Hi All
Something I came accross on the web, opinions and idea's please.
Article:
First, a brief explanation of M-Theory. M-Theory was created to solve all the problems that arose from String Theory (Quantum Mechanics). Both these theories posit the existence of higher spatial dimensions beyond the fourth (which is time). M-Theory goes all the way up to 11 Dimensions. Don’t let the word “higher” fool you, these dimensions are infinitely small, so small in fact, they don’t exist, at least not on our plane of existence. If the 7 higher dimensions don’t exist in our universe, how can they possibly be related to us in any way? The answer is…cosmic strings. Cosmic strings “run through” all 10 spatial dimensions and the time dimension, they are smaller than the smallest quantum particles in our universe, the Quarks, and they are the true building blocks of reality. There’s an old saying “Everything we see around us is merely a protrusion from a higher dimension” (or words to that effect). That saying is old, and predates even General Relativity, but it’s smack bang on the money. Cosmic Strings “vibrate”, and their vibrations in the higher dimensions effect how we perceive them in our dimensions, this is called string harmonics. Everything is made of strings, and if a string vibrates a certain way in the higher dimensions, we get a hydrogen atom, if it vibrates at another frequency, we get Helium and so on and so forth. This part of M-Theory isn’t really the lynch pin of SlipString Drive (so you can forget it if you want), but the next part is:
This means that no part of the universe is empty, since for even Vacuum to exist, there needs to be cosmic strings, this “String Medium” is like an extremely tenuous liquid or “membrane”, for better understanding, it helps to know that this is often referred to as the “Fabric of Space”, which makes it easier to understand. Imagine your finger is a spaceship (come on, we’ve all done it), now imagine placing it on a tablecloth, pressing firmly against the table underneath. Now move your finger forward and you will see the cloth bunches up in front of you and if becomes more and more difficult to move your finger. According to M-Theory, this is what happens when you accelerate to the speed of light, and is why it is so difficult. The String Medium “bunches up” on the front of an accelerating object, the faster you go, the more resistance the String Medium provides, until you hit 99% the speed of light, the String Medium is dragging on you so much, your ship has infinite mass, and you would need infinite energy to go that little bit faster. Cosmic Strings are like quartz crystals in a watch, and their vibrations also control the passage of time, if they are all compressed on the front of your ship, they don’t have much room to vibrate, and thus do so slower than the rest of the universe, which is why you would experience time dilation.
Keeping up so far? lol
Righto. So far we’ve established that the fabric of space is basically a “fluidic” medium of strings. If you imagine a bowl of water with a tennis ball in it. Spinning the tennis ball causes the water around it to eventually spiral into a whirlpool and removing the ball creates a “vacuum” which the water floods into, when the water meets, it ripples back outward. This happens in space as well, though space is more “jelly like” than water. Put it like this, the water in your bowl has very weak surface tension, your tennis ball punches straight through it and displaces the water, animals like pondskaters don’t break the surface tension, but they do create a “dent” in it. Well, the “surface tension” of the String Medium, is strong enough to hold up planets, stars and even black holes, but all of them make “dents” in the surface (if you think of it as flat). This creates Gravity. A spinning object (such as the Earth) creates the same whirlpool ripples in the medium. These are called Gravitational Waves (I’ll shorten that to G-Waves).
This is perhaps the most complicated part of the whole thing to explain and unfortunately, it is essential to understanding SlipString Drive, which is based completely around G-Waves.
The Sun, is 8 light minutes away, G-Waves travel, like everything else, at the speed of light. If the sun were to suddenly disappear, the space if occupies would “spring” back up. But it’s gravity well is much bigger than that, so a gravity wave forms, as the wave passes a region of space once distorted by the sun, it returns to normal. 7 minutes and 59 seconds after the sun is gone, we would still be orbiting it. 1 second later, the gravity wave hits us, and we stop orbiting and simply shoot off into space at an angle. Neptune would continue orbiting the Sun many hours after it has ceased to exist, and 4 hours after we have shot off into space, since the G-Wave hasn’t reached it yet, and the space it occupies is still distorted by the Sun’s gravity. Unfortunately I can’t find a frakking diagram of this. Hopefully I explained it well.
