Sci-fi Writers Guild Forum

Mathematical details here
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936.pdf

The objections you raise are valid--especially the latter one, which involves communication between the spacecraft and the wavefront. Dr. White's approach claims to offer hope that the enormous energy requirements you mention can be by-passed using--you are correct--negative energy and--he claims--negative mass. However, negative energy is a little less controversial than you suggest--in some calculations, the Casimer effect does show negative energy.

The main problem with Dr. White's approach is that--except for the above paper which doesn't reveal how anything works in practice--he hasn't really published his results because of "non-disclosure" agreements. Who with? Well, apparently he can't disclose that either, because of the same agreements.

RIght now, this is appears to be a mathematical anomaly--an artifact of one possible metric that satisfies Einstein's basic equations. But we don't know that metric--or another, higher-dimensional one mentioned n White's paper above--actually describes how the universe works. We don't even know how to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity.


Max Griffin
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