Warp six, Captain!

Being a skeptic and a scientist does not mean you are immune to the emotional side of life.

Well, at least I'm not.  It may well be that I was attracted to science as an antidote for the fact that I'm the kind of person who, under the least provocation, will get pretty overwrought about things.  Science seemed like an escape from having emotion swing me around by the tail all the time.

Still... there are times when my reaction even to a science story is more emotional than it is cerebral.  Consider, for example, the link my friend and fellow writer Andrew Butters (of the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math) sent me yesterday, which says that... scientists have created the first ever warp bubble.

My skeptical brain immediately gave it the wry eyebrow and said, "Well, maybe.  How many times have we had our hopes dashed before?".  On the other hand, my emotional brain started jumping up and down making excited little squeaking noises.  It's been my dearest wish since I was a kid either to have aliens visit (as long as they're not Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, or the Vashta Nerada), or to have practical interstellar flight and go there myself.  And ever since Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre showed back in 1994 that faster-than-light warp drive was at least theoretically possible, I've been desperately hoping that it would eventually become feasible as well.

Science adepts amongst my readership might be thinking, "Wait a second.  Doesn't the General Theory of Relativity forbid FTL travel outright?"  The answer, of course, is yes, but Alcubierre seems to have found a loophole; that you won't break the relativistic speed limit if the way you do it is by curving space behind and in front of you, creating a stretch in the fabric of space-time, and then riding that curve in much the way that a surfer rides a big wave.  (I know, it's way more complicated than that, but I'm not going to go into deeper details for the very good reason that the mathematics in the original paper loses me after the first paragraph.)

In any case, "theoretically possible" and "actually feasible" are two very different things, and the first analysis of Alcubierre's proposal found that it's completely impractical because it would take a phenomenal amount of energy to create the curvature needed.  It's a little like Archimedes's boast, "Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I could move the world."  Well, okay, Archie, but (1) that's a really fucking long lever, and (2) there is no place to stand.

But otherwise, works fine.

(N.B.: Yes, I know Archimedes was just trying to make a point about the usefulness of levers.  It applies just as well to issues of feasibility.  If he can use the example, so can I.)

Anyhow, all the "yes, buts" seemed to put Alcubierre's idea on the shelf -- until ten years later, when physicist Harold White reworked Alcubierre's equations and showed a way to accomplish warping space with far less energy.  Even so, the theory of creating a warp bubble seemed very far removed from practical application.  But now...

... White seems to have done it in the lab.

*brief pause to stop jumping up and down and squeaking*

[Image from LSI]

Working at the labs of Limitless Space Institute, White announced this week that he'd created a small, transient warp bubble that met the criteria laid out in his theoretical paper from fifteen years ago.  White said, "Our detailed numerical analysis of our custom Casimir cavities [a microscale structure in which the warp bubble supposedly occurred] helped us identify a real and manufacturable nano/microstructure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble, not an analog, but the real thing."

He cautioned that this was only a first-step proof-of-concept, that it didn't mean we'd be zooming off to Alpha Centauri day after tomorrow.  However, he said his experimental findings lined up so well with the theoretical predictions that it was impossible not to consider this a fantastic breakthrough.  "This is a potential structure we can propose to the community that one could build that will generate a negative vacuum energy density distribution that is very similar to what’s required for an Alcubierre space warp," White said.  "It is early to ask questions about some type of actual flight experiment.  In my mind, step one is to just explore the underlying science at the nano/micro scale.  Crawl, walk, run."

I just hope the "crawl" and "walk" stages move along, because dammit, I want to see this happen.  I'm 61, so at this point (unless we also get some serious life-lengthening strategies soon) I've got maybe thirty more years, forty if I'm really lucky and take after my Great-Aunt Clara, who lived to be 101.  I've been waiting for this ever since I was seven and first heard Captain Kirk say, "Warp six, Mr. Sulu!"

I'm trying my best not to get too worked up about it.  These things have a way of running into serious snags.  It's a little like the person who quipped, "Artificial intelligence is five years in the future, and always will be."  Even so, reading this was a rush.  Maybe it will come to naught; that's certainly happened before.  But maybe... just maybe... we've finally met the real Zefram Cochrane.

