you know, to lay out a highway between here and Jupiter. I have to go from Jupiter.
Yes, exactly, huge cavea out there. Right, you have to build this track somehow. I mean, it's possible that somebody else could come up with another way to make space do this that doesn't require you to visit that place in advance and sort of build the track along the way. Remember that Einstein's equations just say space can do that if you can figure out how, And now people are trying to be creative bout figuring out how to do that, and so that's one obstacle, is like laying this track in front of you. The bigger obstacle is that we've never seen anything with negative energy density before. We don't even know if that's possible to do in the universe.
Hmm. It sounds like it's more of a like a warp train than a warp drive, right, Like you kind of have to lay out the tracks or are you going to be like there's cartoons where you're like going and laying the tracks down at the same time.
Leave it to the engineers to figure out some way to make this very effective. The physicists are just like, well, space says we can do this if somehow we can arrange this strange matter in the right configuration.
Right, But as the engineer, I would be mad if you told me, like, hey, I come up with a way to make a warp drive, but it's actually a warp train. You know, then we brought all the wrong tools to make it.
You'd be disappointed in a warp train. I'd still be pretty excited about a warp train. I mean, you're right, it's not a warp drive, but a warp train is still pretty awesome.
Yeah. No, I think both would be exciting. But you know, if I'm going to pay for a ticket, I want to know what I'm getting, or if it's going to be a train ride or it's gonna I'm gonna see some fancy star show. All right. So then it seems like it is possible, at least from a theyreal perspective, to make a warp something warp drive or train or I don't know, tram.
Perhaps why about a warp zipline that would be pretty cool.
Oh, there you go. So it seems possible, But the question is how you would make it. And there's this idea of a Casimir effect that might be able to do it, and that's kind of where where this headline all originated, right, So what exactly did this study that the headline is based on too.
This study is trying to make progress on the stickiest part of the warp drive or warp train project, which is negative energy density. Right. By energy density, we just mean like how much stuff is there in a certain part of space. Matter has energy to it, right equals mc squared, And so if there's a blob of stuff in space, that's positive energy density. So the warp drive needs something with negative energy density in order to expand the space behind you. And so this project was trying to figure out, like, well, is it possible to build things with negative energy density? And here's the accidental part. They weren't actually trying to crack this problem of the warp drive. They were just studying the Casimere effect, which is a well known and actual thing which we approve in is real. And they were looking at the energy density if the effect, and they noticed something interesting to them, at least which they connected with warp drives.
I see. So this is now jumping off from this idea of a warped train that you can compress space and expand it behind you, but to expand the space behind you. You need negative energy. And so these folks were studying negative energy and you're saying they found something.
Well, they did find something interesting, that's true. I mean, I've read their paper. What they were doing is studying the Casimir effect, which is a really interesting and super awesome quantum effect that appear between two plates that are very very close together. So imagine two like two sheets of metal and bring them like ten nanometers apart. What you discover if you do that is that there's a force between them. Even if they have like no electric charge on them and we're ignoring gravity, you can measure this force which appears between the plates because of this strange quantum effect called the Casimir effect.
Okay, so what is this effect.
What's happening in the Casimir effect is that we're actually interacting with and probing the vacuum energy of space. Remember we've talked about how space is not just empties filled with quantum fields. Like there's a photon in space that's a wiggle in the electromagnetic field. There's an electron in space that's a wiggle in the electron field. But even if you don't have a photon, and even if you don't have an electron space still has these fields in them, these possibilities for particles to pass through them, and because they're quantum fields, they can never actually go all the way down to zero energy. There's always a little bit of fuzz, a little bit of energy. So we call that the vacuum energy, the lowest possible energy in a quantum field, which is not zero. And so people wonder like, is that real, is it really happening or is it just like part of our mathematics. Well, the cool thing about the Casimir effect is that when you bring these two plates really close together, it cancels out some parts of those wiggles between these two sheets. Only certain kinds of wiggles can survive, so it suppresses some kinds of wiggles and allows others. And so because it's suppressing some kinds of wiggles, it like lowers the energy between these two ship which creates an energy differential, which is what creates a force. So it squeezes these two plates a little bit closer together because that's a lower energy state. So the Casimere effect is like deleting some vibrational modes of the quantum vacuum between these two plates in a way that ends up pushing them together a little bit.
