NASA Accidentally Discovers Warp Drive?

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http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/04/nasa-may-have-accidentally-developed-a-warp-drive/

“Star Trek” introduced the world outside of rocket science circles to the concept of warp drive â€" the propulsion system that allowed the starship Enterprise to travel faster than the speed of light. Warp speed is the holy grail that would let us explore the universe safely surrounded and protected by a space-distorting warp field. After watching the SpaceX rocket recently just try to land on a platform, you’d think this ability is years if not decades away. Yet the buzz on space websites is that NASA may have accidentally discovered a way to create a warp field. Wait, what?

To get around the theory of relativity, physicist Miguel Alcubierre came up with the concept of a bubble of spacetime which travels faster than the speed of light while the ship inside of it is stationary. The bubble contracts spacetime in front of the ship and expands it behind it. The warp drive would look like a football inside a flat ring. The tremendous amount of energy it would need made this idea prohibitive until Harold “Sonny” White of NASA’s Johnson Space Center calculated that making the ring into a donut shape would significant reduce the energy needs.



Meanwhile, in the lab, NASA and other space programs were working on prototypes of the EmDrive or RF resonant cavity thruster invented by British aerospace engineer Roger J. Shawyer. This propulsion device uses a magnetron to produce microwaves for thrust, has no moving parts and needs no reaction mass for fuel. In 2014, Johnson Space Center claimed to have developed its own low-power EmDrive.



Which brings us to today’s warp field buzz. Posts on NASASpaceFlight.com, a website devoted to the engineering side of space news, say that NASA has a tool to measure variances in the path-time of light. When lasers were fired through the EmDrive’s resonance chamber, it measured significant variances and, more importantly, found that some of the beams appeared to travel faster than the speed of light. If that’s true, it would mean that the EmDrive is producing a warp field or bubble. Here’s a comment from a space forum following the tests.

That’s the big surprise. This signature (the interference pattern) on the EmDrive looks just like what a warp bubble looks like. And the math behind the warp bubble apparently matches the interference pattern found in the EmDrive.
Another surprise is that the discovery was accidental, as this comment attests.

Seems to have been an accidental connection. They were wondering where this “thrust” might be coming from. One scientists proposed that maybe it’s a warp of the spacetime foam, which is causing the thrust.

What happens next? To prove that the warp effect was not caused by atmospheric heating, the test will be replicated in a vacuum. If the same results are achieved, it seems to mean that the EmDrive is producing a warp field, which could ultimately lead to the development of a warp drive.

What does that mean? I’ll let the physicists, propulsion experts and space scientists answer that. All I know is, it will cause a lot of wet seats at the next Star Trek convention.

[kilodelta]

I feel skeptical about this... I mean, I'd love to see some progress toward FTL. But, I just can't bring myself to give this article credit.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warp.html

[_Xenu_]

I dont know man. The Canna Drive was pretty recently mocked, until NASA finally tested the idea itself and accepted that it worked. I'm not saying warp drive is eminent or even possible, but there's still quite a bit we don't understand yet.

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Which is why there is a question mark in the title.

This from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive

EmDrive (also RF resonant cavity thruster) is a proposed spacecraft propulsion device invented by British aerospace engineer Roger J. Shawyer, who develops prototypes at Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd (SPR),[1] the company he created for that purpose in 2000.[2] New Scientist ran a cover story on EmDrive in its 8 September 2006 issue.[3] The device uses a magnetron to produce microwaves which are directed into a metallic, fully enclosed conically tapered high Q resonant cavity with a greater area at the large end of the device, and a dielectric resonator in front of the narrower end. The inventor claims that the device generates a directional thrust toward the narrow end of the tapered cavity. The device (engine) requires an electrical power source to produce its reflecting internal microwaves but does not have any moving parts or require any reaction mass as fuel. If proven to work as claimed, this technology could be used to propel vehicles intended for all forms of travel including ground travel, marine travel, sub-marine travel, airflight and spaceflight.[4][5][6][7][8][9]

The device, its mode of operation, and theories attempting to explain it are all controversial. As of 2015, there are still arguments about whether the EmDrive is genuinely a new propulsion device, or whether its experimental results are simply misinterpretations of spurious effects mixed with experimental errors. The proposed theories of its operation have all been criticized because they seem to violate the conservation of momentum, a fundamental law of physics, though Shawyer asserts that EmDrive does not.[10]

Chinese researchers from the Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU) in Xi'an in 2010, built and tested their own device based upon Shawyer's design, claiming to have replicated Shawyer's experiments, recording better results than Shawyer had claimed at even higher power levels,[7][11][12][13][14] though they were also clear that their work was still preliminary. Then at the Johnson Space Center in 2014 a NASA evaluation group also claimed replication at low power levels, measuring a directional thrust level in accord with Shawyer's experiments and claims.[9][15]

Obviously everything is preliminary, so the Vulcans aren't due to show up just yet. 

(edit) btw, upon further research it appears mysterious universe is not a woo mag, but certainly not rigorously scientific. They have articles on unexplained phenomena also.

[aitm]

I saw the word football and was intrigued……but….never mind

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