He's named Harold White.

*******************************

As I've mentioned before, I love a good mystery, which is why I'm drawn to periods of history where the records are skimpy and our certainty about what actually happened is tentative at best.  Of course, the most obvious example of this is our prehistory; prior to the spread of written language, something like five thousand years ago, most of what we have to go by is fossils and the remnants of human settlements.

Still, we can make some fascinating inferences about our distant ancestors.  In Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgely, we find out about some of the more controversial ones -- that there are still traces in modern languages of the original language spoken by the earliest humans (Rudgely calls it "proto-Nostratic"), that the advent of farming and domestication of livestock actually had the effect of shortening our average healthy life span, and that the Stone Age civilizations were far more advanced than our image of "Cave Men" suggests, and had a sophisticated ability to make art, understand science, and treat illness.

None of this relies on any wild imaginings of the sort that are the specialty of Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and Giorgio Tsoukalos; and Rudgely is up front with what is speculative at this point, and what is still flat-out unknown.  His writing is based in archaeological hard evidence, and his conclusions about Paleolithic society are downright fascinating.

If you're curious about what it was like in our distant past, check out Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Breaking the speed limit

I grew up watching television shows like Lost in Space and Star Trek, and the first movie I ever saw in the theater was 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I was about ten at the time, and it also stands out as the first time I ever heard an adult who wasn't a family member swear.  I watched the movie with the combination of awe and total bafflement that apparently is a common reaction to it, and as we were leaving the theater a thirty-something guy turned to me and said, "Kid, do you have any idea what the fuck that was about?"

I'm not sure why he thought a ten-year-old would have a decent chance of understanding a movie that flummoxed the majority of adults.  And in fact, I had no idea why HAL had gone off his rocker and killed most of the crew, why we spent a good fifteen minutes watching swirling rainbow colors superimposed on a man's eye blinking, nor why the main character got turned into a Giant Space Baby at the end.  So I just grinned and shrugged and said, "Nope."

He nodded, and looked relieved.  "Glad I'm not the only one."

Anyhow, having had a continuous diet of science fiction as a kid, I was seriously dismayed when I found out in my high school physics class that the speed of light was a hard-and-fast speed limit, and that superluminal travel was impossible.  Not just beyond our current technology, like Lost in Space's cryogenic hibernation tubes, or Star Trek's tricorders; but really impossible, a contradiction of the fundamental laws of physics, whereof even Chief Engineer Scott said ye canna break despite the fact that the entire crew broke multiple laws of physics every week and none of them ever seemed any the worse for it, except for the ones who had red shirts.

Anyhow, I was heartened to find out that there was nothing ruling out almost-light-speed travel, and in fact you can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light, just not over it.  (Again, I'm talking in a theoretical sense; the practical bit I'll deal with in a moment.)  But my hopes were dashed again when I got a sense of how big the universe actually is.  To take a round trip at the maximum speed to the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, would still take ten years.  And you get caught in the loopy time-dilation effects of General Relativity, even so; the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down for you relative to the people you left behind on Earth, and you'd get back from your ten-year trip to find that hundreds, or thousands, of years had passed on Earth.  The idea was riffed on in one of Queen's least-well-known but coolest songs, written by astrophysicist and lead guitarist Brian May, which -- when you realize what it's saying -- is devastatingly sad:

And things only get worse the farther out you go.  The star Vega, home of the advanced civilization in the movie Contact, is twenty-five light years away, so a round trip would be at least fifty years, and the relativistic effects even more pronounced.  I mean, I'd love to see what's out there, but I'd rather (1) survive long enough to make the return journey, and (2) not find the Earth ruled by hostile, super-intelligent monkeys when I get back.