Right. It's sort of like you create a space that is so small that most particles can even fit in them, and so the universe can't create those particles in that space, and so therefore it like creates almost like a void in space, right, where like, oh, nothing can happen there, So there's sort of like an emptiness and the rest of the universe is biased towards having a little bit of energy. Then that vacuum somehow creates like a it sucks off it. Basically.
Yeah, it's really fascinating because it lowers the energy of space there below the vacuum energy. Right, typically we think the vacuum energy is the lowest, but if you create this special configuration, you can bring the energy of space below the vacuum energies you say prevents those fields from existing in certain modes, and so it lowers the overall energy. You can either think about this in terms of fields, if you like thinking about space is filled with fields, or you can think about it in terms of virtual particles, which is really equivalent if you like thinking about space is filled with all these virtual particles constantly popping in and out of existence between these two plates. Some kinds of virtual particles are not allowed, and so the energy density is lower between the plates.
I see. So you're saying you're not creating a spot of negative energy. You're just creating a spot of lower energy than like the normal amount of energy that the universe has, sort of like sound, right, Like you can't have negative sound, but you can make a room that's lower sound than like the average din of your space of your town.
Yeah, that's exactly right, And some really important nuances there. As you say, it's not really negative energy, it's just lower than the vacuum. Now, if you define the vacuum to be zero, then it's negative energy density, I suppose. But that's a little bit arbitrary, just sort of like where you set your zero. Really it's lower energy than the rest of space around it. It's an interesting puzzle there, because all the physical phenomena we observe this actual force from the Casimir effect, this just relates to the energy difference, like the fact that there lower energy between the plates is what gets the force. But if you try to do the calculations and ask, like, well, how much energy is there in the vacuum, you actually run into weird infinities. Like you try to calculate it. You say, well, there's an infinite number of different possible modes in space, and so in principle there should be infinite energy there, which gets really weird and still nobody understands. So we see the Casimir effect. We know there's lower energy density between the plates. Even in the Casimir effect. We don't really understand what absolute energy is even in like normal empty space. We just know that it's lower between the plates and the Casimir effect.
All right, So we have this Casimir effect that might be able to give us negative energy, which might let us make a warphoat you train. That's how I think scientist should call it. So let's get into whether or not someone has actually made this Casimir effect work and whether it can be applied to a warp drive. But first, let's take another quick break.
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All right. We are warping our way to examining news headlines, and particularly very specific headline recently that said NASA might have accidentally built the warp drive, and the study that created this headline was actually looking at the Casimir effect, which is a way to maybe create zero energy or negative energy in the universe. Now, Daniel, this is a kind of a theoretical effect, right, something scientists think it might happen if you run this experiment. Has anyone actually done this and measured this negative energy?
People have actually measured the Casimir effect. So Casimir predicted it in like nineteen forty eight by doing a bunch of calculations, and it's a very very small effect, so it took a long time and some real virtuoso experiments. But in nineteen ninety six, Stephen Lamoureaux at Yale actually did this. He was able to measure the force between two objects that really really close together and found that the forest was very close to what Casimir.
Predicted, and that's been verified since then.
Yeah, there have been other experiments that verify it, and they've done it with various different configurations. It's really hard to actually do it with like two sheets that are like nanometers apart, so instead they use like one sheet and a sphere for example, which experimentally is just sort of easier to manipulate. And at separations of like ten nanometers, which is like one hundred times the size of an atom, the Casimir effect produces a force about equivalent to like an atmosphere of pressure.
So you're saying, we can create spots of negative or zero energy in the universe, And does that mean then that the space in that spot gets expanded like in a warp drive, like it would do in a warp drive.
So we can create spots which have lower energy density than normal empty space, right, and it does cause the Casimir effect, and we've measured that and that's real. We don't know if that actually means their negative energy density, right. We don't know how to set the zero Try to calculate the energy of all the space, you get infinities which don't make sense. So we don't know how to do those calculations. So an open question about the Casimir effect is what it means for gravity. Remember that gravity is a classical theory. Einstein's theory of gravity doesn't even know how to deal with particles, not to mention like an infinite number of virtual particles. We don't actually know how to calculate the impact of this kind of arrangement on gravitational fields and on the shape of space. We don't know the answer to your question of does this expand the space between those two sheets, but.
I guess in theory it is right because energy in general compresses space. So if you have something where a spa, where you have less energy than technically that space would not compress as much, which would be the same as expanding space.
It depends on whether the general relativistic concept of energy density is the same as the quantum mechanical one. Remember the quantum mechanical one. Here, we don't know if this is negative or positive energy density, and we don't know how to do those calculations because we don't have a theory of quantum gravity. People have tried to do those calculations and they get crazy predictions like oh, there's infinite energy here, so you get singularities everywhere in the universe. And so it's just sort of an open problem in theoretical physics, sort of gravitational implications of the vacuum energy.
So you can create a spot of almost zero or negative energy, but you don't know if it's expanding or compressing space. But it is that if it is, then you could use it to maybe make a warp.
Drive maybe, because we don't really even know if it counts as negative energy density in a gravitational sense. Again, it's just relatively lower energy than the rest of the vacuum. And so in this paper, what they were doing was thinking about the energy density from the Casimere effect, and they were doing a bunch of simulations. So in this paper they didn't build anything, right, They didn't like create a lab and build something. They were just doing calculations on the computer, thinking about what is the energy density between objects that are really close together, thinking about the Casimire effects. That they were doing a bunch of calculations.
So then what did they find in their simulations and why did people use that to make the headline that NASA created a warp drive.
So they were doing a bunch of calculations and they saw a plot and it had these funny shapes in it. And one person who's working on the project is also really interested in warp drives and remembers seeing a similar shape and a paper about warp drives, and we said, oh, this figure here, this shape of the energy density looks kind of like the shape you would need for a warp drive.
Well, maybe step us through with more detail here. What is this as a plot of.
It's just a plot of the energy density between two surfaces. Like in the Casimir effect, you bring two surfaces very close together and you get lower energy density between the surfaces than around it. Again, that doesn't necessarily mean actually negative energy density from a gr perspective, but had like an interesting shape, and it had sort of the same shape as a figure from a warp drive paper that said here's the negative energy density profile you would need to expand the space behind the warp bubble. So just sort of like, oh, we have a crescent in this plot. We have a crescent in that plot. Maybe they're the same thing, but they're not at all, right, it's just sort of vaguely similar. And this is just a qualitative comparison of two things that might not even be related. It's just like saying, oh, the Casimir effect creates this crescent shape negative energy density. I also have a cookie of that shape, So maybe the Casimir effect makes cookies.
Well, who doesn't want to warp cookie? But it's a little I feel like maybe it's a little bit more than that. Right, because you know what they saw in this simulation. It seems like it is that if you bring these two plates together and measure the Casimir effect, you get a dip in the energy between the two plates. Right. That's probably what they saw, like a dip in the energy. And if you plot the energy between the two plates, you'll see a dip. And he's saying, well, to make a warp train, you need to also kind of create this dip in energy behind you.
You certainly do, but we don't know again if the Casimir effects relative decrease in energy density would actually create the kind of expansion of space we need for the warp bubble, and the warp bubble needs a sort of general relativistic negative energy density, which requires like particles of negative mass, for example, whereas the Casimir effect creates a relative shift in the quantum vacuum and we don't know the impact of that gravitationally, all this paper is doing is saying, oh, look, I made a shape of relative decrease of energy density that's similar to the actual negative energy density in a warp bubble metric.
Right, So then I guess what would be the idea is that you somehow create a whole bunch of these plates really close together behind you, and somehow that decreases the density behind you, and somehow that compresses space. Is that kind of where they were going with this.
That's sort of where they were going with this. But you know there's a lot of leaps there, right. First of all, Number one, this is just a simulation. Haven't built anything, haven't demonstrated that their calculations are correct.
But you said that Casimir effect has been proven experimentally.
Yeah, the Casimir effect has been proven experimentally, but that doesn't mean that everybody who's doing Casimir effect calculations is correct. And this particular team has a bit of a spotty history in publishing papers. This is the same team that was working on the em drive, an attempt to build a rocket that violates Newton's third law, you know, propellantless rocket. So you know, you got to take everything they do with a bit of a grain of salt. And they also haven't shown a really crucial step, which is that the Casimir relative decrease in energy density actually does provide the negative energy density you need for general relativity to create this war bubble. They just have not shown that at all. So I passed this paper to an expert in a friend of the podcast, Barok Shasheny, who's a professor of cosmology and gravitational physics, and his review was, this paper is one hundred percent pure nonsense. How this paper passed peer review is completely beyond me.
