NASA Flouts Einstein, Explores Feasibility Of Interstellar Travel
From: Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk (Stig Agermose)
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 20:02:57 -0800
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Found at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/examiner/article.cgi?year=1997&month=08&day=11&article=NEWS378.dtl
The text speaks for itself, but the NASA link at the end doesn't work. ---Stig
Monday, Aug. 11, 1997 … Page A 1 ©1997 San Francisco Examiner
NASA flouts Einstein, explores feasibility of interstellar journeys
Key to star treks may be found in science fiction
Keay Davidson
EXAMINER SCIENCE WRITER
In a development straight out of "Star Trek," NASA is looking seriously
at the feasibility of flight to the stars.
Way-out schemes for traveling to the nearest stars are being assessed
by scientists and engineers as part of a low-profile, micro-budget NASA
program, dubbed Breakthrough Propulsion Physics.
Wormholes, warp drives and other means for interstellar flight - long
staples of science fiction - may become science fact, if the
researchers get their way.
Tuesday through Thursday, more than 80 employees of the space agency
and space-related industries will gather at NASA's Lewis Research
Center in Cleveland to hear 14 scientists and engineers discuss ways to
achieve interstellar flight.
Possibilities include the generation of so-called wormholes, something
akin to rips in the fabric of space and time. Some physicists have
speculated that a spaceship passing through a rip might emerge in a
distant part of the cosmos.
"We don't even know if these things are physically possible," said the
program's chief and sole full-time employee, aerospace engineer Marc
Millis of NASA-Lewis.
But, Millis added hopefully: "Progress is not made by conceding
defeat."
Why go to the stars? Among other things, to find habitable planets for
humanity, Millis said.
"Imagine if we could give citizens access to a whole nother planet
Earth," said Millis, 37. "Imagine if there were an uninhabited planet
suitable enough to live on."
The main barrier to interstellar flight remains Albert Einstein's
theory of relativity, which forbids travel at speeds faster than light
- 186,000 miles per second.
The nearest stars, other than the sun, are four light-years away. A
light-year is 6 trillion miles, the distance that light travels in a
year. Because of the Einsteinian limit, a spaceship would need at least
four years to reach the closest stars, Proxima Centauri and Alpha
Centauri.
Two scheduled speakers come from the Bay Area - Raymond Chiao of the
UC-Berkeley physics department and astrophysicist Bernhard Haisch of
Lockheed Missiles & Space Co.'s office in Palo Alto.
Haisch is expected to discuss the possibility of space propulsion using
something called "the momentum of the quantum vacuum." Chiao plans to
discuss how laboratory experiments suggest that under certain
circumstances, photons - particles of light - appear to travel "at an
effective speed of 1.7 times the speed of light."
The program has official liaisons at a number of NASA centers around
the nation - for example, Larry Lemke at NASA's Ames Research Center in
Mountain View.
The proposed technologies "are extremely long shots," cautions one
enthusiast, John Cole. He is manager of space transportation research
at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, which funds the
program at Lewis.
"Theories of this type have cropped up perpetually from time to time,"
Cole said, "and usually wind up not leading anywhere. . . . But if we
don't look, we certainly will never find anything."
And the time may be right.
"People, particularly young people, are sort of rejecting the
claustrophobic position that we are locked in this solar system without
any chance at all of going to others," said Whitt Brantley, chief of
the advanced concepts office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in
Alabama.
But not everyone at NASA is pleased by talk about star ships.
Within the space agency, "the reactions completely cover the entire
spectrum," Cole said. "There are those that believe we are about to get
NASA embarrassed with some ideas that can't possibly be achieved.
"And there are others that are just delighted that NASA is finally
open-minded enough, and (has) enough courage - and encouragement from
the administrator (Daniel Goldin) - to pursue these things," Cole
added.
Brantley interjected: "If you look back in history before great
discoveries were made, there were great minds trying to show they were
impossible."
How did an agency packed with conservative engineers get interested in
interstellar flight?
For one thing, NASA Administrator Goldin made the once-taboo topic
acceptable by publicly speculating about it.
Also, recent research published "in credible, peer-reviewed
(scientific) literature" has made interstellar flight seem more
feasible than it did decades ago, Millis said.
For example, the warp drive plan is based on an idea proposed by Miguel
Alcubierre, an astrophysicist from the University of Wales. He
published the method in 1994 in a little-known scientific journal
called "Classical and Quantum Gravity."
According to one theory of warp drive, one could get around Einstein's
speed limit for matter by moving the space around the matter. The
space, being non-material, could exceed the speed of light - or so the
theory implies.
Larry Diehl, director of NASA-Lewis' research and technology
directorate, acknowledged with a chuckle that on the Internet, there
has been chatter about whether "we are looking to violate the laws of
physics. The answer, of course, is "no.'
"We haven't made any large-scale commitment to funding work in this
area. . . . (Still) if we don't continue to reach out and explore, I
don't feel that we make progress," said Diehl, an aerospace engineer
who has worked for the agency for three decades.
The program's current one-year budget is $50,000 - pennies by NASA's
usual gold-plated standards.
NASA has published the agenda for its conference on the World Wide Web
at
www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/html/warp/bppconf.htm.
Index: Interstellar Travel
Created: Aug 13, 1997
