From Russia with Love
WARP DRIVE ANIMATION (avi file)
New August 20, 1997 Slide Show
ADVANCED WARP DRIVE PHYSICS (250 kilobytes) New August 8, 1997.
This web page has been averaging 1500 hits per week consistently for the past few months.
New August 20, 1997 Slide Show
ADVANCED WARP DRIVE PHYSICS (250 kilobytes) New August 8, 1997.
This web page has been averaging 1500 hits per week consistently for the past few months.
The Presidio
San Francisco, CA
axis@trinidad.net wrote (August 20, 1997):
" Dear Dr. Sarfatti,
I have written to you previously on the utility of a semiotic viewpoint in getting PQM straight. Later, I have written on the idea that the "Universe-at- large" might consist of "all the information that might ever be" which I identified with "nothing". I suggested that fieldlike functions can configure our specific universe, "filtering" it out of the Universe-at-large either directly, or via a set of "buffer spaces" which would then become a hierarchy of implicate order.
Thus we need only deal with a universe of quantum fields. No beables to confound our postquantum mechanics.
Well you are wrong about that -- at least in the low-energy limit where we exist. You must obey the actual mathematics. Have you read The Undivided Universe? What you are doing is going back to the conventional idea that Hilbert space is everything. Bohm discusses this quite thoroughly in his book which you should read.
"The problem incurred here is that the sheer size of the spaces involved would force us to add to our theories of functions and computation: Some of the "fieldlike functions" referred to may indeed be recursive structures, lending a deep fractal nature to our observable universe. Additionally, computational structures that execute in steps leading to sets which are not just dense, but of higher cardinality than the continuum, might lead to obnoxiously "non-godelian" computation."
"Now, I must lay my cards on the table. I am very much interested in the development of the device you call a "Q-chip". I suppose such a device would exhibit raw consciousness eventually equal to or, much more likely, far surpassing human consciousness. "
Yes, that is the idea.
"A superconscious Q-chip would be able to exploit signal and gravitational nonlocality sufficiently well to act as a "stargate" or "warp drive"; or even configure a neutron star into superconsciousness. So your dual goals might well be one and the same thing. This you know."
Yes, we seem to be getting similar messages! :-)
Exactly, that is the power of the WEB. This may be my Quixotic "Impossible Dream", or it may be correct. Let experiment decide whether this is bona-fide CONTACT with advanced VALIS intelligence, John Lilly's "solid state entities", "The Nine", "conscious computers on space-craft from the future" or just some wacky fun conceptual Psi Fi art - or all of the above :-)
"I also suppose that you are fully aware of how postquantum computers of the kind you envision will impact on the eschatology of Homo sapiens, and perhaps our spacetime universe."
Yes, of course I am. You have seen
" I assume that you realize that, if theoretically possible, weak Q-chips are currently well within the range of micro-fabrication techniques available to late 20th Century civilization. "
Yes, of course. If the people at Intel etc. realized what I have here they would start learning about microtubules and how to emulate them in the solid-state.
"I therefore deduce that you fully appreciate that advent of your Q-chip might be inevitable and imminent; and, at least in the mathematical sense, catastrophic."
"Apre mois, Le Deluge!" (Louis XIV):-)
"What might your initial materials be: semiconductor; conductor or superconductor? Time may be very short."
That is for experimentalists like Ray Chiao et-al to figure out. I am only a "Wandering Minstrel" -- a thing of shreds and patches, ballads, songs and snatches, .. and dreamy lullabies." :-)
your internet student,
Alain Huitdeniers
axis@trinidad.net
It is 100 years since the birth of the Bohm Institute now located in the heart of the Space Naval Academy at The Presidio in San Francisco.
