Hello Steemians! How are you doing? I am Rahul here and I am back again with another interesting, intriguing article related to science. In today's article, I will tell you about the different ways by which we can travel faster than the speed of light. Since this topic is enormous, I will be dividing it into different parts. This is the part 1 of the series. Let's start.
There are 3 ways by which we can travel "faster" than the speed of light. One of them is Alcubierre's Warp Drive named after Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre. Let's get into some details.
As I told you in one of my previous article that any thing having some mass, energy or information cannot travel faster than the speed of light but what if we have backdoor and we can manipulate our surroundings and travel faster than the speed of light without breaking the laws of physics. Well warp drive is one way to do that.
The speed limit of 299,792,458 m/s doesn't apply on the space. Because if it does so, than the diameter of our space would have been around 28 billion light years but it is not the case. Diameter of our universe is around 93 billion light years. Therefore space can travel faster than the speed of light.
In warp drive what we do is expand the space at the back and contract the space in front without manipulating the space just around us. Something like this:
This way we can technically travel faster than the speed of light. Since Miguel Alcubierre proved it mathematically we can do this without breaking the laws of physics. But since we know everything why we haven't built a warp drive? It's because scientists have some problems which they have to solve first to make it a reality.
To shrink the space in front, we need an object with enormous mass. Mass at least should be equal to the mass of Jupiter. We can't just make that much mass in laboratories.
Well this is not the real problem we are facing. The real problem is to expand the space in back. For that we need something that have negative energy or negative mass, something like exotic matter. Scientists have already discovered that such things exist in quantum world but we need substantial amount of it which we can't do yet. Scientists believe we can found exotic matter somewhere in this universe.
Some other problem is what effects will it have on the spaceship in the middle. According to some physicists everything will be burned due to hawking radiation.
So basically it's going to take a lot of time to make warp drive a reality. NASA in their Eagle Birds Laboratory is already trying to make it a reality. They are for right now trying to expand the space in front to confirm the theory. Let's hope we get expected results.
That's all for today. Bye Bye.