![]() ![]() Accordingly, "warp 1" is equivalent to the speed of light, "warp 2" is 8 times the speed of light, "warp 3" is 27 times the speed of light, etc. If you must know what it is (according to Wikipedia), here you go:Īccording to the Star Trek episode writer's guide for The Original Series, warp factors are converted to multiples of c with the cubic function v=w(cubed)c, where w is the warp factor, v is the velocity, and c is the speed of light. [*Update: Apparently I was wrong about warp 10 being 10 times the speed of light. I'm not easily impressed by stories in which science fiction anticipates science we've heard so many of them. The news came from a symposium that only a NASA space-nut could devise: The 100 Year Starship Symposium. Moskowitz also reports that the scientist behind the new warp drive, Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center, has begun experiments on such a drive in his laboratory. That's not as fast as Star Trek's warp 10, which is 1,000 times the speed of light.* But it's fast. ![]() Science fiction often anticipates science, but not usually to this level of detail. For the past few years White has promoted the concept of the warp drive (links to his scientific papers can be. She does not note that this, as I understand it, is precisely the top speed that the Star Trek warp drive allowed: warp 10. White, who works at NASAs Johnson Space Center. She notes that the new lower-energy faster-than-light travel idea would allow travel as fast as 10 times the speed of light. The most substantial story I found was from Clara Moskowitz at. But there seems to be some real scientific content to add to the fun this time, making a nice mix. The story didn't get the coverage I expected. From today’s perspective, the negative-energy field would no longer be. The ring around the spacecraft generates a negative-energy field. Peckham doesn't give us a lot of detail, but he has fun with the story–and why not? NASA artist’s 1998 rendition of warp drive travel. Now, a NASA scientist, Peckham reports, says tinkering with Alcubierre's scheme could sharply reduce the energy needed. That's a lot of mass to store in the trunk. There was one tiny detail: You would need to convert all the mass of Jupiter to energy to power the thing. Eighteen years ago, the physicist Miguel Alcubierre came up with the idea that a "warp bubble" could be created by bending spacetime, moving space around the spacecraft so that it actually gets where it's going at a speed faster than that of light. "Nothing can travel faster than light, right? To do so would violate the special theory of relativity, which stipulates that you’d need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a particle with mass to light speed."Īs Peckham points out, that's almost true. Matt Peckham begins his article at with a scene from the movie Contact and quickly reminds us that faster-than-light travel–what Star Trek called warp drive–is impossible. ![]()
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