NASA's NEW Helical Engine that Breaks the Laws of Physics
Intro According to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity,
the only thing that is faster than the speed of light is the expansion of the universe.
This means that the universe is expanding at an incredible rate making it almost impossible
to explore it in its entirety.
Thus far, humanity has depended on traditional methods of propulsion which have allowed us
to explore some parts of our solar system.
However, if we wish to go beyond our galactic neighborhood, we must find a way to travel
faster in the vacuum of space.
The latest reports suggest that NASA has finally perfected the design of a Helical engine that
breaks the laws of physics, let's take a closer look.
Warp Drives The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri.
It is about 4.25 light-years away or about 25 trillion miles.
The fastest ever spacecraft, the now-in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed
of 450,000 mph.
It would take just 20 seconds to go from Los Angeles to New York City at that speed, but
it would take the solar probe about 6,633 years to reach Earth's nearest neighboring
solar system.
If humanity ever wants to travel easily between stars, people will need to go faster than
light.
But so far, faster-than-light travel is possible only in science fiction.
In Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, humanity can travel from planet to planet, star to
star, or across the universe using jump drives.
We have all read many such stories in our youth, and these same stories are what inspire
scientists today to find alternative ways humanity can travel in space.
Some characters – like the astronauts in the movies "Interstellar" and "Thor" – use
wormholes to travel between solar systems in seconds.
Another approach – familiar to "Star Trek" fans – is warp drive technology.
Warp drives are theoretically possible if still far-fetched technology.
Two recent papers made headlines when researchers claimed to have overcome one of the many challenges
that stand between the theory of warp drives and reality.
But how do these theoretical warp drives work?
And will humans be making the jump to warp speed anytime soon?
Physicists’ current understanding of spacetime comes from Albert Einstein’s theory of General
Relativity.
General Relativity states that space and time are fused and that nothing can travel faster
than the speed of light.
General relativity also describes how mass and energy warp spacetime – hefty objects
like stars and black holes curve spacetime around them.
This curvature is what you feel as gravity and why many spacefaring heroes worry about
“getting stuck in” or “falling into” a gravity well.
Early science fiction writers John Campbell and Asimov saw this warping as a way to skirt
the speed limit.
What if a starship could compress space in front of it while expanding spacetime behind
it?
“Star Trek” took this idea and named it the warp drive.
In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican theoretical physicist, showed that compressing spacetime
in front of the spaceship while expanding it behind was mathematically possible within
the laws of General Relativity.
So, what does that mean?
Imagine the distance between two points is 10 meters.
If you are standing at point A and can travel one meter per second, it would take 10 seconds
to get to point B. However, let's say you could somehow compress the space between you
and point B so that the interval is now just one meter.
Then, moving through spacetime at your maximum speed of one meter per second, you would be
able to reach point B in about one second.
In theory, this approach does not contradict the laws of relativity since you are not moving
faster than light in the space around you.
Alcubierre showed that the warp drive from "Star Trek'' was theoretically possible.
Unfortunately, Alcubierre's method of compressing space time had one problem: it requires negative
energy or negative mass.
A negative Energy Problem Alcubierre’s warp drive would work by creating
a bubble of flat spacetime around the spaceship and curving spacetime around that bubble to
reduce distances.
The warp drive would require either negative mass – a theorized type of matter – or
a ring of negative energy density to work.
Physicists have never observed negative mass, so that leaves negative energy as the only
option.
Option.
To create negative energy, a warp drive would use a huge amount of mass to create an imbalance
between particles and antiparticles.
For example, if an electron and an antielectron appear near the warp drive, one of the particles
would get trapped by the mass and this results in an imbalance.
This imbalance results in negative energy density.
Alcubierre’s warp drive would use this negative energy to create the spacetime bubble.
But for a warp drive to generate enough negative energy, you would need a lot of matter.
Alcubierre estimated that a warp drive with a 100-meter bubble would require the mass
of the entire visible universe.
In 1999, physicist Chris Van Den Broeck showed that expanding the volume inside the bubble
but keeping the surface area constant would reduce the energy requirements significantly,
to just about the mass of the sun.
A significant improvement, but still far beyond all practical possibilities.
Two recent papers – one by Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire and another by Erik Lentz
– provide solutions that seem to bring warp drives closer to reality.
Bobrick and Martire realized that by modifying spacetime within the bubble in a certain way,
they could remove the need to use negative energy.
This solution, though, does not produce a warp drive that can go faster than light.
Independently, Lentz also proposed a solution that does not require negative energy.
He used a different geometric approach to solve the equations of General Relativity,
and by doing so, he found that a warp drive wouldn’t need to use negative energy.
Lentz’s solution would allow the bubble to travel faster than the speed of light.
It is essential to point out that these exciting developments are mathematical models.
The scientific community won’t fully trust these models until there is experimental proof.
Yet, the science of warp drives is coming into view.
Innovative thinking on this subject is crucial to making the dream of interstellar travel
a reality.
In the words of Captain Picard, things are only impossible until they are not.
EM Drive Another recently proposed method that could
solve the problem is an EM drive.
The design claims to make the impossible possible.
It uses a method of pushing spacecraft around without the need for propulsion or an exhaust.
But the EmDrive doesn't just violate our fundamental understanding of the universe; the experiments
that claim to measure an effect haven't been replicated.
It goes by various names — the EmDrive, the Q-Drive, the RF Resonant Cavity, the Impossible
Drive — but all the incarnations of the device claim to do the same thing: bounce
some radiation around inside a closed chamber, and you can get propulsion.
This is a big deal because all forms of rocketry require conservation of momentum.