Anyhow, the reason this comes up is because of some new work on what I'd call a warp-ish drive.  It's not the Alcubierre warp drive, about which I wrote eight years ago in what has turned out to be unjustifiably optimistic terms.  The Alcubierre model has three problems, of increasing difficulty: (1) even if it worked, it would expose the crew to lethal levels of radiation; (2) it requires an energy source larger than the Sun; and (3) it requires exotic matter capable of warping space both in front of and behind the spaceship, and we don't even know if the exotic matter exists.

But, Alcubierre said, if we could do it, we could scoot around General Relativity and achieve superluminal speeds.

That "if" has pretty much put the kibosh on research into the question, because even if turns out to be theoretically possible, the technical difficulties seem to be insurmountable.  But a paper in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity last week has scaled things down, back to almost-light-speed travel, and the designs they're coming up with are intriguing, to say the least.

The current paper, by Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire of Lund University, describes a set of solutions to the problem of near-light-speed travel that seem to be practical, even if the technology to achieve them is still currently out of reach.  The authors are cautious about how their work will be perceived by laypeople -- understandably, given the hype that has surrounded other such work.  "If you read any publications that claim we have figured out how to break the speed of light, they are mistaken," Martire said, in an interview with The Debrief.  "We [instead] show that a class of subluminal, spherically symmetric warp drive spacetimes, can be constructed based on the physical principles known to humanity today."

The encouraging thing is that they were able to show the feasibility of near-light-speed travel without recourse to some as-yet-undiscovered exotic matter with negative mass density.  And while we're back to most of the universe being still too ridiculously far away to reach, at least the nearer stars are potential candidates for study.  As Martire points out, "If we can send a probe to reach another star within ten years, it is still incredibly useful."

I can't help myself, though; even given my background in science, I'm still hoping for a loophole around the speed of light and General Relativity.  The idea of being able to get to nearby stars in a couple of weeks rather than a couple of decades is just too attractive.  I'm fully cognizant of how unlikely it is, though.

But maybe, just maybe, someday we'll find out that ye can break the laws of physics -- at least the ones we currently know about.  If so, I'll make sure not to wear a red shirt.

*********************************

The sad truth of our history is that science and scientific research has until very recently been considered the exclusive province of men.  The exclusion of women committed the double injury of preventing curious, talented, brilliant women from pursuing their deepest interests, and robbing society of half of the gains of knowledge we might otherwise have seen.

To be sure, a small number of women made it past the obstacles men set in their way, and braved the scorn generated by their infiltration into what was then a masculine world.  A rare few -- Marie Curie, Barbara McClintock, Mary Anning, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind -- actually succeeded so well that they became widely known even outside of their fields.  But hundreds of others remained in obscurity, or were so discouraged by the difficulties that they gave up entirely.

It's both heartening and profoundly infuriating to read about the women scientists who worked against the bigoted, white-male-only mentality; heartening because it's always cheering to see someone achieve well-deserved success, and infuriating because the reason their accomplishments stand out is because of impediments put in their way by pure chauvinistic bigotry.  So if you want to experience both of these, and read a story of a group of women who in the early twentieth century revolutionized the field of astronomy despite having to fight for every opportunity they got, read Dava Sobel's amazing book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.

In it, we get to know such brilliant scientists as Willamina Fleming -- a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid, but who after watching the male astronomers at work commented that she could do what they did better and faster, and so... she did.  Cecilia Payne, the first ever female professor of astronomy at Harvard University.  Annie Jump Cannon, who not only had her gender as an unfair obstacle to her dreams, but had to overcome the difficulties of being profoundly deaf.

Their success story is a tribute to their perseverance, brainpower, and -- most importantly -- their loving support of each other in fighting a monolithic male edifice that back then was even more firmly entrenched than it is now.  Their names should be more widely known, as should their stories.  In Sobel's able hands, their characters leap off the page -- and tell you a tale you'll never forget.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Curing premature annunciation

As a science teacher, I get kind of annoyed with the media sometimes.

The misleading headlines are bad enough.  I remember seeing headlines when interferon was discovered that said, "Magic Bullet Against Cancer Found!" (it wasn't), and when telomerase was discovered that said, "Eternal Life Enzyme Found!" (it wasn't).  Add that to the sensationalism and the shallow, hand-waving coverage you see all too often in science reporting, and it's no wonder that I shudder whenever I have a student come in and say, "I have a question about a scientific discovery I read about in a magazine..."

