![]() ![]() That’s why a lot of the stuff you see in the movies is not possible today. That’s why jet packs only last a few minutes. Well, people say, we could use batteries. The problem with jet packs and ray guns is always a portable power pack. But in a firefight, you don’t want to put a nuclear power plant on your shoulder. We already have ray guns that are powered by nuclear power plants, which are very powerful lasers. It looks very similar to the rendition of warp drive in the movies - you would see distortion of star light, stars would come at you very fast, but inside you feel nothing. Empty space can contract or expand faster than the speed of light. Einstein never said that nothing can go faster than light. But in principle, if you have, let’s say, a meteorite made of negative matter, then it may be possible. We don’t have negative matter, for instance. There are some objections to this, of course. But you can compress the space like an accordion - compress the space between you and the stars. Everybody assumes you have to go to the stars, which means you have to break the light barrier and violate the laws of physics. The key is, you don’t go to the stars, the stars come to you. And Alcubierre got a solution that looked very similar to warp drive. The loophole is negative matter - Einstein never considered it. About 10 years ago, a Mexican relativist named Miguel Alcubierre was watching Star Trek, and he came up with a new solution to Einstein’s equation. We physicists used to laugh at Star Trek‘s warp factor. Will it ever be possible to travel at “warp factor 4”? We all know the Enterprise travels at warp speed. These are called transversable wormholes you can go back and forth freely without too much effect. To keep the hole open so you can go through it, you need negative matter to stabilize the black hole. And if you add radiation, there is a debate among physicists right now about, will it close up the wormhole, is it stable? Math says there is a wormhole at the middle of a spinning black hole. If you could go through the ring, then who knows where the other universe is located? It could be backwards in time, it could be a parallel universe. There are many, many questions raised by this. This solution was first found by Roy Kerr in 1963, and it is the most realistic description of a spinning black hole. If you fall through the ring, you wind up in a parallel universe. If you have a spinning black hole - and all the black holes we’ve seen in space are spinning very rapidly - then the math says they collapse to a ring, not a dot. Events change that alter the course of history as we know it for the Enterprise crew (which will be handy for sequels.) But my understanding of physics is that it’s not possible to go through a black hole and come back out, at least in one piece? Future Spock, or old Spock, travels through one after he fails to save a planet from being blown up by a supernova, and he winds up 130 years in the past. The movie makes frequent use of black holes.
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