Uh harsh, I mean, let's not miss words. It's one hundred percent pure nonsense.
That was his evaluation. He was not very oppressed with this paper.
Well, from a theoretical point of view, yes, I feel like from what I'm understanding here from me today is that, yeah, they skipped over the fact that we don't have confirmation that lower energy leads to a expansion of space, but everything seems to kind of point to that, right, That's kind of how the universe works. More energy you have, the more space gets compressed.
I suppose. But we don't know how to do the calculations to predict the impact on the curvature of lower quantum field energy. Remember again that gr is a classical theory. It can't handle quantum particles, not to mention infinite towers of virtual particles. People have tried to do those calculations and gotten crazy bonkers results, which suggests that what we need is a new theory of quantum gravity that might let us do this and it might work. Right. It might be that the Casimir effect does decrease the local energy density in such a way that a theory of quantum gravity would predict the expansion of space in just the right way to give you a warp bubble. But this paper doesn't show that.
Right.
It doesn't show that. But you know, they're just presenting the results of their simulation and saying there's maybe a link to warp drive. Maybe the real problem was that it got picked up by the media and then the headline got overblown because if you read the title of the paper, it's not like, hey, we made a warp drives. I have it here because you send them worldline numerics applied to custom Casimir geometry generates unanticipated intersection with al Kubeir warp metric.
Yes. Absolutely, the title their paper is much better than the title of the Coffee or Die article that says that they accidentally create warp bubble for interstellar travel. I completely agree.
And they have the word numerics here, so they are saying that it is a simulation.
No that's right. A lot of the misunderstanding lies in the coverage of this paper. This paper definitely doesn't show that NASA accidentally created a warp bubble. It just shows that the Casimir effect in certain configurations can generate decreases in local energy density that have a similar shape qualitatively to what you would need for a warp bubble. And again it's just qualitative. They didn't even like analyze quantitatively to say like, is this actually the shape they need? It just sort of like looks the same on the page.
Right, So then you might say that NASA might have accidentally built the warp drive.
Well, also, these guys aren't at NASA. Like, nobody here works at NASA.
I mean mots people who work in to work at NASA, right.
They're not like working for NASA. This is not a NASA funded study. This was a study funded by DARPA, however, so.
That that's where the headline made. The mistake should have been the government might have accidentally built a warp drive.
Some people in a garage that previously have made outrageous claims did a calculation that looks to them on the screen similar to something they remember being relevant to warp bubbles.
Ah, now you're being harsh, Dan. I thought anyone could come up with a great idea.
Absolutely, anybody can.
Are you saying if I work out of my garage, I can't come up with a good idea. But no, these people are at a university, right.
Some of these folks are. Some of them are in the engineering department at Texas A and.
M, which is near NASA. Kind of right, If any.
Two places in Texas are adjacent to each other, then sure, maybe because.
They have a warp drive, they ensuring the distance between spots in Texas.
Maybe they can. And absolutely, you're right, anybody could come up with a great idea, and it might be that in somebody's garage one day a warp drive is built.
All right, Well, it sounds like the very date here is that the science as it is is not super exaggerated, right, because they are doing simulations and they are just saying there is a qualitative connection there. But it sounds like maybe the headline that picked it up did overblow the implications of it or the probability that it might be translated into an actual warp drive.
Yeah. I think that's a generous reading of it.
Yeah, we already know your harsh reading of it and your friends.
Well, let's hope that somebody builds a warp train one day, and you know, we have like a new character on Thomas the train, we have like the warp engine.
I think the conclusion here is that maybe these websites that picked it up warped reality a little bit.
Yeah, and not accidentally, I imagine. So be careful where you get your science news, but feel free to send us any headline you see that makes you wonder or gets you excited. We're happy to digest it for you and give you a sense for whether or not it's the next big breakthrough.
That's right, and you need tips on how to use word to make their paper or attacks. You can also email Daniel that's right.
Send us your questions about warp drives, about space physics, and about a tech to question at Danielandhorhea dot com.
You hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you asdairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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