But lately, we have had a rash of announcements implying that scientists have overcome heretofore insurmountable obstacles in research or technological development, when in fact they have done no such thing.  Just in the last two weeks, we have three examples that turn out, on examination, to be stories with extraordinarily little content -- and announcements that have come way too early.

The first example of premature annunciation has hit a number of online news sources just in the last few days and has to do with something I wrote about a year and a half ago, the Alcubierre warp drive.  This concept, named after the brilliant Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, theorizes that a sufficiently configured energy source could warp space behind and ahead of a spacecraft, allowing it to "ride the bubble," rather in the fashion of a surfer skimming down a wave face.  This could -- emphasis on the word could, as no one is sure it would work -- allow for travel that would appear from the point of an observer in a stationary frame of reference to be far faster than light speed, without breaking the Laws of Relativity.

So what do we see as our headline last week?  "NASA Unveils Its Futuristic Warp Drive Starship -- Called Enterprise, Of Course."  Despite the fact that the research into the feasibility of the Alcubierre drive is hardly any further along than when I wrote about in in November 2012 (i.e., not even demonstrated as theoretically possible).  They actually tell you that, a ways into the article:

Currently, data is inconclusive — the team notes that while a non-zero effect was observed, it’s possible that the difference was caused by external sources. More data, in other words, is necessary. Failure of the experiment wouldn’t automatically mean that warp bubbles can’t exist — it’s possible that we’re attempting to detect them in an ineffective way.

But you'd never guess that from the headline, which leads you to believe that we'll be announcing the crew roster for the first mission to Alpha Centauri a week from Monday.

An even shorter time till anticlimax occurred in the article "Could the Star Trek Transporter Be Real? Quantum Teleportation Is Possible, Scientists Say," which was Boldly Going All Over The Internet last week, raising our hopes that the aforementioned warp drive ship crew might report for duty via Miles O'Brien's transporter room.  But despite the headline, we find out pretty quickly that all scientists have been able to transport thus far is an electron's quantum state:

Physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands were able to move quantum information between two quantum bits separated by about 10 feet without altering the spin state of an electron, reported the New York Times. 

In other words, they were able to teleport data without changing it. Quantum information – physical information in a quantum state used to distinguish one thing from another --was moved from one quantum bit to another without any alterations.

Which is pretty damn cool, but still parsecs from "Beam me up, Scotty," something that the author of the article gets around to telling us eventually, if a little reluctantly.  "Does this mean we’ll soon be able to apparate from place to place, Harry Potter-style?" she asks, and despite basically having told us in the first bit of the article that the answer was yes, follows up with, "Sadly, no."

Our last example of discoverus interruptus comes from the field of artificial intelligence, in which it was announced last week that a computer had finally passed the Turing test -- the criterion of fooling a human judge into thinking the respondent was human.

It would be a landmark achievement.  When British computer scientist Alan Turing proposed the test as a rubric for establishing an artificial intelligence, he turned the question around in a way that no one had considered, implying that what was going on inside the machine wasn't important.  Even with a human intelligence, Turing said, all we have access to is the output, and we're perfectly comfortable using it to judge the mental acuity of our friends and neighbors.  So why not judge computers the same way?

The problem is, it's been a tough benchmark to achieve.  Getting a computer to respond as flexibly and creatively as a person has been far more difficult than it would have appeared at first.  So when it was announced this week that a piece of software developed by programmers Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko was able to fool judges into thinking it was the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy named Eugene Goostman, it made headlines.

The problem was, it only convinced ten people out of a panel of thirty.  I.e., 2/3 of the people who judged the program knew it was a computer.  The achievement becomes even less impressive when you realize that the test had been set up to portray "Goostman" as a non-native speaker of English, to hide any stilted or awkward syntax under the guise of unfamiliarity.

