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No, we didn’t accidentally create a warp bubble
- pwdisswordfish9 5y agoIt seems the warp bubble bubble just burst.
- teawrecks 5y agoMan.....I wish Feynman were still around today.
- Randor 5y agoWell, I think journalism is getting worse as the years go by. Like everybody else I noticed the title and clicked on it a few days ago. Reading the paper revealed that the team was simply interpreting/speculating what the math was showing about some hypothetical energy density structures. Of course the sensationalized title propagated all over the net ignoring the facts.
- sillyquiet 5y agoHonestly, I think this has always been how most journalism has been, we're just noticing it more. But to be fair and I think to support your point, the bastions of so-called 'real' journalism do seem to have gotten fewer and fewer.
- belly_joe 5y agoThe dynamic sort of of reminds me of the "market for lemons" in that the bad drives out the good. Not really quite the same though. The question is what the production function for articles looks like from the publisher/journalist perspective. If it's easier to produce clickbait articles than "real" articles then I think this effect is what we see in the market for news. But from another angle, it seems more labor intensive for a journalist to spin a weak finding into a strong finding than to simply report an exciting finding directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
- Randor 5y agoYeah, It makes me sad to think that I contribute to this process. I have to admit... that I probably do read alot of those clickbait articles giving them more views. It makes me even more sad when I think about the platforms that are removing the ability to downvote incorrect/misleading information.
- sovnade 5y agoIt sounds like journalism is achieving its goal - getting more clicks. Like you said, everyone clicked it and read it. Not sure what the solution is when the only way for these outlets to stay afloat is to get more and more clicks.
- skyechurch 5y agoThe market is responding to its incentives and producing an optimized product, line goes up and all is right with the world.
- scythe 5y agoA deeper problem is: how do you create an "open" discussion forum for paid subscription content? Everyone bemoans ad-financing, but everyone loves aggregators (including Hacker News), and aggregators and paywalls generally don't mix.
- BizarroLand 5y agoI think you would want to create a federated members only collection of websites, pay a few hundred influencers to move their base of operations into the collective, and then set and keep the annual subscription so low that the cost isn't prohibitive to 80% of the potential audience. Ad free reddit, youtube, twitter, and the like, all populated only by people who paid to be there and not an ad or corporate sponsor in site except within a walled garden of delights (for the influencers)? I'd pay $10 a month for that.
- likpok 5y agoJournalism about physics has always been like this. The Alcubierre drive is 25 years old, even before that there were widely-publicized discussions of the same kind of idea: invert the equations and come up with interesting results. The realities of space travel are kind of grim: months to visit even nearby uninhabitable planets and decades to get anywhere interesting. Relativity has always been a huge and ever-increasing impediment to that, and the ways in which it is have percolated out. There's also the demand for hard science fiction with space battles (I personally am a fan!) that similarly runs aground on "you can't have a galactic empire where it takes a hundred years to reach the next province over". So there's lots of demand for "hey this thing makes FTL travel possible" and not as much demand for "scientists publish paper but everything still sucks".
- Randor 5y agoWell, About a week ago this topic was widely in the news under variations of the title: "DARPA and NASA Scientists Accidentally Create Warp Bubble" That's the context of my response here in this thread. I am not sure if everyone reading this thread knows that. The new title "No, we didn't accidentally create a warp bubble" was the NASA engineer attempting to fix the misinformation generated by the journalists. Absolutely agree with you about physics journalism. I enjoy science fiction books too, I have no problem with the theoretical FTL topic.
- anonGone73 5y agoJournalism is getting worse, because the market has changed/evaporated. It is another race to the bottom. There are more journalists in prisons than ever before. Attention is a currency and we are easily distracted.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago> There are more journalists in prisons than ever before. In Russia or China, I can believe this. But in the USA and most of Europe, I'm going to need a citation before I believe that.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoOh boo hoo, we didn’t solve the warp drive in the first attempt? The paper made some interesting but handwavy claims? This is what science actually is—incrementalism. Unless the guy lied, I say god bless him for finding something relevant to publish towards our multi-galactic future.
- juancampa 5y agoThe original paper states: > This qualitative correlation would suggest that chip-scale experiments might be explored to attempt to measure tiny signatures illustrative of the presence of the conjectured phenomenon: a real, albeit humble, warp bubble. The key word here is "conjectured". He didn't say he created a warp bubble. I'm okay with publishing conjectures. If you think there's something interesting, let the world know. Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist by any means.