So there we go, the key to G-Waves usefulness in SlipString Drives is the fact that, at the leading edge of the wave, spacetime is “squashed” and at the trailing edge it is “stretched” as the spacetime from the front “rolls over” the crest of the wave, this means that G-Waves actually repel spacetime.
It is speculated by Bob Lazar (UFO research engineer) that element 115 produces G-waves that extend past the shell of the atom thus could be controlled and focused within a reactor assembly.
Imagine a spaceship (and yes, it can be the Millenium Falcon). If that spaceship begins generating enough G-Waves in all directions in a consistent manner and in such a way that they have negligible effect on their own, but when they meet each other (at a set distance away from the ship) they will be quite potent, it will begin to push spacetime away from it. In this state, it occupies a region which is Partially Separated from the rest of the universe. Meaning that the spacetime it occupies is beginning to lose “touch” with the rest of the universe, light and other EM radiation finds it more difficult to enter this region, as the G-Waves get stronger, the ship begins to “phase” out of our universe more and more. From a light beam’s perspective, it is travelling in a straight line, but from the ship’s perspective, the beam is bending around it, congratulations, you are about to watch the Millenium Falcon (admit it) completely isolate itself from the rest of the universe. Once the G-Waves are strong enough, they aren’t pushing spacetime away from it anymore, since there is none left to push, instead, they are rather holding the rest of spacetime at bay, and the ship is existing in a little bubble. Obviously the bubble also consists of space time as well, more specifically space time that exists inside the “Event Horizon” created by the ship’s G-Waves. The beauty of SlipString drive is that you can focus the G-Waves (more on how later) to coalesce at any distance from your ship you want, meaning your bubble could be huge, or tiny. From an outside observer, there is nothing there, the ship has disappeared from view, you can even walk through the area where it just was, and not experience it at all. You’re not aware of it, but you are curving around the edge of the bubble. The “bubble” is now a completely isolated micro universe, imperceptible from ours, no light, matter or energy can get into (or out of) this region of spacetime.
So, now the Millenium Falcon (or whatever) is isolated from the entire universe, whoop de doo, how does this help us reach ludicrous speeds? Well, first, if you haven’t already, assume the bubble is perfectly spherical. The spaceship’s G-Waves are holding the rest of the universe “at arms length” and keeping the bubble isolated, and naturally, the spacetime outside the bubble doesn’t much like curving around the bubble, and is such pushing in. Imagine holding a ball bearing between your thumb and index finger, squeeze it. Your fingers are spacetime, exerting pressure on a spherical object, because it is a sphere, pressure is equal at all points of the object, and thus it remains stationary. However, now imagine you are squeezing a teardrop shaped object such as a sunflower of melon seed, squeeze hard enough and it will shoot out of your grip, since the object is an uneven shape, you could exert uneven force on it, more specifically, you could exert more force on the tapered end then you could on the bulbous end. By focusing more intense G-Waves behind the ship, the bubble becomes a teardrop shape, and the spacetime outside the bubble begins to “slide” down the tapered edge, pushing it forward. The ship is now “slipping” through the universe (hence the name SlipString Drive).
The longer the tapered edge of the bubble, the faster you will travel. Remeber the fabric analogy? Instead of pushing directly on the fabric, make a small cut at the edge, large enough to fit your finger in, you should now be touching the table. Make the cut longer and move your finger forward, and sew up the area where your finger used to be. There’s no resistance is there? Your speed is limited only to how fast you can cut and stitch the fabric, which translates directly to how tapered you can make your Slip bubble. If you were to move to the middle of the table in this fashion, then close the cut entirely so your finger is once again on the fabric, you would have completely changed position on the tablecloth without ever touching it. Et, voila! SlipString Drive. The ship inside the bubble is stationary, and doesn’t violate the speed of light, and the bubble itself is gravitationally separate from the string medium, if it’s not touching the string medium (ie our universe) there is no resistance and unlimited speed can be achieved. In effect, the SlipString drive moves the universe (and all those pesky physical laws) “out of the way” like a curtain, moves through it, and closes it again. Also, because Spacetime is pushing in on your bubble, ceasing G-Wave generation will collapse your bubble, causing our universe to “wash over” you again. You’ll be back in our universe, and, if you did it right, very far away from where you left.
