Copasetic Flow

"Sure," I hear you saying, "Michael Gladych is cool and all, but what does this have to do with the history of physics?" Read on and find out how Gladych reported on the events that would fund Higgs Particle research as well as the relativistic framework that inspired the Alcubierre drive. The same events that inspired Nick Cook's antigravity classic, "The Hunt for Zero Point" The article that brought Mike Gladych to the attention of fringe physics buffs everywhere, “The G-Engines are Coming”, appeared in its first incarnation in the pages of the November, 1956 issue of American Modeler.  The article begins with the bold assertion that nuclear airplanes will be made obsolete—by the artificial control of gravity—before they ever leave the design phase.  It then goes on to state that many aircraft companies were currently engaged in the study of the control of gravitation including: Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Co., Convair, Bell Aircraft, Lear, Inc.,...

The Alcubierre drive works, (theoretically), by warping space 'downwards' in front of a spaceship and 'upwards' behind it, (picture 1). The net effect is that the spaceship always feels like it's free-falling through space.  We have to be careful not to let the spaceship approach either the upward or downward walls of the curved space shown above.  In these regions, gravity due to the curvature of space is changing rapidly, and will cause uneven forces, known as tidal forces, on different portions of the spaceship that can cause it to break apart.  That's where Alcubierre's tophat function comes in.  The tophat is the input to the operation that describes how space is warped by the drive.  It's nice, flat top becomes the flat area in the middle of the warp shown above where the spaceship can safely rest. In case you weren't there, here's the description of the tophhat function I provided in the last post on the Alcubierre drive [1], (s...

I transferred yesterday's Mathematica file with the Alcubierre warp drive[2] line element and space curvature calculations to the  +Sage Mathematical Software System  today, (the files been  added to the public repository [3]).  If you haven't used Sage before, it's a Python based software package that's similar in functionality to Mathematica.  Oh, and it' free.  I also worked a little more on understanding the theory, but frankly, I made far more progress with the software than the theory.  What follows will be a little more of the Alcubierre theory, plus, a cool Sage interactive demo of one of the Alcubierre functions[1], as well as a bit about my first experience with using Sage. Theory The theory is fun, but it's moving slowly.  Here's the chalk board from this morning's discussion Alcubierre setup the derivation using something called the 3+1 formalism which means we consider space to be flat, (in this case), slices that are labelled ...

I was able to play with the Alcubierre warp drive derivations for a bit today!  I'm still trying to absorb all the niceties, but here's what I understand so far.  I'm just getting started on all of this and everything is very shaky.  So, please, anyone who happens to be familiar with oh, I don't know, the 3+1 formalism of GR say, please feel free to jump in.  Actually the more involvement the merrier, whether it be with suggestions, corrections, or questions. Which brings up the Alcubierre github repository [1].  I went ahead and made an open access github project that for the moment holds only a mathematica file with the derivation details I've been able to compile so far, a wiki, and one open issue, (the space curvature graph looks a little too jaggy).  Here's the graph by the way, king of the 'Hello World' moment for Alcubierre work I suppose, (picture 1): I'd hoped to have more to say about this tonight, but hopefully I can check in again...