- voldacar 5y agoThis article could have been 2 or 3 sentences but instead I had to wade through paragraphs of fluff
- johnhenry 5y ago"This isn’t an experimental paper, but rather a theoretical paper, one with a suspiciously low number (zero) of theoretical physicists on it."
- PaulHoule 5y agoEvery solution I've seen for the Alcubierre drive is static. To really make it work you have to start out in normal flat space, turn it on, and then turn it off. You have to do this without being killed. I suspect you'd face hazards like the hazards you'd have falling into a black hole. (Personally I think you die when crossing the event horizon and never make it to the classical singularity, not just because you got killed at the event horizon, but there is nothing that looks like the classical singularity.) I think the Alcubierre drive doesn't violate the censorship principle because practically it doesn't create closed timelike curves. You can't see outside, you can't get into it, you can't get around it. You might be moving faster than light in some sense but you can't interact with the universe and communicate messages from here to there.
- donkarma 5y agoim a big fan of the idea that anyone who uses FTL with the intent of sending messages back in time has it not work
- doliveira 5y agoFermi paradox: advanced civilizations discover time travel and generate paradoxes that erase the timelines that led to their creation
- GolfPopper 5y agoThis is explicitly the background for SF author C.J. Cherry's Morgaine Cycle, although the destruction isn't complete and leaves fragments scattered across space and time. (The reaction of a interstellar human civilization to discovering the fragmented network of space-time gates is "shut it all down and bury it".)
- EarthLaunch 5y agoThat sounds fascinating, I'll read that. C.J. Cherryh is one of the authors I somehow didn't pick up as a child, even though I was reading C.S. Friedman and the like. Maybe it was the covers.
- BrazzVuvuzela 5y agoI'm not a physicist so take this with a huge grain of salt, but from what I understand, this proposed warp bubble would use the casimir effect. But the casimir effect works by creating a gap so narrow it excludes wavelengths of energy larger than it. So even if the math were all correct and you actually built one of these, wouldn't it be too small to actually send a signal through? And if nothing can fit through it, is there any point?
- colechristensen 5y agoNo, it would be a few micrometers across, hundreds of times larger than features on advanced microchips. And if it is effectively a warp bubble, it wouldn’t have any immediate useful application, but for teasing you could send electrons or photons through it and measure effects. This is not a wormhole, the likely effect is either nothing or a slight signal timing change.
- webmaven 5y agoYeah, I found the original hype overblown. The claims made were also for a configuration that was odd, at best. Intuitively, there are any number of geometries that ought to produce greater 'negative energy densities' while being easier to manufacture and test than the sphere-in-a-cylinder one if the proposed effect isn't just a mathematical artifact.
- stakkur 5y agoZefram Cochrane will settle all this in 2063.
- kuraudo 5y agoThis epidemic of "No, ..." titles needs to be cured.
- TigeriusKirk 5y agoIt's one of the clickbaitiest title formulations around. It works amazingly well on a certain type of mindset.
- ravenstine 5y ago... Here's why. :D
- dang 5y agoGood point, and it looks like something that can easily be scraped out. I'll add it to the list. Thanks!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jerf 5y agoI would say another problem with the underlying paper is that it uses quantum mechanical principles to compute its results, which we're then supposed to accept as something we can just inject into general relativity. However, we know those theories don't go together very well, and I would certainly consider trying to create "warp bubbles" as an extremal condition for the combination of the two, so we shouldn't take such a combination too seriously. Not necessarily unseriously simply on the basis of this one thing... I believe Hawking's initial computations for black hole radiation plays a bit fast and loose with this distinction, albeit in a somewhat principled way, so it's not an immediate disqualifier. But it's definitely a Spock-eyebrow-raise and a "hmmmmm?" Personally, I wouldn't be surprised that when we get the real theory of quantum gravity, if we ever do, that a lot of these "oh, look at this solution for general relativity!" obscurities go away, like wormholes, cosmic strings, the place in the Kerr metric that seems to lead to a new universe or some other exotic thing [1], singularities in general, and quite possibly, warp bubbles and other crazy solutions. This is the Occam's Razor, most parsimonious solution to the question "why is it that we look out in the universe and the craziest general relativity thing we see is black holes?"... the rest of these things are artifacts of the approximation that is general relativity. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_metric#Kerr_black_holes_as_wormholes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_metric#Kerr_black_holes_a...
- sam0x17 5y ago> Personally, I wouldn't be surprised that when we get the real theory of quantum gravity, if we ever do, that a lot of these "oh, look at this solution for general relativity!" obscurities go away In particular, I've thought dark matter is in this category of "bad theory rounding error" since I learned about general relativity and quantum mechanics in high school.