We’re already setting up observatories in space to learn about G-Waves, scientists have every optimism that we are very close to being able to produce our own. At the heart of a SlipString Drive, is the (secret technology) device for creating the G-Waves, I postulate that it will be some sort of rotating device to create the “whirlpool” ripples I mentioned earlier. The G-Waves would then have to be controlled and focused. This is actually massively easy. The purest form of light is that which travels through a vacuum, as soon as it hits something more massive than the vacuum (such as glass) it slows down and gets refracted (its direction changes). With glass this is infinitesimal, but with opaque objects, its massive, the light simple bounces off. The same principle applies to G-Waves, when they pass through more massive objects, they slow down, get refracted, and change direction. By using a flexible liquid mercury lens (mercury being a reasonably massive element), we could focus the G-Wave out of the generator and down whatever path we desire. Creating Slip bubbles of any shape and size we desire.
Now we have SlipString Drive, we can go anywhere in the entire universe. Inside the bubble however, you won’t see a thing, in your little universe, there are no stars, no planets, no nothing, only your ship, and maybe the few atoms that hitched a ride in your bubble. You’ll have to stop periodically to check you’re on the right track (using either starfixes or astronomical landmarks). Be warned however, powering down your drive while your bubble is inside a planet or star will kill you instantly, as the spacetime the rock or plasma is occupying, washes over you, separating your atoms from one other. Painless I’ll admit, but still death. Fortunately, by “dialling down” your drive (but not switching it off), you can come partially back into contact with the universe, just enough to see where you are, but not enough to be assploded all over the inside of a planet.
Considering what it can do, SlipString Drive is actually quite a simple and compact technology, we should have enough knowledge of G-Waves to build our first generator in about 15 years, with maybe a test of an actual Drive core following sometime (but not too long) after that. Providing such a project receives sufficient funding and G-Waves prove to have the properties as predicted in M-Theory, we could see manned FTL flights in 30 to 50 years.
Something I came accross on the web, opinions and idea's please.
Article:
First, a brief explanation of M-Theory. M-Theory was created to solve all the problems that arose from String Theory (Quantum Mechanics). Both these theories posit the existence of higher spatial dimensions beyond the fourth (which is time). M-Theory goes all the way up to 11 Dimensions. Don’t let the word “higher” fool you, these dimensions are infinitely small, so small in fact, they don’t exist, at least not on our plane of existence. If the 7 higher dimensions don’t exist in our universe, how can they possibly be related to us in any way? The answer is…cosmic strings. Cosmic strings “run through” all 10 spatial dimensions and the time dimension, they are smaller than the smallest quantum particles in our universe, the Quarks, and they are the true building blocks of reality. There’s an old saying “Everything we see around us is merely a protrusion from a higher dimension” (or words to that effect). That saying is old, and predates even General Relativity, but it’s smack bang on the money. Cosmic Strings “vibrate”, and their vibrations in the higher dimensions effect how we perceive them in our dimensions, this is called string harmonics. Everything is made of strings, and if a string vibrates a certain way in the higher dimensions, we get a hydrogen atom, if it vibrates at another frequency, we get Helium and so on and so forth. This part of M-Theory isn’t really the lynch pin of SlipString Drive (so you can forget it if you want), but the next part is:
This means that no part of the universe is empty, since for even Vacuum to exist, there needs to be cosmic strings, this “String Medium” is like an extremely tenuous liquid or “membrane”, for better understanding, it helps to know that this is often referred to as the “Fabric of Space”, which makes it easier to understand. Imagine your finger is a spaceship (come on, we’ve all done it), now imagine placing it on a tablecloth, pressing firmly against the table underneath. Now move your finger forward and you will see the cloth bunches up in front of you and if becomes more and more difficult to move your finger. According to M-Theory, this is what happens when you accelerate to the speed of light, and is why it is so difficult. The String Medium “bunches up” on the front of an accelerating object, the faster you go, the more resistance the String Medium provides, until you hit 99% the speed of light, the String Medium is dragging on you so much, your ship has infinite mass, and you would need infinite energy to go that little bit faster. Cosmic Strings are like quartz crystals in a watch, and their vibrations also control the passage of time, if they are all compressed on the front of your ship, they don’t have much room to vibrate, and thus do so slower than the rest of the universe, which is why you would experience time dilation.
