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Comment by gmartire | Hacker News Reader

Hey all, I'm one of the authors of the paper Introducing Physical Warp Drives and a Y Combinator alum (YC W'14). This video does a great job explaining our paper and Erik's as there a few misunderstandings in this forum https://youtu.be/PA66ah9b0U4. We all know each other and all have the warp bug as we now have a path; it's just going to be difficult. If you would like to join our warp drive cohort, please email us a bit about yourself and your ideas for warp at create at appliedphysics dot org. Our cohort is composed of PhDs and engineers from several STEM disciplines, we meet weekly and have more papers in the works, perhaps you can join the fun! https://thedebrief.org/new-warp-drive-model-requires-no-exot...

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Do you have any thoughts on Lentz's comment that IPWD "made a rush to judgement" on his draft of Hyper-Fast []? Or has anything changed in your assessment between the draft and publication of his paper? (I did not see anything on his blog)

[] https://eriklentzphd.blogspot.com/2021/04/review-and-respons...

The version accepted in the journal clearly states that superluminal warp drives are physically unachievable because they violate the dominant energy condition. It means that superluminal drives require superluminal matter. This is in agreement with the conclusions in the IPWD paper. However, the version E.Lentz uploaded on arxiv or the press-release did not state this clearly.

If superluminal matter existed, would we know it?

In principle, yes, for sure, we could detect it. For example, it would still generate gravity and be uniquely identifiable this way. But then, superluminal matter breaks causality, allows sending signals back in time and, to the best of our knowledge, is unphysical.

Superluminal speed is called "instant" in physics.

Indeed, a superluminal object will appear to have an infinite velocity for some physical observers.

The superluminal speed is not an infinite speed, it's just faster than the speed of light, of course, but it called "instant". For example, a photon of light is emitted or absorbed "instantly", which is not true, obviously, because it means infinite speed of transition.

I do not understand how the proposed warp drive could help with moving a ship. It sounds more like a "time dilation device" to shorten the travel time for the crew than a setup to make moving through space actually easier.

Would you mind explaining?

A conclusion of this paper is that a warp bubble that fits into the categories described requires external propulsion.

I agree, the positive energy, spherically symmetric warp bubble isn't particularly interesting and certainly not a new effect.

I believe spherically symmetric bubbles in subluminal regime are more interesting than any warp drive solutions suggested so far. Firstly, they do not require negative energy. Secondly, the passengers in such bubbles age less by the time they reach any destination compared to other warp drives or conventional rockets. Given that exceeding the speed of light is fundamentally prohibited by physics, I would say that spherically symmetric warp drives are the most interesting warp drive constructions we got so far.

A conclusion of the paper is that any warp drive, including all the ones proposed in the literature, fits in the categories explained in the paper.

I think applied a few months ago. But i never got a rejection, i assumed ghosting was the way to tell me: no.

Great video!

How can you accumulate enough mass to make this possible without destabilizing the entire solar system? Even getting to the Oort Cloud to collect mass outside of our solar system is 3 light years away.

>We all know each other and all have the warp bug as we now have a path

What do you mean by that? Not to be a negative Nancy but the titles of both the paper and the video are a bit click-baity. None of this will be possible in our lifetime, the amounts of energy required are way too large, even if it could be engineered (which I have doubts about). Imo as a society we need to focus on getting off earth and establishing colonies in our own solar system first, before we can even start dreaming about going to other stars.

> society we need to focus on getting off earth...before we can even start dreaming about going to other stars.

How about people who are interested in warp physics study warp physics, and those interested in establishing off-world colonies spend their time on that persuit?

Fair. I certainly didn't mean that they shouldn't be able to study this. To use an analogy my point is more that it's similar to how early hominids "studied" going to the moon when they didn't even know how to make fire yet. It's an interesting idea to think about but was science fiction then, just like warp drives are today. Science fiction doesn't necessarily mean it's unscientific. But we don't know where to get the energy equivalent of 1/10th of the solar mass and somehow put it in a spaceship. It's absolutely not something we can work on solving even in theory right now.

What was your process for self-teaching yourself enough physics to work on a paper like this?

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