- nostromo 5y agoI don't get the excitement for the Alcubierre drive. It requires negative mass, something that doesn't exist. (It's not like dark matter, something we know exists but don't understand -- it is something that we have no evidence for its existence at all.) I feel like they were just playing with models, entered a nonsensical value (negative value for mass), and discovered a warp drive. If you're going to do that, just enter negative time and invent time travel while you're at it.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> negative mass, something that doesn't exist We don’t know this. And this isn’t a “can’t prove a negative” argument. The origin of mass is frontier physics. More directly, one can explore why negative mass is needed, and whether there are other phenomena that produce that effect. Worst case: the math is interesting.
- WJW 5y agoIt's not so strange to understand the excitement when you think about how many people would really REALLY like FTL travel to be possible. Not only does it invoke romantic ideas about exploring the stars and lets people dream about becoming captain of their own starship on day, it also helpfully distracts from having to confront the extremely difficult social issues that hinder saving the Earth from it's myriad problems. Without FTL you take all those dreams away, so it's no wonder people are extremely interested in anything that even looks like a "solution".
- zionic 5y agoDoes it require negative _mass_ or negative space-time compression? We know gravity waves exist, so space time can oscillate between 0 and N where N is positive right? Are we so sure there is not a -N < 0 < N? Not even close to an expert in this stuff.
- mabbo 5y agoThey explain part of that in the article > Today, however, it’s recognized that what’s needed isn’t necessarily negative mass or negative energy; that was simply the way that Alcubierre recognized one could induce the needed “opposite type” of curvature to space from what normal mass or energy causes. There's other options, and also we aren't 100% certain negative mass/energy can't exist (but probably not...) Edit: changed my tone because I was being a snarky jerk.
- q-big 5y ago> No, we didn’t accidentally create a warp bubble. ... we consciously did.
- GenerocUsername 5y agoDark matter is obviously latent gravity acting across the time axis
- at_a_remove 5y agoI only managed a BSc in Physics, although I did get to take grad-level G&R. My stance is the following: I do not care what your proposed method is for FTL, tell me how the paradoxes allowed by closed timelike curves will be resolved. No, just bundling all of it into a black-box general AI "cosmic censor" is not sufficient, that's just an abstraction saying not to worry about it. Yes, it ruins most of our fun space opera. Oh well.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoA bunch of nonsense thought from someone who reads too much sci-fi: > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29569437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29569437 In other words, it's perfectly ok to change the past and the universe doesn't so much self-censor as timelines always ultimately loop in some kind of meta-time back into each other. Another way to think of it is that it self-censors in the way that a delayed choice quantum eraser experiment does. The timelines which do not ultimately form part of a stable meta-loop structure destructively interfere with each other. Feel free to point out all the ways in which this is nonsense by the way. I love this sort of education through correction of ignorant armchair supposition.
- ben_w 5y agoWell, QM allows superposition and entanglement, why not just have you and your grandfather be in an entangled superposition of |alive> and |dead> corresponding to each part of the sequence in the classical eponymous paradox? That said, I read a plausible claim that a CTC would have an unstable buildup of energy in the form of the wavefunctions of virtual particles self-reinforcing, so I suspect it’s more likely that trying to build a time machine would instead result in unbounded energy, and that being a possibility is generally considered a sign that somebody made a mistake.
- Exendroinient 5y agoSounds like a normal day in the science journalism. The same case was with the ""earth-like planets"" headlines even though some were unconfirmed and the only data known about them was their orbit, mass to a certain degree and star, which in most cases was small and very active. In the media outlets there weren't any information about the host star and the fact that most of those planets were tidally locked. Besides all of that, they were still calling them earth-like planets.
- koheripbal 5y agoThe reality is that Earth like planets probably exist in great numbers, but we lack the technology to see them since they are small and relatively far from their host star.
- tsimionescu 5y agoWhy do you think this is 'probable'? It's certainly possible, no doubts about that, but why do you believe there is a greater than 0.5 probability of it?
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoA quick Google says that there are an estimated two trillion galaxies, each with an estimated 100 billion stars on average, with an average of 1 planet per star. That means there's an estimated 200 trillion billion planets. Don't you think it's incredibly improbable that our Earth is the only one?
- tsimionescu 5y agoI think that's impossible to estimate, at least for some definitions of "Earth-like".
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoIt's impossible to estimate a total number, for sure, but I think it's perfectly reasonable to believe that there's at least 1 other Earth-like planet in the universe.