Alternative to chemical engines --- warp?

[K^2]

Unless you, you know, quite obviously DON'T carry all the equipment required to GET the negative matter.

There are no matter states with negative energy, so you can't. You can only get negative energy densities in a very specific environment, which means you have to haul all the equipment with you.

[KASASpace]

There are no matter states with negative energy, so you can't. You can only get negative energy densities in a very specific environment, which means you have to haul all the equipment with you.

According to what theory?

And what proof is there?

Personally, I don't care how much proof, either way I'm going to scrutinize the living crap out of it. Because if you know anything about science, than you at least understand that principle, right?

[Accelerando]

According to what theory?

And what proof is there?

Personally, I don't care how much proof, either way I'm going to scrutinize the living crap out of it. Because if you know anything about science, than you at least understand that principle, right?

There's a difference between scientific scrutiny and just whacking at something without considering how the other party might also be correct. Continually begging for "more proof" ad infinitum without ever entertaining the other's suggestion is pretty much the definition of being contrary for its own sake, and it's exactly what you are doing

on that note, this

Personally, I don't care how much proof, either way I'm going to scrutinize the living crap out of it.

pretty much is just saying "personally, I don't care how much proof, either way I'm going to find a way to disagree with you"

Edited April 16, 2014 by Accelerando

[KASASpace]

There's a difference between scientific scrutiny and just whacking at something without considering how the other party might also be correct. Continually begging for "more proof" ad infinitum without ever entertaining the other's suggestion is pretty much the definition of being contrary for its own sake, and it's exactly what you are doing

on that note, this

pretty much is just saying "personally, I don't care how much proof, either way I'm going to find a way to disagree with you"

Okay, so you have no idea what science is then?

Sometimes the OTHER people also don't entertain the idea that the other side is right, and the thing is, there never will be enough proof, because guess what, we don't know everything, and as such we can't just go assuming things willy nilly and say they are right. Anyone who does so does not even understand the simple aspects of the universe.

And no, it is not like saying that at all, it's called experimenting, and I suggest you look it up.

[Accelerando]

true, i am not a scientist, and i am not learned in science. i should not throw science jargon around. that said...

Sometimes the OTHER people also don't entertain the idea that the other side is right, and the thing is, there never will be enough proof, because guess what, we don't know everything, and as such we can't just go assuming things willy nilly and say they are right.

no one is saying that you have to say they are right. What I am saying is that in order to truly consider all possibilities is that you have to consider that the other party might be right.

because if it's always possible for someone to be wrong, then it's equally possible for all evidence you know, to be wrong  and thus, for the other side to be right. Whether or not the other person is willing to entertain your own point is irrelevant to whether or not their opinion is correct.

Telling yourself that you get to say everyone else is wrong by default, on the grounds that they might not say that you are right, or anyone else, is blaming others for your own bias. Experimentation or not, you are being arrogant and ignorant

[K^2]

According to what theory?

Same theory that predicts Warp Drives. And I really can't wait to see how you'll try to argue your way out of this one.

[Accelerando]

while i'm being off topic, reading k^2 posts about the scifi implications of physics is like a godsend to this aspirant writer. thanks wo/man

[Mazon Del]

One of the great things about the average scientist is that regardless of how devoted to their line of research they are, when someone else comes up with proof (math backed theories, experimental proof, etc) that what they were doing is clearly wrong and here is where your research went wrong and how to correct it, that the original scientist will (admittedly after a period of mumbling, double/tripple checking, some beer, etc) admit the other was right.

Improper scientists are the ones that just flat out declare something is impossible no matter what the conditions are.

[LaydeeDem]

Well, what we really have to do to get this warp drive off the ground is to invert the perpetual dampeners. This boosts the anti-handwavium flow through the quantum midichlorian reactor by a factor of 150%. Thus allowing the Technobabble drive to reach the translight barrier.

/sarcasm

Surprised how many people here take sensationalism as fact.

Edited April 16, 2014 by Nutt007

[Mazon Del]

I could never decide if it really was an accident about saying "light" instead of "sound" there, or if the person who wrote it did it on purpose as a joke.

[KASASpace]

Same theory that predicts Warp Drives. And I really can't wait to see how you'll try to argue your way out of this one.

Hmm, last time I checked, there was no mention of such things, only that it could be done.

