The solution involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric.

doesn't mention How they do this, i guess this is a purely mathematic experiment?

[–] just_another_person 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Well...yeah. No warp drive is possible with current tech, so it's all theoretical. We have no capabilities at all ever mentioned in these articles, but it's still interesting.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

What i meant: physics has a lot of mathematic nuts. Some take it a bit too far and think, just because you can make a formula that works out, it proves anything, instead of mathe describing the logic. As an example: some thesis at ETH Zurich "proved" the existence of god by having some set parameters and assumtions (which were a classical logical fallacy). I think this might be similiar.

For the alcubiere warp drive, the logical explanation is: it warps space before the ship and back behind it, so it basically makes the distance for the ship shorter. I expected a similiar explanation for this. But it looks more like people played mathematics here.

[–] just_another_person 6 points 6 months ago

The physics behind the Alcubierre is all theoretical, and when you're dealing with Theoretical Physics of any kind, there are assumptions in the mix until you have provable theories.

Think of it like a logic chain: "If Z is possible, then Y is possible, and so is X, but that's all supposing we can make W happen first..."

So you can have different pieces of the puzzle provable by math alone, but not all the pieces will together without real world experimentation perhaps. Like how know that Fusion power is possible (we can observe it mathematically and in the Sun), but we basically have to take a bunch of blind leaps to actually make it happen.