Warp Drive Feasible? Relativity Loophole Means ‘Star Trek’ Device Might Actually Work, Physicists Say

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In the “Star Trek” TV shows and films, the U.S.S. Enterprise’s warp engine allows the ship to move faster than light, an ability that is, as Spock would say, “highly illogical.”

However, there’s a loophole in Einstein’s general theory of relativity that could allow a ship to traverse vast distances in less time than it would take light. The trick? It’s not the starship that’s moving — it’s the space around it.

In fact, scientists at NASA are right now working on the first practical field test toward proving the possibility of warp drives and faster-than-light travel. Maybe the warp drive on “Star Trek” is possible after all. [See also: Warp Drive: Can It Be Done? (Video)]

According to Einstein’s theory, an object with mass cannot go as fast or faster than the speed of light. The original “Star Trek” series ignored this “universal speed limit” in favor of a ship that could zip around the galaxy in a matter of days instead of decades. They tried to explain the ship’s faster-than-light capabilities by powering the warp engine with a “matter-antimatter” engine. Antimatter was a popular field of study in the 1960s, when creator Gene Roddenberry was first writing the series. When matter and antimatter collide, their mass is converted to kinetic energy in keeping with Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence formula, E=mc².

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In the “Star Trek” TV shows and films, the U.S.S. Enterprise’s warp engine allows the ship to move faster than light, an ability that is, as Spock would say, “highly illogical.” However, there’s a loophole in Einstein’s general theory of relativity that could allow a ship to traverse vast distances in less time than it would take light.

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Antimatter-Gravity ‘Alpha’ Experiment At CERN Tests Force’s Effect, Yields Ambiguous Result

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When it comes to antimatter, what goes up doesn’t necessarily come down. In a new study, physicists weighed antimatter in an effort to determine how this strange cousin of matter interacts with gravity.

Ordinary matter atoms fall down due to the pull of gravity, but the same might not be true of antimatter, which has the same mass as matter, but opposite charge and spin. Scientists wondered whether antimatter atoms would instead fall up when pulled by gravity, and whether such a thing as antigravity exists.

“In the unlikely event that antimatter falls upward, we’d have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the universe works,” Joel Fajans, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in a statement.

Fajans and his colleagues at the Alpha experiment at Switzerland’s CERN physics lab made the first experimental measurements of the gravitational mass of antihydrogen — the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen, made of an antiproton and a positron (the antimatter counterpart to an electron). [Whoa! The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

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This illustration of antimatter shows antiparticle beside its particle mirror-image.

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Gravity Waves, Predicted By Einstein’s General Relativity Theory, May Soon Be Detected

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In the next five years or so, scientists are poised to discover proof that space and time can wrinkle in the form of gravitational waves. These waves were predicted almost 100 years ago by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but have yet to be seen.

That could change soon when the latest, most sensitive experiments hunting gravitational waves come online. “There’s so much activity and excitement in the field right now,” said Mansi M. Kasliwal, an astronomer at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, Calif. “The momentum is really building.”

Kasliwal is the author of a paper published online today (May 2) in the journal Science describing the burgeoning field of gravitational wave studies.

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3D visualization of gravitational waves produced by two orbiting black holes.

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Dark Matter Found? Underground Detector Finds Hints Of Elusive Particle, Physicists Say

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Hints of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up perhaps 85 percent of the matter in the universe, may have been observed by scientists.

But researchers are far from saying they’ve discovered the source of dark matter.

“We’re not claiming anything,” warned Blas Cabrera, a Stanford University physicist speaking here today (April 15) at a meeting of the American Physical Society. [Explaining Dark Matter (Infographic)]

The new results come from the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS), which takes place deep underground in the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota.

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The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment (SuperCDMS) uses five towers of dark matter detectors like the ones shown here.

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Archeologists Unearth Alien-Like Skulls In A Mexico Cemetery

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Archeologists have unearthed what looks like a cone-shaped alien skull from 1,000 years ago in Mexico.

The skull, which dates from 945 A.D. to 1308 A.D., was discovered accidentally while digging an irrigation system in the northwest state of Sonora in Mexico.

