PBS Space Time
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2023
10:00 · 2.5M views · Oct 28, 2015
PBS Space Time introduces Miguel Alcubierre's warp drive, explaining how spacetime itself could be warped rather than moving a ship through it, and whether it is physically possible.
HN points to it as a short, approachable starting point on warp drive physics from a channel commenters like.
3 comments from Hacker News
Mathematically yes, actually probably not. I'd suggest looking into Alcubierre Warp Drive, cool story on why the guy came up with it and shows how to wrap spacetime around a spaceship to make it go faster than light. The ship wouldn't go faster than light because it wouldn't move at all, the spacetime around it would. The channel below has quite a few other videos on the subject. I love it. this video
There's an episode of PBS Space Time about this, "The Speed of Light is NOT About Light" [1], which comes pretty close to making the same points you are making. It might be useful to watch this earlier episode, "Are Space and Time an Illusion?" [2], first. There is a later episode (or maybe a couple of them) that go into how interactions with the Higgs field make it so things with mass travel slowed than the speed of causality. To tie back to the warp drive news, they have an episode that would be a good place to start on warp drives, "Is The Alcubierre Warp Drive Possible?" [3]. There's also "Superluminal Time Travel + Time Warp Challenge Answer" [4], and "Will Wormholes Allow Fast Interstellar Travel?" [5]. A non-warp unknown physics drive that comes up a lot also got an episode, "The EM Drive: Fact or Fantasy?" [6]. There is at least one episode covering interstellar travel without using any unknown physics, "5 REAL Possibilities for Interstellar Travel" [7]. The scope of the series is basically anything vaguely connected to astronomy, cosmology, and quantum mechanics, and the episodes are all pretty short (5-12 minutes), so it is a great thing to watch when you've got a short wait for something. Here's the series home page [8], and their YouTube channel [9]. Also on the PBS streaming app, for those who like to get their physics on their big screen TVs. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] this video [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK] [7] [LINK] [8] [LINK] [9] [LINK]
The issue seems to be that the alcubierre drive requires things like external negative energy which are 'theoretically possible' but have never been detected and probably should have been already if they existed. Also, even if they worked, the negative energy requirements is something like the mass energy of jupiter on the high end or the moon on the low end. This is an hour long interview Dr Miguel Alcubierre who wrote the paper describing the Alcubierre drive. [LINK] For a shorter 10 minute video, see this PBS Spacetime video this video