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DARPA funded researchers accidentally create world's 1st warp bubble (warp drive)

#1
C C Offline
https://thedebrief.org/darpa-funded-rese...rp-bubble/

EXCERPTS: . . . Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White has reported the successful manifestation of an actual, real-world “Warp Bubble.” And, according to White, this first of its kind breakthrough by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team sets a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized, warp-capable spacecraft.

“To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble,” White told The Debrief...

In 1994, Mexican Mathematician Miguel Alcubierre proposed the first mathematically valid solution to the warp drive. More specifically, he outlined a spacecraft propulsion system previously only envisioned in science fiction that can traverse the cosmos above the speed of light without violating currently accepted laws of physics.

That solution was lauded for its elegant mathematics, yet simultaneously derided for its use of theoretical materials and massive amounts of energy that appeared virtually impossible to engineer in any practical way.

Over a decade later, this theory underwent a major shift, when Dr. White, a then NASA-employed warp drive specialist and the founder of the highly respected Eagleworks laboratory, reworked Alcubierre’s original metric and put it into canonical form. This change in design dramatically reduced the exotic materials and energy requirements of the original concept, seemingly providing researchers and science fiction fans alike at least a glimmer of hope that a real-world warp drive may one day become a reality. It also resulted in the informal renaming of the original theoretical design, a concept now more commonly referred to as the “Alcubierre/White Warp Drive.”

Since then, The Debrief has covered a number of physicists and engineers taking their own stabs at designing a viable warp drive, including an entire group of international researchers working on a warp drive that requires no exotic matter. However, like Alcubierre and White before them, the warp concepts of these would-be visionaries all still remain theoretical in nature.

Now, it appears the situation has changed. [...] “While conducting analysis related to a DARPA-funded project to evaluate possible structure of the energy density present in a Casimir cavity as predicted by the dynamic vacuum model,” reads the actual findings published in the peer-reviewed European Physical Journal, “a micro/nano-scale structure has been discovered that predicts negative energy density distribution that closely matches requirements for the Alcubierre metric.”

Or put more simply, as White did in a recent email to The Debrief, “To my knowledge, this is the first paper in the peer-reviewed literature that proposes a realizable nano-structure that is predicted to manifest a real, albeit humble, warp bubble.”

This fortuitous finding, says White, not only confirms the predicted “toroidal” structure and negative energy aspects of a warp bubble, but also resulted in potential pathways he and other researchers can follow when trying to design, and one day actually construct, a real-world warp-capable spacecraft.

“This is a potential structure we can propose to the community that one could build that will generate a negative vacuum energy density distribution that is very similar to what’s required for an Alcubierre space warp,” explained White.

[...] Given that DARPA is paying the LSI Eagleworks lab to explore Casimir cavities and not the accidental discovery of a warp bubble, regardless of its potentially staggering implications (at least, not yet), it is not surprising that White and his team remain “laser-focused” on the work at hand. Plus, given the sometimes secretive nature of work funded by groups like DARPA, even if White and his team were planning to conduct the two tests outlined once their current project is completed, it may not be immediately made public until another significant breakthrough is cleared for publication.

[...] In the end, especially given the magnitude of this discovery and its potential implications, White believes it is only a matter of time before his mini-warp craft is designed and tested, a milestone that he believes will slowly but surely move the whole process toward the ultimate goal of a warp-capable spacecraft.

[...] When asked by The Debrief how quickly a successfully-tested nano-scale “craft” like the experimental one his team proposed could be scaled up to something that can actually be flown in space, he offered a more realistic approach to this research, along with an almost poetic piece of hard-earned advice.

“It is early to ask questions about some type of actual flight experiment,” said White. “In my mind, step one is to just explore the underlying science at the nano/micro scale,” before moving toward a larger craft. Or put more simply, as White did to end that same email, “Crawl, walk, run.” (MORE - missing details)

(Dec 6, 2021) The very first warp-bubble created by DARPA funded team

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/L0eMu1vNizg

(Apr 21, 2021) Warp drive background & new possibilities

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Vk5bxHetL4s
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#2
C C Offline
I wrote the book on warp drive. No, we didn't accidentally create a warp bubble.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/no-warp-bubble/

EXCERPT: . . . So, what did this new “warp bubble” paper actually do?

The article, thankfully, published in the open access (but often dubious) European Physical Journal C, is publicly available to anyone wishing to download it. (Link here.) Using micron-scale electrical conductors in a variety of shapes, including pillars, plates, spheres and other cavities, teams of researchers were able to generate electric potentials (or changes in voltage) of a few hundred microvolts, completely in line with what previous experiments and theoretical predictions both indicate. That’s what the DARPA-funded project was for, and that’s what the experimental research surrounding this idea accomplished: in a custom Casimir cavity.

However, there’s an enormous difference between what teams working on Casimir cavities do experimentally and the numerical calculations performed in this paper. That’s right: This isn’t an experimental paper, but rather a theoretical paper, one with a suspiciously low number (zero) of theoretical physicists on it. The paper relies on the dynamic vacuum model — a model typically applicable to single atoms — to model the energy density throughout space that would be generated by this cavity. They then use another technique, worldline numerics, to assess how the vacuum changes in response to the custom Casimir cavity.

And then it gets shady. “Where’s my warp bubble?” They didn’t make one. In fact, they didn’t calculate one, either. All they did was show that the three-dimensional energy density generated by this cavity displayed some qualitative correlations with the energy density field required by the Alcubierre drive. They don’t match in a quantitative sense; they were not generated experimentally, but only calculated numerically; and most importantly, they are restricted to microscopic scales and extremely low energy densities. There’s a lot of speculation and conjecture, and all of it is unproven.

That isn’t to say this might not be an interesting idea that might someday pan out. But the most generous thing I can say about it is this: it isn’t fully baked.... (MORE - missing details)
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