Flying to the stars is a long-standing dream of humanity. However, the distances to them are so great, and the speed of any technical means known to us is so low that it seems as if the dream will forever remain an artsy fantasy. And, nevertheless, physicists have an idea how to deceive the laws of nature and break out into the interstellar space.
LIMIT SPEED
Until the beginning of the 17th century, it was believed that light spreads instantly. Contrary to this opinion, the great Galileo Galilei believed that he had a certain speed, and even invented an experiment with a lantern to measure it, but he did not succeed. As a result, it was first measured by the Danish astronomer Olaf Roemer, who in 1676 observed the eclipses of Io, the moon of Jupiter, and found that the time between eclipses becomes shorter when the distance from this giant planet to Earth decreases, and more when it increases. He realized that the difference is due to the speed of light, which "travels" a greater distance when Jupiter recedes, and was able to easily calculate it. Roemer, of course, was mistaken in determining the exact value, but he correctly established the order - 214,000 km / s.
Later physicists carried out many other measurements and by the beginning of the twentieth century established: the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,910 km / s - this was already close to the modern value. But no one could even imagine that it is the ultimate for our Universe.
In 1905, Albert Einstein accepted as a postulate for his special theory of relativity (SRT) not only the statement that the speed of light is the maximum possible, but also that it is invariant, that is, it does not depend on the movement of the light source or on the frame of reference observer. Unusual consequences followed from this. For example, it turned out that the closer the speed of an object to the speed of light, the slower its time flows and the more significant the mass becomes. That is, no material body can accelerate to the speed of light, otherwise its mass will become infinite.
PARADOX OF TELEPORTATION
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So, the speed of light is limiting, and even the light reaches the nearest star Proxima Centauri in only 4.2 years. If we use modern rocket technologies, the record of which remains the speed of 20 km / s, then it will take more than 70 thousand years to get there! It is clear that with such a time frame, there is no need to talk seriously about expeditions to the nearest stars.
Yet seeking minds almost immediately tried to find a way to overcome speed limits. One of these ways could be teleportation.
Interestingly, the idea of decomposing objects into atoms with their subsequent recreation was invented even before the discussion about the technical reality of teleportation arose in principle. We find it in the story of the American Edward Mitchell "The Man Without a Body", published back in 1877. Then it was believed that science has learned the structure of molecules and atoms, so the writer believed that it would be easy to recreate an object disassembled into elementary "bricks". In the twentieth century, the idea turned out to be in demand by science fiction writers, and today it is difficult to imagine a work about interstellar flights in which there would be no teleportation.
As for science, before physicists philosophers thought about the probable consequences of teleportation. Suppose, they said, a teleport disassembles a person into atoms, then information about them is transmitted to Mars, and there another teleport collects a person from local materials. Can a person on Mars be considered the same person who entered the teleport on Earth? It turned out that there are no criteria sufficient for identifying a person, that is, until we establish what material basis the “soul” has, it is premature to talk about the applicability of the teleport.
But if you use it to send items? And not everything is simple here! The uncertainty principle, discovered by Werner Heisenberg, forbids accurate measurement of all characteristics of a particle: for the numerical fixation of one characteristic, one has to “sacrifice” another, so we can never fully describe an object at an elementary level.
Then scientists thought about the possibility of using the features of quantum mechanics for teleportation. As you know, there is quantum entanglement - a phenomenon in which the quantum states of objects are interdependent, even if the objects themselves are separated in space by a huge distance. Of course, with the help of quantum entanglement one cannot transmit matter or energy, but it is possible to transmit information, and at a speed … much higher than light! In practice, it looks like this. You have an object that is entangled with an object that is sent to Mars. You change the quantum state of your object, after which the state of the object on Mars instantly changes accordingly.
Experiments on quantum teleportation have been carried out since 1997, and today even a kind of record has been set for the translation of the states of photons at 143 km. The successes of physicists are impressive, but still nature has not yet succumbed to their pressure: to decipher the meaning of a message received in this way, additional information is needed, which is transmitted over a conventional radio channel.
BUBBLE ALCUBIERRE
Another idea of how to deceive the laws of nature was invented by the Soviet physicist Sergei Snegov in the fantastic trilogy People are Gods, published in the second half of the 1960s. The "Tanev engines" described by him were able to actively influence space, converting vacuum into matter, due to which the characters were able to develop arbitrarily high speed.
Something similar was suggested many years later by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In his 1994 paper “Warp Drive: Ultra-Fast Travel in General Relativity,” he described a method of warping space that theoretically makes it possible to accelerate faster than light. The hypothetical engine forms a kind of "bubble" ("warp sphere"), behind which ordinary space will expand, and in front of it will contract. In fact, in the local volume, the model of the early youth of the Universe is being recreated, when the very fabric of space was expanding. However, it takes exotic negative energy to place a spaceship in a bubble. It, in turn, can be generated due to the Casimir effect, which generates virtual particles.
Of course, there are also problems. Physicists have calculated that to create a "bubble" of sufficient size, ordinary energy is required, the power of which is comparable to that which would be obtained by converting the entire mass of Jupiter into energy. Despite this, a group was formed at the NASA space agency, led by physicist Harold White, who has been working hard since 2011 to improve the idea of a warp drive and managed to configure a "bubble" into a "disk", due to which the required energy costs were reduced to acceptable quantities. Moreover, it is announced that in the foreseeable future his group is going to launch a prototype warp drive that uses powerful lasers to form a "disk".
It is noteworthy that in parallel with the physicists, the artist-designer Mark Redmaker is working on the concept of the superluminal starship, dubbed the IXS Enterprise - his drawings and paintings help to better understand the depth of the technical problems that will have to be solved by engineers if the warp drive is built. According to calculations, the starship will be able to cover the distance to Proxima Centauri in just two weeks.
While there is no firm certainty that the Harold White group will succeed, but we can say for sure: scientists will not give up trying to deceive the existing laws of physics and find a way to get to the stars.
Anton Pervushin