Imagine yourself back in time 100 years ago in a small office at the edge of Washington Square that Sam Spade would find much to his liking - especially the sexy Chicana secretary and her jolly Italian boyfriend who is the local milkman. It’s a scene right out of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience with me as Bunthorne. Tomorrow was a special day in Babylon By The Bay. It was Herb Caen's Wake at Moose's with burgers at 50 cents. Sarfatti was gobbling down dried figs, debating with himself like Woody Allen playing Hamlet in "To eat meat, or not to eat meat? That is the question ..." Little did he know that he was to finally meet The Woman and The Child predicted by qabalist Carlo Suares in Paris in 1974. "Hi Jack", she said, with a British accent, from across the bar, as he looked into her large waif-like dreamy eyes. :-)
Jack Sarfatti, who in real life is the Reincarnated Rashi De Troyes, was first contacted by the Implicate Order of the Super-Illuminati at the tender age of 12 in Brooklyn, New York in Woody Allen’s neighborhood with an unusually high concentration of budding Jewish geniuses who could remember the Glory Days of World War Two before Fat Boy burst at Los Alamos. The Von Neumann probe picked up this planet’s first uncontrolled nuclear explosion almost immediately, but typical interservice rivalry in the Confederation’s United Star Command delayed sending the flying saucers with conscious computers for almost two Earth years, and then the damn squadron of raw Space Cadets crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico. They already had selected Richard Feynman of Far Rockaway, and others like David Bohm, and in 1952 they decided to go back to Flatbush to reap the new crop of kids who were only partly human.
To be continued.
Copyright, 1997, Internet Science Education Project. All rights reserved.
--
"You will begin to meet the others in twenty years."1952 For more information
in conversation with
Theoretical Physicist,
Doctoral Degree from University of California
UFOs are a controversial and compelling enigma. We remain uncertain of what these objects are, or whether they even exist. Conventional wisdom is that most UFOs are likely erroneous observations, along with a bit of mass hysteria and some outright charlatanism. Was there really a UFO crash at Roswell in 1947? But what if we were to assume -- purely as an exercise -- that UFOs are actually products of a starfaring civilization?
The rational mind rebels at the idea. UFOs allegedly exhibit outlandish behavior. Witnesses report incredible things like instant accelerations, right angle turns at enormous velocities, and instant stops. These objects are also reported to change their shapes and colors, and simply disappear like phantoms instantly leaping from one universe to another. UFOs violate the laws of physics. No terrestrial spacecraft are capable of such magical feats of reality engineering.
It's no wonder that most scientists consider the subject of UFOs patently absurd and not worthy of serious discussion. Can modern physics ever hope explain the UFO phenomenon to fit within the current world view? Or is an entirely new physics required? This article will address the question "If UFOs are real, then how do they work?"
Clear Intent, by Larry Fawcett and Barry Greenwood, presents evidence of Air Force observations of these phenomena. Included in the book were published Department of Defense documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act, that report repeated UFO penetrations of high security ICBM bases and nuclear weapons storage areas back in the 1970s. One major mission of the American intelligence community is to anticipate technology that might disrupt our defense systems. Judging from the documents Fawcett and Greenwood published, the Department of Defense and Air Force are not on top of the situation, with regard to UFOs buzzing some of our most sensitive defense areas.
Recent newspaper and magazine articles have also reported that the Air Force is testing some new kind of "black project" aircraft, code named "Aurora." According to the news accounts, this ultra-secret, high altitude hypersonic aircraft creates powerful vertical, earthquake-like jolts, felt by thousands of Southern California residents, as it passes high overhead at over four thousand miles per hour.
Anything that burns a propellant in a reaction chamber, and then directs the exhaust products of that reaction out of a nozzle can be described as a rocket. Aurora's propulsion system is obviously rocket-like. It makes a lot of noise. It follows, then, that any rocket capable of the tremendous speed and maneuvering attributed to UFOs would be impossible not to notice.