[KASASpace]

true, i am not a scientist, and i am not learned in science. i should not throw science jargon around. that said...

no one is saying that you have to say they are right. What I am saying is that in order to truly consider all possibilities is that you have to consider that the other party might be right.

because if it's always possible for someone to be wrong, then it's equally possible for all evidence you know, to be wrong  and thus, for the other side to be right. Whether or not the other person is willing to entertain your own point is irrelevant to whether or not their opinion is correct.

Telling yourself that you get to say everyone else is wrong by default, on the grounds that they might not say that you are right, or anyone else, is blaming others for your own bias. Experimentation or not, you are being arrogant and ignorant

Oh, I am very well considering they might be right. I am simply saying there's more than one side of the coin.

And, what if we're BOTH wrong, than it's still equally possible that two out of the three are wrong.

Those last two lines make no sense whatsoever.

[LaydeeDem]

I get the feeling this discussion would actually get somewhere if both sides did some reading.

[K^2]

I get the feeling this discussion would actually get somewhere if both sides did some reading.

That article is fairly useless if you don't know some basic General Relativity already. It does deliver one important point, however. That while Alcubierre Metric is fairly straight forward for computations, it's not practical, as it requires impossible amounts of energy to work with. There are other metrics, though, which reduce the energy requirements to quite plausible levels, and there is no reason why there can't be metrics bringing it down even further. Discussion on negative energy in that article is very limited, and that's been a big part of discussion here. The other part is trajectory taken by the ship under warp drive under influence of gravitational field, and that requires far more serious math than what's presented in the article. (I've discussed some of that in other threads on the topic.)

[Mazon Del]

KASASpace: You say that you are considering the other side, but so far you have seemed to indicate that while there is another side to the coin, it is clearly wrong. Period.

What he is saying in the first of the last two lines is that in a debate such as this, if you insist that your opponent (in this case, that warp drive is real and works) is/can be wrong, then you MUST recognize the possibility that your side (in this case, that warp drive cannot work at all) is/can be wrong as well. If you do not admit this possibility, then you are not debating from the field of science, you are debating from the field of blind belief and nothing you say actually helps science.

In the second of the last two lines he is saying that if you declare your opponent wrong because you feel he might say your side is wrong is not science or debate. It is the debate equivalent of plugging ones ears and declaring "lalala-I'm-not-listening" any time your opponent correctly counters a point you bring up against their side.

Science is not advanced by declarations of impossibility. If you walk into an experiment 'knowing' the answer your data is going to tell you, then you will at some level force your data to give you the answer you 'know' rather than drawing conclusions from the data. Anybody can be prone to this on any side of an experiment. This is one of the reasons why the debate about violent video games causing violence is cloudy. It is seen as such a simple premise to test that anybody can organize an experiment. You just need some observers, some kids, and some violent video games. And BECAUSE anybody can run this experiment, you get thousands of studies that do, and you get thousands of studies that are proven to be improperly administered. For example, a study where the observer counts how many 'violent' actions the child takes after an hour of violent video games. But there is no count of helping/peaceful actions. Therefor, if the child does even 1 violent action, case proven! At the level of something like that topic, the solution is what is called a meta-study. One where instead of performing the experiment, every experiment that WAS run is examined. Any that do not fulfill the definitions of a properly administered study (double blinds, control groups, no tossing conflicting data, etc) are discarded. Only the studies that fulfill these requirements are examined.

As an offtopic note: A relatively recent meta-study stated that of the thousands of studies done that concluded that violent video games make violent behavior, almost every one of them was found to be an improperly administered study. The only ones that were properly administered, they came to the conclusion that any violence was within the normal behavioral range of a child and therefor could not be attributed to the games, except in cases of developmentally challenged children. Almost every study that concluded that violent video games had no effect (far fewer in number) or even positive effects were valid experiments. And note, some of those valid experiments were set up with the intention of proving that violence followed the games, and when they observed their data they concluded it did not have any measureable affect and they accepted that.

That is proper science. Taking an experiment, examining the data, and if you are proven wrong, you accept that you are wrong. Maybe you run some more experiments, trying to see why you were wrong as your procedure could have been incorrect. But in the end, real scientists accept what properly gained data shows them and they NEVER declare something is impossible. This is why everything is "Theory this" or "Theory that", because at any instant an experiment might prove them wrong. Scientific Laws are not even ironclad, as they declare that under X, Y, Z conditions, A, B, C are always true. If you find something that goes against this, it is not because the law was false, it is just that your experiment was operating under W, X, Y, Z conditions. Different conditions lead to different results.

That having been said, matter in standard space time curves cannot move FTL, that much at the moment our understanding declares to be true. Matter in non-standard space time can operate completely differently without declaring my previous statement false.

