The Alcubierre Warp Drive in Higher Dimensional Spacetime

An eight page paper on Harold White’s space warping ideas

The canonical form of the Alcubierre warp drive metric is considered to gain insight into the mathematical mechanism triggering the effect. A parallel with the Chung-Freese spacetime metric is drawn to demonstrate that the spacetime expansion boost can be considered a 3 + 1 on-brane simplification for higher dimensional geometric effects. The implications for baryonic matter of higher dimensional spacetime, in conjunction with the Alcubierre metric, are used to illustrate an equation of state for dark energy. Finally, this combined model will then be used to outline a theoretical framework for negative pressure (an alternative to negative energy) and a conceptual lab experiment is described.

Recall that the spacetime expansion boost for the Alcubierre model could be made to be arbitrarily high depending on the choice of input variables. A high boost is clearly not an exclusive feature common only to negative energy densities and can be readily obtained in the lab provided powerful enough equipment.

We used Rindler’s method to extract the canonical from of the Alcubierre warp drive metric in order to properly pose this FTL geometry into the Chung-Freese modified FRW metric for cosmological spacetime. This led to the remarkable discovery that a spacecraft’s spacetime expansion boost in the Alcubierre warp spacetime actually represents a movement of the spacecraft off our local brane (3 + 1 dimensional spacetime) and into the higher dimensional bulk space. The Alcubierre warp spacetime expansion boost merely acts as a scalar multiplier acting on an initial velocity. The consequence of this is that the equation of state for the energy density and pressure that induces this effect is equivalent to the dark energy equation of state and the equation of state for the vacuum energy in space. This suggests a conceptual laboratory experiment whereby a toroidal positive energy density induces a negative pressure warp field.

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks