Through the Wormhole— Can we travel faster than light? The universe is all of breathtaking sites, depths through powerful telescopes, but will we ever travel to these places and wonder, and see them with our own eyes? Now scientists are designing warp drives, learning how to pry open wormholes, and looking for cracks in the fabric of the cosmos. To bring the entire universe within our grasps, they must break the fundamental laws of physics. Can we travel faster than light? Space, time, life itself. The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole. Humans have always gazed up at the stars. For thousands of years we thought they were as close as the sun and the moon, almost close enough to reach out and touch. But now, we know just how vast the universe is. The closest star is about 25 trillion miles (25,000,000,000,000 miles = 4.02336e16 meters) away. The fastest spacecraft we have today would take more than 10,000 years to get there. To become true citizens of the cosmos, we have to do something that physics says is impossible; we have to travel faster than a beam of light. As a child, I loved to be out under the Mississippi night sky, warming myself by a campfire. I’d spend hours staring at the dancing flames. What was this light made of? I wondered how it could seem solid, but then vanish into nothingness. Shawn Carol is a theoretical physicist from the California Institute of Technology. The mysterious nature of light gets his mind racing. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, or 670 million miles per hour. Nothing goes faster than the speed of light; it really is the maximum speed limit for everything in the universe. Light travels a million times faster than sound. It’s fast enough to travel the earth 7 times in just one second; but the mystery of light goes much deeper than its breathtaking speed. The way it moves is different from everything else in the universe. We’re gonna pretend for the moment that I am not a respectable citizen, and will do a little bit of littering; we are going to add the velocity of my car, which is 30 miles an hour, and if I throw this slurpee in the same direction at 20 miles an hour, since this is an ordinary, everyday event, the total velocity of the slurpee is actually going to be 50 miles per hour. If I’m going backwards at 30 miles an hour and I throw the slurpee forward at 20, someone on the road will see the slurpee move backwards 10 miles an hour. The speed of Shawn’s car changes the velocity of Shawn’s beverage, but light isn’t governed by the same laws that govern cold drinks. When I push a beam of light out of the car, the total velocity is always the speed of light. Light would seem to be moving at the same speed no matter what my car was doing. You don’t add the speed of light to the speed of the car. The speed of light is always the speed of light. These strange rules for how light moves inspired Albert Einstein to rewrite the basic laws of the universe. He realized that space and time were not fixed and absolute, but connected and relative. It was an idea that led to the most famous equation in history, . Time and space are really part of one underlying thing called spacetime, and how you divide up spacetime into time and space depends on how you’re moving, so there are various corollaries of that. Once Einstein realized that time and space were the same thing. He realized that energy and mass are the same thing. implies that the more energy you inject into a rocket, the more mass it gains, and the more massive it is, the harder it is to accelerate. Boosting it to the speed of light is impossible because in the process, the rocket will become infinitely massive. The energy it takes to accelerate increases and increases as you come closer to the speed of light. If in principle you wanted to go the speed of light, you need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate you that fast. So you’re going to get more and more energy, but you’re not going to get that much more speed. Relativity makes light both our friend and foe. Its tremendous speed lets us communicate between any two points on earth almost instantaneously. On the other hand, because we could never move faster than light, we’re stranded in the Solar System with the stars, and possibly our land. This man believes he can help us escape our cosmic prison. He thinks he’s found a way to bend Einstein’s rules, and allow us to reach the stars. Miguel Alcubierre, a physicist in Mexico City, has invented the warp drive. The warp drive is a way to get from one place to another that is very different from the way we normally do it. So, normally we just move through space like we walk or we fly or whatever, but the warp drive theorists use space, lets space do the motion. Miguel’s idea stems from another aspect of Einstein’s theory of relativity, that the shape of space can be distorted by mass or energy. So the basic idea is, you expand space behind you – this actually makes you further away from the objects behind you, and contract space in front of you, getting closer to the objects in front of you, but you don’t move at all. See this is a spaceship. Normally you would have to fly through space like that, and you cannot do this faster than the speed of light. But instead of that, let us contract space here, and expand it here, like this. Now you see, the spaceship is getting closer to this side, and further away from that side, but it’s actually not moving at all with respect to the objects around it. The beauty of Miguel’s idea is that the spaceship actually stands still inside the bubble of spacetime. Since it’s not moving, it doesn’t gain any mass. And you can actually go at any speed because there are no limits in the laws of physics that tells you how fast you can warp space. You can do it at any speed you want. Miguel’s warp drive is an ingenius way around Einstein’s cosmic speed limit, but it’s still theoretical, and lacks one crucial ingredient: an exotic substance called negative energy, something that many scientists aren’t even sure exists. But one man does believe in negative energy. He even claims that he created it in his lab. The warp drive. It sounds like science fiction, but the idea of surfing across the universe in a warping bubble of space would make perfect sense to Einstein. There is one snag. A warp drive can only function with a mysterious power source, negative energy. And today, most scientists believe negative energy is just an unproven theoretical concept. But Steve Lamoreaux, an atomic physicist at Yale University, has made it his mission to track down this exotic form of energy, and he believes the answer is all around us in the fabric of space itself. We normally think of the vacuum of space as being completely empty, but in fact there’s energy density in empty space, and we call that the zero point energy of space. The theory of quantum mechanics predicts that empty space is actually constantly shimmering with microscopic pulses of energy, as particles pop in and out of existence. To make negative energy you have to find a way to suppress this constant chatter. Steve realized the way to do this was to change the shape of space. There’s a nice analogy: You have two ships on a rough ocean. One ship will tend to reflect waves from it, the other one does the same thing, so the wave density between the two ships is a little bit less compared to one left by itself which is surrounded by a rough sea. So if you put two ships on a rough sea, they’ll be mutually attracted, and they’ll come together. Steve reasoned that if he created a narrow enough region of empty space like the area between the two ships, then some of the shimmering 0 point energy would not fit inside it. The energy of empty space outside the narrow region would be stronger, and force it to shrink. That force would be the signature of negative energy, and Steve set out to create it in his lab. It was an idea that would consume him for more than a decade. We call the experiment the Time Machine, actually the Time Machine 2, this is the second version of the experiment. We call it that because I invested 15 years of my life in this major-ment. That’s a lot of time. It’s a time-wasting machine, more accurately defined. Inside this vacuum chamber are two small metal plates sitting less than the width of a human hair apart from one another. To get them that close, and not touch, the metal has to be perfectly flat, down almost to the atomic level. The 0 point fluctuations of free space won’t fit between those plates as well, so when we bring these two plates together, there are fewer fluctuations between the plates than there are outside the plates.