LOOPHOLES & Spacetime (PLUS)

Who doesn’t love a good loophole? Thanks to a ‘loophole’ in Einstein’s theory, the FTL Drive (remember Star Trek!) is possible. You see while traveling the speed of light is impossible if you travel the same amount of space but don’t travel faster than light–like a skipping stone on the water you skip past parts of space, you aren’t actually breaking any of Physics laws – LOOPHOLE.

Up until now what has been holding us back from trying this is that we thought the amount of energy required would be prohibitive. Harold White of Icarus Interstellar (an advanced propulsion theme lead for NASA's Engineering Directorate) has located the loopholes that exist in the math using an instrument called a “White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer”. "At [The Johnson Space Center] JSC, Eagleworks has initiated an interferometer test bed that will try to generate and detect a microscopic instance of a little warp bubble. Although this is just a tiny instance of the phenomena, it will be existence proof for the idea of perturbing space time." Says White. White’s recent work intimates that if we optimize the warp bubble thickness while at the same time oscillating the bubble intensity we can then reduce the stiffness of Spacetime.

And there are other benefits! "There are no tidal forces inside the bubble, no undue issues, and the proper acceleration is zero. When you turn the field on, everybody doesn’t go slamming against the bulkhead, which would be a very short and sad trip." While it might not make it as a ride at Great Adventure, it will make the trip to Alpha Centuri in about two weeks.

The Dark Energy Camera - HUH? Okay – I may be wrong but I thing dark energy is energy that is hypothesized to be within the tapestry of the Universe. Dark Energy accounts for 75% of the matter in the Universe. So 75% equals some stuff that we don’t know what it is and can’t see. Umm, if we can’t see it, what’s the camera for? We now have this camera that is a 570 million pixels and will be scanning 300 galaxies in order to discover the true nature of Dark Energy.

FACTOIDS • The effects of gravity we experience and the matter we see that “should” make it up, doesn’t equal, doesn’t even come close! • Galaxies according to what we know, should fly apart; but if something else is holding them together… • So since there is a hole in our theories, Astrophysicists have decided that rather than a need to fine tune what we have, a new and invisible force must be at work – I give you "dark matter" - invisible to us but clearly acting on galactic scales. • Contrary to what evidence dictates, the Universe is accelerating in its expansion. • Approximately 75% of the Universe is dark energy, 20% is dark matter, and just 5% the kind of matter we can see.