Cristina Garcia Moreno, who worked on the project with Arizona State University, explained that 13 of the 25 skulls found in the Hispanic cemetery had these deformed heads.

“We don’t know why this population specifically deformed their heads,” Moreno told ABC News.

The site, known as El Cementerio, was discovered in 1999, but the team just completed their analysis of the skeletal remains last month. They plan to continue their research during the next field season. Archaeologists also discovered artifacts on the site, like pendants, nose rings and jewelry.

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ISS Dark Matter Detector Finds Hint Of Elusive Particles From Cosmos, Scientists Say (VIDEO)

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It is one of the cosmos’ most mysterious unsolved cases: dark matter. It is supposedly what holds the universe together. We can’t see it, but scientists are pretty sure it’s out there.

Led by a dogged, Nobel Prize-winning gumshoe who has spent 18 years on the case, scientists put a $2 billion detector aboard the International Space Station to try to track down the stuff. And after two years, the first evidence came in Wednesday: tantalizing cosmic footprints that seem to have been left by dark matter.

But the evidence isn’t enough to declare the case closed. The footprints could have come from another, more conventional suspect: a pulsar, or a rotating, radiation-emitting star.

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Three-Body Problem Breakthrough: Physicists Discover New Solutions To Age-Old Puzzle

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It’s the sort of abstract puzzle that keeps a scientist awake at night: Can you predict how three objects will orbit each other in a repeating pattern? In the 300 years since this “three-body problem” was first recognized, just three families of solutions have been found. Now, two physicists have discovered 13 new families. It’s quite a feat in mathematical physics, and it could conceivably help astrophysicists understand new planetary systems.

The trove of new solutions has researchers jazzed. “I love these things,” says Robert Vanderbei, a mathematician at Princeton University who was not involved in the work. He says he, in fact, spent all night thinking about the work.

The three-body problem dates back to the 1680s. Isaac Newton had already shown that his new law of gravity could always predict the orbit of two bodies held together by gravity—such as a star and a planet—with complete accuracy. The orbit is basically always an ellipse. However, Newton couldn’t come up with a similar solution for the case of three bodies orbiting one another.

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Solutions to the three-body problem, such as the “figure eight” and “yarn,” can be viewed on an abstract shape-sphere.

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Knot Physics Experiment Uses Water To Create Amazing ‘Knotted Vortex’ Loop (VIDEO)

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After a century of studying their tangled mathematics, physicists can tie almost anything into knots, including their own shoelaces and invisible underwater whirlpools. At least, they can now thanks to a little help from a 3D printer and some inspiration from the animal kingdom.

Physicists had long believed that a vortex could be twisted into a knot, even though they’d never seen one in nature or the even in the lab. Determined to finally create a knotted vortex loop of their very own, physicists at the University of Chicago designed a wing that resembles a delicately twisted ribbon and brought it to life using a 3D printer.

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Star-Shaped Gravity Waves Discovered By Physicists In France

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Star-shaped waves can form in vibrating tanks of liquid oil, researchers say.

Learning more about such bizarre waves could shed light on counterparts that may exist elsewhere in nature, researchers added.

Waves of all kinds often behave in an intuitively linear manner. For instance, a weight on a spring will bob up and down in a manner directly proportional to the force that the weight exerts on the spring.

However, a number of strange waves can also form. They come from what is called nonlinearity, in which a small or simple change results in a disproportionately large or complex effect. For instance, aspects of weather behave chaotically, in a nonlinear manner.

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Researchers have discovered a new type of gravity wave, one that is shaped like a star. Such bizarre waves result from a property called nonlinearity, in which a small or simple change results in a disproportionately large or complex effect. For instance, aspects of weather behave chaotically, in a nonlinear manner.

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What Is Time? Theoretical Physicist Sean Carroll Explains Time’s Arrow (VIDEO)

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Have you ever stopped to ask yourself, “what is time?” We all understand its passage intuitively, experientially. But does time actually exist? Is it a force of nature? A tangible entity? Or is time a human construct–an attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible?

I spoke with theoretical physicist and perhaps the world’s premier expert on the science of time, Sean Carroll, to learn more.

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