And it still didn't fool people all that well.  Wired did a good takedown of the claim, quoting MIT computational cognitive scientist Joshua Tenenbaum as saying, "There's nothing in this example to be impressed by... it’s not clear that to meet that criterion you have to produce something better than a good chatbot, and have a little luck or other incidental factors on your side."


And those are just the false-hope stories from the past week or so.  I know that I'm being a bit of a curmudgeon, here, and it's not that I think these stories are uninteresting -- they're merely overhyped. Which, of course, is what media does these days.  But fer cryin' in the sink, aren't there enough real scientific discoveries to report on?  How about the cool stuff astronomers just found out about gamma ray bursts?  Or the progress made in developing a vaccine against strep throat?  Or the recent find of exceptionally well-preserved pterosaur eggs in China?

Okay, maybe not as flashy as warp drives, transporters, and A.I.  But more interesting, especially from the standpoint that they're actually telling us about relevant news that really happened as reported, which is more than I can say for the preceding three stories.

Boldly going where no one has gone before

One of the best things about science is that it is just so freakin' cool.  I think that's why I have never really understood aficionados of woo-woo; why do you need all the magic and quantum consciousness and chakras and ley lines and so on, when the real, verified science is so mind-blowingly amazing?

If you needed proof of that, consider the Alcubierre warp drive.  Yes, you read that right; warp drive, as in Star Trek.  Turns out that a Mexican physicist named Miguel Alcubierre proposed way back in 1994 that there might be a way to achieve faster-than-light travel by warping space-time behind, and in front of, a spaceship, and then riding the wave of that warped space-time in the fashion of a surfer being pushed much faster than the individual water molecules in a wave are traveling.

For those of you who know your physics, you're probably saying, "But wait... what about general relativity?"  Apparently, since within the (warped) space-time of the region around the spacecraft itself, no one is exceeding the cosmic speed limit of 300 million meters/sec (the speed of light in a vacuum), this does not break the rules -- even though Alcubierre thought that it might be possible to travel at speeds which, when viewed from the point of view of someone not on the spaceship, might allow Our Intrepid Crew to reach Alpha Centauri in a few weeks.  (Voyager, one of the fastest manmade vehicles ever constructed, would take 12,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, if it were heading that direction, which it's not.)

The catch, however (and it's a big one), is that in order to warp space-time to this extent, Alcubierre found that it would take the mass-energy of Jupiter.  Yup -- to do this, you would need half a Jupiter's size chunk of ordinary matter, and an equal-sized chunk of antimatter, and allow them to mutually annihilate.  If you could do that in the right way, you could warp space in this fashion.

That's one hell of a big warp core.  I don't think even Scotty or Geordi LaForge could make that work.

But this hasn't discouraged scientists.  Recently, Harold White of NASA announced that if you took the warp bubble, and made it toroidal instead of flat, and oscillated it, you could achieve the same effect -- and reduce the mass-energy needed to less than 800 kilograms!  [Source]

Right as we speak, White and his team are trying to accomplish the same thing on a tiny scale -- seeing if they can distort space-time in the way Alcubierre predicted, using lasers.  They're looking for a one-part-in-ten-million disturbance.  But if they find it -- it confirms Alcubierre's predictions, and at that point the problem changes from being a theoretical one to being a technological one.

And, if history is any indicator, after that, it will only be a matter of time.

Or space-time, actually.

I think this is about the most exciting thing I've read in ages.  Despite the fact that I was a physics major in college, I don't pretend to understand the details of the theory; I very quickly got lost in the abstruse mathematics when I took a look at Alcubierre's paper.  But all I know is, if I could get to the nearest star system  in only a few weeks, I would be elbowing people out of my way to get to the front of the line.  Can you even imagine, landing on a planet orbiting another star?  For real?

Man, I think I just had a nerdgasm, there.

So, if White et al. end up with results, I think we know who our answer to Zefram Cochrane will be.  His name is Miguel Alcubierre, and I think we should make sure that he's the one who gets to shake the Vulcan's hand when they land on the Earth.

Make it so!