Keeping up so far? lol
Righto. So far we’ve established that the fabric of space is basically a “fluidic” medium of strings. If you imagine a bowl of water with a tennis ball in it. Spinning the tennis ball causes the water around it to eventually spiral into a whirlpool and removing the ball creates a “vacuum” which the water floods into, when the water meets, it ripples back outward. This happens in space as well, though space is more “jelly like” than water. Put it like this, the water in your bowl has very weak surface tension, your tennis ball punches straight through it and displaces the water, animals like pondskaters don’t break the surface tension, but they do create a “dent” in it. Well, the “surface tension” of the String Medium, is strong enough to hold up planets, stars and even black holes, but all of them make “dents” in the surface (if you think of it as flat). This creates Gravity. A spinning object (such as the Earth) creates the same whirlpool ripples in the medium. These are called Gravitational Waves (I’ll shorten that to G-Waves).
This is perhaps the most complicated part of the whole thing to explain and unfortunately, it is essential to understanding SlipString Drive, which is based completely around G-Waves.
The Sun, is 8 light minutes away, G-Waves travel, like everything else, at the speed of light. If the sun were to suddenly disappear, the space if occupies would “spring” back up. But it’s gravity well is much bigger than that, so a gravity wave forms, as the wave passes a region of space once distorted by the sun, it returns to normal. 7 minutes and 59 seconds after the sun is gone, we would still be orbiting it. 1 second later, the gravity wave hits us, and we stop orbiting and simply shoot off into space at an angle. Neptune would continue orbiting the Sun many hours after it has ceased to exist, and 4 hours after we have shot off into space, since the G-Wave hasn’t reached it yet, and the space it occupies is still distorted by the Sun’s gravity. Unfortunately I can’t find a frakking diagram of this. Hopefully I explained it well.
So there we go, the key to G-Waves usefulness in SlipString Drives is the fact that, at the leading edge of the wave, spacetime is “squashed” and at the trailing edge it is “stretched” as the spacetime from the front “rolls over” the crest of the wave, this means that G-Waves actually repel spacetime.
It is speculated by Bob Lazar (UFO research engineer) that element 115 produces G-waves that extend past the shell of the atom thus could be controlled and focused within a reactor assembly.
Imagine a spaceship (and yes, it can be the Millenium Falcon). If that spaceship begins generating enough G-Waves in all directions in a consistent manner and in such a way that they have negligible effect on their own, but when they meet each other (at a set distance away from the ship) they will be quite potent, it will begin to push spacetime away from it. In this state, it occupies a region which is Partially Separated from the rest of the universe. Meaning that the spacetime it occupies is beginning to lose “touch” with the rest of the universe, light and other EM radiation finds it more difficult to enter this region, as the G-Waves get stronger, the ship begins to “phase” out of our universe more and more. From a light beam’s perspective, it is travelling in a straight line, but from the ship’s perspective, the beam is bending around it, congratulations, you are about to watch the Millenium Falcon (admit it) completely isolate itself from the rest of the universe. Once the G-Waves are strong enough, they aren’t pushing spacetime away from it anymore, since there is none left to push, instead, they are rather holding the rest of spacetime at bay, and the ship is existing in a little bubble. Obviously the bubble also consists of space time as well, more specifically space time that exists inside the “Event Horizon” created by the ship’s G-Waves. The beauty of SlipString drive is that you can focus the G-Waves (more on how later) to coalesce at any distance from your ship you want, meaning your bubble could be huge, or tiny. From an outside observer, there is nothing there, the ship has disappeared from view, you can even walk through the area where it just was, and not experience it at all. You’re not aware of it, but you are curving around the edge of the bubble. The “bubble” is now a completely isolated micro universe, imperceptible from ours, no light, matter or energy can get into (or out of) this region of spacetime.
