A Real Life Warp Drive

A team of physicists has reported the accidental discovery of a real-world "warp bubble" whilst observing the structure of Casimir cavities – a small step towards building a potential warp drive.

The Debrief reports that Dr. Harold G. "Sonny" White and his team stumbled upon the existence of a warp bubble whilst conducting DARPA-funded research into Casimir cavities and the energy density present in those structures. White acknowledged the significance of the fluke findings but asserted that it was only a small step forward in regards to actually building a warp drive.

"Our detailed numerical analysis of our custom Casimir cavities helped us identify a real and manufacturable nano/microstructure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble, not an analog, but the real thing," White explained in a statement to the publication.

He emphasized that the findings recorded by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team centered around "a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble" as opposed to a warp bubble analog, and confirmed that the structure "predicts negative energy density distribution that closely matches requirements for the Alcubierre metric," hence the significance of the observation.

IGN previously referred to the Alcubierre metric and the possibility of warp drives becoming a reality, as Space.com noted that "a concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy."  READ MORE...

Leaving NASA

Warp Drive Inc
Traveling at faster than the speed of light has been the subject of countless works of science fiction. Most notably, the “warp drive” in “Star Trek” allowed cosmic travelers to break the lightspeed barrier to traverse vast galactic distances.

In the real world, research into potential warp drive technologies has been slow, but significant enough to attract the interest of NASA and even a handful of independent ventures.


Take Harold “Sonny” White, a big name in warp drive research who left NASA in 2019 to work at a Houston-based nonprofit called the Limitless Space Institute — where, he says, he was allowed by NASA to continue his work and even take his lab equipment with him.

“Yeah, I have a lab here full of all my goodies from NASA,” White told The Debrief in a fascinating new interview. But the engineer didn’t burn any bridges in the process, adding that “we have a Space Act agreement with the agency.”


Leaving NASA
It sounds like NASA is pretty chill with White continuing his work elsewhere.

Sonny said that “when I was working in NASA, we really didn’t try to go through and patent anything.”

“Probably a little too early to try and really work towards patenting anything,” he told The Debrief. “I mean, there may be a time it’s right to do that, but there wasn’t at NASA.”

Where the transition leaves White’s progress on realizing a new form of propulsion that could allow humans to travel past the speed of light remains somewhat murky (although The Debrief says it’s going to publish two more installments of its interview with White, so stay tuned.)  READ MORE