To set yourself in motion, you have to push off of something.
Your feet push off of the ground, airplanes push themselves off of the air, and rockets
push parts of themselves out the back end to make them go forward.
But the EmDrive doesn't.
It's just a box with microwaves inside it, bouncing around.
And supposedly it can move.
Explanations for how the EmDrive could work go past the boundaries of known physics.
Perhaps it's somehow interacting with the quantum vacuum energy of space-time.
Perhaps our understanding of momentum is broken.
Perhaps it's some brand-new physics, heralded by the EmDrive experiments.
Conservation of momentum is pretty straightforward: in a closed system, you can add up the momenta
of all the objects in that system.
Then they interact.
Then you add up the momenta of all the objects again.
The total momentum at the beginning must equal the total momentum at the end, this means
that momentum is conserved.
The idea of the conservation of momentum has been with us for centuries.
It's even implied by Newton's famous second law, but in the early 1900s, it gained a new
status.
The brilliant mathematician Emmy Noether proved that conservation of momentum along with other
conservation laws, like conservation of energy, is a reflection of the fact that our universe
has certain symmetries.
For example, you can choose a suitable location to perform a physics experiment.
You can then pick up your physics experiment, transport it to anywhere in the universe and
repeat it.
As long as you account for environmental differences, say, different air pressures or gravitational
fields, your results will be identical.
This is a symmetry of nature: physics doesn't care about where experiments take place.
Noether realized that this symmetry of space directly leads to the conservation of momentum.
You can't have one without the other.
So, if the EmDrive demonstrates a violation of momentum conservation which it claims to
do, then this fundamental symmetry of nature must be broken.
But almost every single physical theory, from Newton's laws to quantum field theory, expresses
space symmetry and momentum conservation in their base equations.
Indeed, most modern theories of physics are simply complicated restatements of momentum
conservation.
To find a crack in this symmetry wouldn't just be an extension of known physics — it
would completely upend centuries of understanding of how the universe works.
That's certainly not impossible, scientific revolutions have happened before, but it's
going to take a lot of convincing to make that happen.
And the experiments so far have not been all that satisfying.
Ever since the introduction of the EmDrive concept in 2001, every few years a group claims
to have measured a net force coming from its device.
But these researchers are measuring an incredibly tiny effect: a force so small it couldn't
even budge a piece of paper.
This leads to significant statistical uncertainty and measurement error.
Indeed, of all the published results, none have produced a measurement beyond "barely
qualifying for publication," let alone anything significant.
Still, other groups have developed their own EM Drives, attempting to replicate the results,
as good scientists should.
Those replication attempts either fail to measure anything at all or find some confounding
variable that can easily explain the measured meager results, like the interaction of the
cabling in the device with the Earth's magnetic field.
The Helical Engine Thankfully, one of the biggest traits of humanity
is our drive to find solutions to difficult problems.
And this is what NASA scientist David Burns has been doing in his spare time.
Unfazed by the failures of the EM Drive, he has produced an engine concept that he says
could theoretically accelerate to 99 percent of the speed of light - all without using
propellant.
On paper, his design works by exploiting the way mass can change at relativistic speeds
- those close to the speed of light in a vacuum.
It has not yet been reviewed by an expert.
Understandably this paper has caused buzz approaching levels seen in the early days
of the EM Drive.
And yes, even some headlines claim the engine could violate the laws of physics.
But while this concept is fascinating, it's not going to break physics anytime soon.
As a thought experiment to explain his concept, Burns describes a box with a weight inside,
threaded on a line, with a spring at each end bouncing the weight back and forth.
In a vacuum - such as space - the effect of this would be to wiggle the entire box, with
the weight seeming to stand still.
Overall, the box would stay wiggling in the same spot - but if the mass of the weight
were to increase in only one direction, it would generate a greater push in that direction,
and therefore thrust.
According to the principle of the conservation of momentum - in which the momentum of a system
remains constant in the absence of any external forces - this should be not completely possible.
However, there is a loophole.
According to special relativity, objects gain mass as they approach light speed.
So, if you replace the weight with ions and the box with a loop, you can theoretically
have the ions moving faster at one end of the loop, and slower at the other.
But Burns' drive isn't a single closed loop.
It's helical, like a stretched-out spring - hence "helical engine".
The engine accelerates ions confined in a loop to moderate relativistic speeds and then
varies their velocity to make slight changes to their mass.
The engine then moves ions back and forth along the direction of travel to produce thrust.
The engine has no moving parts other than ions traveling in a vacuum line, trapped inside
electric and magnetic fields.
While the concept sounds interesting in theory, it comes with significant practical problems.
One such problem is that the helical chamber would have to be pretty large, around 656
feet long and 40 feet in diameter, to be precise.
And it would need to generate 165 megawatts of energy to produce 1 newton of thrust.
That's the equivalent to the output of a power station to produce the force required to accelerate
a kilogram of mass per second squared.
So, a lot of input for a teeny tiny output.
It is inefficient but in the vacuum of space, it just might work.
Burns believes that the engine itself would be able to get to 99 percent the speed of
light if you had enough time and power.
Burns notes the efficiency problem in his presentation, and also adds that his work
hasn't been reviewed by experts, and there may be errors in his math.
We don't exactly have the blueprints for a fully functional space travel engine here.
What we do have is a piece of groundwork that could be used to develop such an engine.
What we have is a dream of the stars.
Outro If you enjoyed this video, please consider
checking out this one which talks about 5 discoveries the James Webb Space Telescope
is expected to make.
If the Helical Engine works, would you consider going on a journey across interstellar space?
Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.