To me this kind of falls in between sci-fi and science. The paper outlines that while still being theoretical the warp drive is a tiny step closer to being plausible. Of course that doesn’t make for a sexy headline but i’m a huge nerd so i find the news plenty interesting, but the average person likely needs to be given a more hyped up version of the story for them to care in the first place.
4 Likes
i… am too dumb to comment on this thread
2 Likes
My thinking is if we want to capture spacetime in a contractual bubble, we should start by getting it to sign an NDA or maybe work the language into a EULA.
I may not entirely understand the relationship between contract law and quantum physics.
7 Likes
That’s a good guess, since (if I’m not mistaken) the math still says information still can’t travel faster than light regardless of reference frame.
As always, all the mainstream press coverage of what might be an interesting wonky paper is so unbelievably incredibly wrong that all it does is undermine peoples’ faith in science when none of those false promises come true.
4 Likes
There has to be a catch somewhere
1 Like
Oh yeah the hard part is scrutinizing it. It was not obvious what the catch was, how they are either dodging or refuting the no-go theorems (which is why I assume a dodge.)
Well of course! How else to explain all the time travel in Star Trek???
2 Likes
Wasn’t that a Jim Croce song?
(I’ll show myself out now 
)
3 Likes
If one of them is actually dating the warp drive, it’s Chuck Tingle.
Or Becky Chambers.
1 Like
Don’t feel too bad, it basically boils down to: Impossible science theory is now improbable science theory (big maybe). It’s a small step toward figuring out if the warp drive is doable or not, but it hinges on some physics that still needs to be sorted out so it’s still all theoretical. Not terribly exciting to be fair but the figuring out how to get the answers is what’s interesting to scientists, it gives them an idea on what they need to focus on research-wise.
4 Likes
A great deal of classic “hard science” science fiction was based on tech that was, “in principle at least,” doable with (then-)current tech.
Wernher von Braun’s Mars ships from “Project Mars” were buildable with 1940s/50s tech (As exhaustively detailed in the technical appendix, (earlier published seperately as “The Mars Project” (“Das Marsprojekt”)) , but they were still very definitely science fiction.
Likewise, a working warp drive based on these newly-enunciated principles is still science fiction.
Requires a tiny bit less handwaving than previously – but only a tiny bit.
3 Likes
Humans are “Team Hold My Beer, I Got This.”
4 Likes
With that reasoning Florida Man is the Ubermensch. The best of us, the shining example of what we can do 
2 Likes
I’m no more a physicist than I am a hockey player, but I have a fan 's perspective. If Sabine Hossenfelder thinks it is worth consideration, then it probably is. Her professional area of interest is closely related, and she is notoriously intolerant of foolishness
6 Likes
Did Florida Man invent warp drive? I’m willing to give him the accolade if he did
Wut?? Bodda you?
2 Likes
3 Likes
Does the “warp drive” concept violate causality in the way normally associated with backwards time travel? Spock leaves Earth in his local piece of spacetime and drags it with him to a star (Vulcan) ten light years away, in say one year instead of ten. He beats light by nine years, but he’s is still in the same now, right? (ya, I know “now” isn’t well defined/s ) Nothing Spock can do at Vulcan will change whatever we have already seen in the light coming from Vulcan. Spock can tell the other Vulcans that Earth’s Sun will still be there nine years hence, and can even tell them about a message he sent them before he left Earth that will arrive in nine years. In that sense he can predict the future, but so can orbital mechanics. He can’t change either of these events. Spock sends us a signal by radio, and then “warps” back to Earth in one year’s time. When he gets here, he can tell us that we will get a message from him in nine years, but he can’t change to content of that message. There’s no Grandfathercide here, right?
2 Likes
You’d need a configuration of wormholes / warp drive trips.
(I don’t think there is an important difference between a warp drive and a wormhole.)
3 Likes
That’s the problem with it. In Newtonian physics, a warp drive isn’t the same as time travel. But in special relativity, future and past are defined by a light cone, and if you can move outside it then you can move outside it.
Everyone follows their own personal time axis into the future, tilted relative to each other, and everyone has their own hypersurface of the present, likewise tilted. So all you have to do is move near of the speed light relative to someone, and on one side your present will be notably before theirs. Travel into that, turn the other way, and you can tack and veer your way right from their future into their past. There’s no way to allow one without the other.
Also for the record, Vulcan is the planet…the star is 40 Eridani, about 16 light-years away. 
3 Likes
I think the “Roman ring with two wormholes” is similar to the scenario I described…the ordering of events hasn’t changed, just the local experience? Spock isn’t moving outside of spacetime, he’s taking a piece of it with him where time passes slower. Like if a photon from the sun passes Mercury on it’s way to Earth, time passes slower at the distance of Mercury to the Sun, than it does at Earth’s orbital distance, due to gravitational time dilation, but there is no question from the point of view of someone on Earth that the photon passed Mercury before it got to the Earth ?
