A scientific discovery that could transform the study of warp drive is now under wraps at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Harold White, known to his friends as Sonny, was only 11 years old when the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum was unveiled in his home city of Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1976. He and millions of other visitors explored the museum’s halls to marvel at decades-old airplanes and space modules that had only just returned Earth-side, including the Apollo 11’s command module, Columbia. It had remained in orbit as Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the moon. For White, visiting the museum became a pivotal moment that would ripple through his life and career as both a NASA scientist and dogged investigator of one of science’s most challenging problems: how to reach the stars.
As an avid Star Trek fan and a kid who showed an aptitude for math, White says his path toward studying space may have been predetermined, but wandering the museum’s halls helped stoke the flame. “This premise and the promise of space exploration for humanity just really always stuck with me,” he says. After all, we still haven’t sent people past the Moon, a cosmic stone’s throw from home, and our fastest unmanned spacecraft, Voyager 1, will take 75,000 years to reach our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri.
For White, the only solution that would extend the exploration of humanity beyond our solar system is to design a spacecraft that can travel the stars within a fraction of a human lifetime. In other words—warp drive.
Like many technologies White’s beloved Star Trek: The Original Series in the 1960s predicted, such as the flip phones and wireless headsets, warp drive is a science fiction creation that has demonstrated surprising scientific validity.
In the television show, switching to warp drive is as easy as putting your car into a higher gear and allows the U.S.S. Enterprise to blink out of existence as it skips through space-time at speeds quicker than light. Captain Kirk and his crew still have a head start of more than 200 years on this technology, and today’s warp drive science is still nowhere close to this ideal.
Here’s the modern science of warp drive, in a nutshell. Physicist Miguel Alcubierre published the prevailing model of warp drive in 1994, and it shows that warp speed travel could theoretically be possible. However, we first need to manipulate Einstein’s equations of general relativity using a type of exotic matter with negative energy. These equations essentially tell us that massive objects can distort space-time. A warp drive powered by this massive amount of energy would contort space-time into a bubble around the spacecraft, expanding space-time in front of the craft and compressing it behind. This warping would allow the craft itself to jump through interstellar space—without its passengers being any the wiser.
This idea has more than a few problems, chiefly that we’ve never observed this kind of negative energy source that Alcubierre predicts. But it’s this problem that White has been trying to solve.
Since his museum days, White has come a long way in studying the underlying technology for humanity’s race to interstellar space. When Alcubierre published his warp drive paper, it inspired White, who at the time was a young engineer at Boeing and pursuing his master’s degree in mechanical engineering.
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