[KASASpace]

KASASpace: You say that you are considering the other side, but so far you have seemed to indicate that while there is another side to the coin, it is clearly wrong. Period.

What he is saying in the first of the last two lines is that in a debate such as this, if you insist that your opponent (in this case, that warp drive is real and works) is/can be wrong, then you MUST recognize the possibility that your side (in this case, that warp drive cannot work at all) is/can be wrong as well. If you do not admit this possibility, then you are not debating from the field of science, you are debating from the field of blind belief and nothing you say actually helps science.

In the second of the last two lines he is saying that if you declare your opponent wrong because you feel he might say your side is wrong is not science or debate. It is the debate equivalent of plugging ones ears and declaring "lalala-I'm-not-listening" any time your opponent correctly counters a point you bring up against their side.

Science is not advanced by declarations of impossibility. If you walk into an experiment 'knowing' the answer your data is going to tell you, then you will at some level force your data to give you the answer you 'know' rather than drawing conclusions from the data. Anybody can be prone to this on any side of an experiment. This is one of the reasons why the debate about violent video games causing violence is cloudy. It is seen as such a simple premise to test that anybody can organize an experiment. You just need some observers, some kids, and some violent video games. And BECAUSE anybody can run this experiment, you get thousands of studies that do, and you get thousands of studies that are proven to be improperly administered. For example, a study where the observer counts how many 'violent' actions the child takes after an hour of violent video games. But there is no count of helping/peaceful actions. Therefor, if the child does even 1 violent action, case proven! At the level of something like that topic, the solution is what is called a meta-study. One where instead of performing the experiment, every experiment that WAS run is examined. Any that do not fulfill the definitions of a properly administered study (double blinds, control groups, no tossing conflicting data, etc) are discarded. Only the studies that fulfill these requirements are examined.

As an offtopic note: A relatively recent meta-study stated that of the thousands of studies done that concluded that violent video games make violent behavior, almost every one of them was found to be an improperly administered study. The only ones that were properly administered, they came to the conclusion that any violence was within the normal behavioral range of a child and therefor could not be attributed to the games, except in cases of developmentally challenged children. Almost every study that concluded that violent video games had no effect (far fewer in number) or even positive effects were valid experiments. And note, some of those valid experiments were set up with the intention of proving that violence followed the games, and when they observed their data they concluded it did not have any measureable affect and they accepted that.

That is proper science. Taking an experiment, examining the data, and if you are proven wrong, you accept that you are wrong. Maybe you run some more experiments, trying to see why you were wrong as your procedure could have been incorrect. But in the end, real scientists accept what properly gained data shows them and they NEVER declare something is impossible. This is why everything is "Theory this" or "Theory that", because at any instant an experiment might prove them wrong. Scientific Laws are not even ironclad, as they declare that under X, Y, Z conditions, A, B, C are always true. If you find something that goes against this, it is not because the law was false, it is just that your experiment was operating under W, X, Y, Z conditions. Different conditions lead to different results.

That having been said, matter in standard space time curves cannot move FTL, that much at the moment our understanding declares to be true. Matter in non-standard space time can operate completely differently without declaring my previous statement false.

Oh, I am recognizing the other side may be right, in fact I rarely have said they were wrong, all I have been saying is that specific things may have advantages over others, be more efficient, or improbable, etc.

And I do admit the possibility they are right, it's just that I like to at least provide some semblance of the other side of the coin (which many times falls on deaf ears.......)

I never said they were wrong because I thought they were going to say that (still makes no sense)

I know how science works, in fact that's what I've been arguing the entire time, that experiments can be done that eventually proves things wrong.

I know that doing experiments is all about variable control, and many experiments of earlier eras had uncontrolled variables not recognized.

And I never said matter in standard space time curves can move FTL, however, that being said, is assuming that it is the true universal way of happening, as we never have moved anything near the speed of light yet.

[Mazon Del]

I wasn't saying that you said matter in normal space time can move FTL, I was just pointing out that so far that is something physicists agree upon, and that the conditions of an alcubierre warp drive are sufficiently different that the statement 'normal space time' no longer applies, thus requiring a whole new set of experiments and such in order to disprove.

Regardless, in general one of the great things about physics experiments is that it doesn't matter if they prove or disprove a hypothesis, they teach us more about the universe allowing us to get better at predicting things. So there really isn't much to lose from throwing budget at warp drive research, especially when there is the possibility that it pans out.