Via Physics and Astronomy Zone and the Daily Galaxy:
NASA is currently working on the first practical field test toward the possibility of faster than light travel.
Traveling faster than light has always been attributed to science fiction, but that all changed when Harold White and his team at NASA started to work on and tweak the Alcubierre Drive.
Special relativity may hold true, but to travel faster or at the speed of light we might not need a craft that can travel at that speed. The solution might be to place a craft within a space that is moving faster than the speed of light! Therefore the craft itself does not have to travel at the speed of light from its own type of propulsion system. It’s easier to think about if you think in terms of a flat escalator in an airport.
This type of concept was also recently illustrated by Mathematician James Hill and Barry Cox at the University of Adelaide. They published a paper in the journal proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
The only problem with our modern day science is that creating distortions in space-time require energy densities that are not yet possible for humans, or so they say. NASA scientists are currently working on tweaking Alcubierre’s model.
The experiment that led to the possibility of faster than light interstellar travel took place in the vacuum of space. When lasers were fired through the EmDrive’s resonance chamber, some of the beams appeared to travel faster than the speed of light. If that’s true, it would mean that the EmDrive is producing a warp field or bubble.
“Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago,” said Dr. White, 43, who runs the research project told the New York Times. “And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would’ve went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds. Nature can do it,” he added. “So the question is, can we do it?”
See the Daily Galaxy for more.
