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Clément Stahl


Clément Stahl's Self-Journal

Editorial

Human beings love to travel. The reasons are multiple, one of them is simply to explore what is unknown, in this sense, a scientist is nothing but a traveler in the unknown world of knowledge. Therefore as a curious scientist, when I discovered for the first time the idea of Alcubierre, part of my adventurous mind started to heat up. I will try in this issue of my journal to share my interest for this idea, to present the founding article (1994) and some selected reactions to this novel idea. I do not pretend by any means to be neither exhaustive nor precise. However I hope to draw your attention to this bizarre idea that within general relativity, it is theoretically possible to use a rocket in order to travel faster than light without breaking Lorentz invariance.



As a global conclusion, I presented the very idea of wrap drive and some of its limitations. In the past 10 years, the NASA was even investing to build an experiment to challenge the wrap drive. It was possible to enjoy also a very positive and enthusiastic webpage on their website. However the last time I checked, it seems they have completely changed their views on wrap drive, maybe based on the "inconclusive" results of experiments carried out in 2012 and 2013. They now present a very brief note: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warp.html. While wrap drive is an attractive idea for the reason mentioned in the introduction: traveling fascinates any human being, the theoretical implementation of this idea has brought mainly pitfalls.

Clément Stahl
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The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity

It is shown how, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting...

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