So, now the Millenium Falcon (or whatever) is isolated from the entire universe, whoop de doo, how does this help us reach ludicrous speeds? Well, first, if you haven’t already, assume the bubble is perfectly spherical. The spaceship’s G-Waves are holding the rest of the universe “at arms length” and keeping the bubble isolated, and naturally, the spacetime outside the bubble doesn’t much like curving around the bubble, and is such pushing in. Imagine holding a ball bearing between your thumb and index finger, squeeze it. Your fingers are spacetime, exerting pressure on a spherical object, because it is a sphere, pressure is equal at all points of the object, and thus it remains stationary. However, now imagine you are squeezing a teardrop shaped object such as a sunflower of melon seed, squeeze hard enough and it will shoot out of your grip, since the object is an uneven shape, you could exert uneven force on it, more specifically, you could exert more force on the tapered end then you could on the bulbous end. By focusing more intense G-Waves behind the ship, the bubble becomes a teardrop shape, and the spacetime outside the bubble begins to “slide” down the tapered edge, pushing it forward. The ship is now “slipping” through the universe (hence the name SlipString Drive).
The longer the tapered edge of the bubble, the faster you will travel. Remeber the fabric analogy? Instead of pushing directly on the fabric, make a small cut at the edge, large enough to fit your finger in, you should now be touching the table. Make the cut longer and move your finger forward, and sew up the area where your finger used to be. There’s no resistance is there? Your speed is limited only to how fast you can cut and stitch the fabric, which translates directly to how tapered you can make your Slip bubble. If you were to move to the middle of the table in this fashion, then close the cut entirely so your finger is once again on the fabric, you would have completely changed position on the tablecloth without ever touching it. Et, voila! SlipString Drive. The ship inside the bubble is stationary, and doesn’t violate the speed of light, and the bubble itself is gravitationally separate from the string medium, if it’s not touching the string medium (ie our universe) there is no resistance and unlimited speed can be achieved. In effect, the SlipString drive moves the universe (and all those pesky physical laws) “out of the way” like a curtain, moves through it, and closes it again. Also, because Spacetime is pushing in on your bubble, ceasing G-Wave generation will collapse your bubble, causing our universe to “wash over” you again. You’ll be back in our universe, and, if you did it right, very far away from where you left.
We’re already setting up observatories in space to learn about G-Waves, scientists have every optimism that we are very close to being able to produce our own. At the heart of a SlipString Drive, is the (secret technology) device for creating the G-Waves, I postulate that it will be some sort of rotating device to create the “whirlpool” ripples I mentioned earlier. The G-Waves would then have to be controlled and focused. This is actually massively easy. The purest form of light is that which travels through a vacuum, as soon as it hits something more massive than the vacuum (such as glass) it slows down and gets refracted (its direction changes). With glass this is infinitesimal, but with opaque objects, its massive, the light simple bounces off. The same principle applies to G-Waves, when they pass through more massive objects, they slow down, get refracted, and change direction. By using a flexible liquid mercury lens (mercury being a reasonably massive element), we could focus the G-Wave out of the generator and down whatever path we desire. Creating Slip bubbles of any shape and size we desire.
Now we have SlipString Drive, we can go anywhere in the entire universe. Inside the bubble however, you won’t see a thing, in your little universe, there are no stars, no planets, no nothing, only your ship, and maybe the few atoms that hitched a ride in your bubble. You’ll have to stop periodically to check you’re on the right track (using either starfixes or astronomical landmarks). Be warned however, powering down your drive while your bubble is inside a planet or star will kill you instantly, as the spacetime the rock or plasma is occupying, washes over you, separating your atoms from one other. Painless I’ll admit, but still death. Fortunately, by “dialling down” your drive (but not switching it off), you can come partially back into contact with the universe, just enough to see where you are, but not enough to be assploded all over the inside of a planet.
Considering what it can do, SlipString Drive is actually quite a simple and compact technology, we should have enough knowledge of G-Waves to build our first generator in about 15 years, with maybe a test of an actual Drive core following sometime (but not too long) after that. Providing such a project receives sufficient funding and G-Waves prove to have the properties as predicted in M-Theory, we could see manned FTL flights in 30 to 50 years.