But the majority of UFO witnesses report hearing nothing like the continuous, low frequency rumbling sounds that would normally accompany fuel combustion propulsion based rockets; nor do they report seeing the kind of exhaust products one would expect to see with rockets. If not reporting objects that seem to be entirely silent, some witnesses have reported hearing loud, but brief bang-like sounds as UFOs take off, as well as both low and high frequency humming sounds.
We're forced to conclude, then, that UFOs don't operate on terrestrial rocket science principles. In a single stroke, we can eliminate not only all present solid and chemical fuel based rockets, but even future exotic propulsion schemes like nuclear-electric ion rockets, interstellar hydrogen fusion ramjets, and that favorite of science fiction writers and scientists alike, antimatter-matter annihilation rockets, as viable candidates for possible UFO propulsion.
The major problem with applying conventional rocket science to interstellar travel is the Einstein barrier: the exhaust speed of the propellant relative to a rocket is limited to three hundred thousand kilometers per second, the speed of light in a vacuum. At present, this barrier prevents practical interstellar travel because a physically unreasonable quantity of conventional fuel is required to get reasonably close to the speed of light in a rocket. Any starship built on proven or even highly speculative principles of rocket propulsion, such as the very efficient anti-matter drive popularized in Star Trek, would still need to generate much more energy than is generated on Earth every year. The manufacturing costs would be many times the gross national products of America, all of Europe and Japan combined. So, we're faced with both a physical and an economic absurdity. The starship Enterprise still remains a playful notion at best.
Cheap and practical interstellar flight is possible only if Einstein's barrier can be overcome. If UFOs are indeed from other star systems, then they have obviously broken that barrier.
Like conventional rockets and jets, UFOs seem to generate their own internal propulsion. As far as we can tell, they are not pushed along by an external energy source, like a laser or particle beam, or the solar wind. They evidently operate on distinctly "alien" propulsion principles than those we're accustomed to. Could we ever expect to understand such principles?
Theoretical subtleties inherent within Einstein's general theory of relativity (gravity) and quantum mechanics may hold the answer. If it is possible to physically alter or deform four-dimensional space-time, then a kind of space-time tunnel, or time travel gate, can be constructed. In current physics, such theoretical tunnels are known as traversable wormholes.
Cal Tech physicists Kip Thorne and Michael Morris, along with Igor Novikov of Moscow State University and others, have published a number of papers in the prestigious Physical Review on the physics of time travel and traversable wormholes. A traversable wormhole is literally a shortcut through both space and time.
An advanced extraterrestrial civilization , capable of cosmic-scale engineering, could conceivably fabricate traversable wormhole time travel gates, where their starships would enter a wormhole in one region of space- time, and pop out in another extremely distant region of space-time.
According to the equations of general relativity, one of the mouths of the wormhole has to accelerate away from the other mouth to a very high speed close to that of light and then return. If you step into the mouth that accelerates and returns, you will step out the other end into the relative past of when you entered. If you step into the unaccelerated mouth and leave through the accelerated one, you will jump into the relative future. That is, if you had an identical twin who did not go through the wormhole, your twin would be older than you.
How do you create a traversable wormhole time machine? Theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti, has also been working on that question. A self-described "rogue scholar," Sarfatti has had a long association with fringe science. He and Michael Murphy organized and led the first Physics of Consciousness Seminars at the Esalen Institute back in 1974, sponsored by former human potential movement superstar turned pariah, Werner Erhard. Those Esalen seminars spawned an entirely new genre of pop science literature, known as "The New Physics" -- of which the recent best seller by Deepak Chopra, Quantum Healing, is but one example.
Sarfatti's unorthodox theories on faster-than-light (superluminal) communication continue to raise hackles among the more conservative physics mainstream. When it comes to traversable wormhole time machines, Sarfatti speculates that so-called dark matter, which may comprise over 90% of the mass of the universe, could provide an answer.
This elusive matter has so far remained unobservable directly by conventional methods employing photons of electromagnetic radiation. Yet, its gravitational effects on ordinary matter are observed indirectly. "If dark matter moves around in the imaginary time of quantum gravity, then it would be difficult for it to emit any photons, even if it wasn't electrically neutral. So, we wouldn't expect to see it through optical telescopes," Sarfatti explains.
The distinction between imaginary time and real time is important to clarify here. The late Nobel laureate, physicist Richard Feynman, was attempting to unify the quantum theory with gravity -- for some time a kind of Holy Grail to physicists. His intuitive genius led him to reformulate the quantum theory as "a sum over histories." According to Feynman, a particle doesn't just have a single history, as it would in classical Newtonian and Einsteinian physics. Instead, it is supposed to follow every possible path in spacetime.
There are two numbers that are associated with these histories, one for the size of the wave, and the other for its position, or phase, in the cycle. The probability that a particle can be found at any particular point is then found by adding up the waves associated with every possible history that passes through that point.
The problem is that when you actually perform this summing of all possible histories, severe technical problems arise. "To avoid the technical difficulties with Feynman's sum over histories," says physicist Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time,
"one must use imaginary time... That is to say, for the purposes of calculation, one must measure time using imaginary numbers, rather than real ones. This has an interesting effect on spacetime: The distinction between time and space disappears completely... we may regard our use of Euclidean spacetime as merely a mathematical device (or trick) to calculate answers about real spacetime."
Despite the fact that imaginary time is only a calculational device, history has time and again that real physics can and does emerge from such abstract mathematical constructs of the mind. Nevertheless, all theories must still be verified by experiment for them to be meaningful. That is the nature of physics and the scientific method.
Sarfatti employs this same "trick" of imaginary time in his calculations on the possible nature of dark matter.
"I've been investigating a new kind of causality violating quantum field theory, which reveals that the projection of imaginary time motion into real time can be both slower and faster than light. If that's true, it means that the energy density of this hypothetical neutral dark matter would get smaller as its speed increased, which would make it the perfect stuff to construct traversable wormholes with."
He believes it might also make a super-efficient starship fuel. Remember the exhaust speed limitation of rocketry discussed earlier?
"In theory, dark matter can produce a faster-than-light exhaust velocity, which means it could be used to overcome the Einstein barrier. Since its density would theoretically decrease as its exhaust velocity increased, that means a small amount of dark matter fuel could easily propel a massive payload to the stars,"says Sarfatti.
"And, if dark matter is as uniformly distributed throughout the universe, as it seems to be, you'd never run out of fuel. Even though dark matter comprises 90% of the mass of the universe, its average density is still too small for us to detect directly in an easy way. But I think that situation will change in the near future."
Sarfatti admits that a number of important questions about dark matter remain unanswered.
"How do we find and use such matter if it only exists in imaginary time? How does curvature in imaginary time influence curvature in real time? Can it be both attractive and exotic? Can dark matter carry electric charge? Does it have a magnetic moment? If it does, then it could be electromagnetically manipulated. And finally, is it even possible to scoop up and clump together enough dark matter with the accuracy and precision required to fabricate a traversable wormhole or power a starship?"Combine an inexhaustible fuel with a potential faster-than-light exhaust speed, like the hypothesized dark matter, with a super-technology capable of manipulating space-time geometry, and you have all the physical requisites for a starfaring society. If UFOs are interstellar in origin, then, they could be using traversable wormholes, or, they have developed an efficient interstellar propulsion system (like Sarfatti's proposed dark matter model), which allows them to travel very close to the speed of light. Traversable wormholes are preferable, since they would enable the extraterrestrials to tunnel across vast interstellar distances, and then tunnel back to where and when they came from.
Since the first version of this article, Alcubierre has shown how exotic matter permits an effectively faster-than-light warp drive. The "ufo", or starship, freely floats along a gravitational shock without time dilation. We have provided an animation of the warp drive.
ALL NEW (Dec 27, 1996)
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