[hal-01075682] The analysis of Harold Puthoff applied to the Natario warp drive spacetime Can the spacetime metric engineering be really used for superluminal interstellar spaceflight??

Warp Drives are solutions of the Einstein Field Equations that allows superluminal travel within the framework of General Relativity There are at the present moment two known solutions The Alcubierre warp drive discovered in 1994 and the Natario warp drive discovered in 2001 However the major drawback concerning warp drives is the huge amount of negative energy density able to sustain the warp bubbleIn order to perform an interstellar space travel to a nearby star at 20 light-years away in a reasonable amount of time a ship must attain a speed of about 200 times faster than lightHowever the negative energy density at such a speed is directly proportional to the factor 10 48 which is 1000000000000000000000000 times bigger in magnitude than the mass of the planet Earth!! With the correct form of the shape function the Natario warp drive can overcome this obstacle at least in theoryOther drawbacks that affects the warp drive geometry are the collisions with hazardous inter-stellar matterasteroidscometsinterstellar dust etcthat will unavoidably occurs when a ship travels at superluminal speeds and the problem of the Horizonscausally disconnected portions of spacetimeThe geometrical features of the Natario warp drive are the required ones to overcome these obstacles also at least in theory Some years ago the American physicist Harold Puthoff published a very interesting work in the Journal of the British Interplanetary SocietyHe theorized about the possibility of the modification of the space-time geometry by arbitrary advanced civilizations able to generate the so-called metric engineering and such a modification would be supposed to allow the propulsion of spaceships at superluminal veloci-tiesHowever Puthoff used only diagonalized metrics for his analysis and he even quotes the Schwarzschild metricIn this work we reproduce the Puthoff analysis for the Natario warp drive spacetime and due to the fact that the Natario warp drive is a non-diagonalized metric due to the presence of both the shift and Natario vectors our results are different than the ones obtained by PuthoffHowever his idea of a spacetime metric engineering able to distort the spacetime geometry allowing superluminal interstellar spaceflight is perfectly possible



from HAL : Dernières publications http://ift.tt/1FBp1Gt