The warp drive concept in Star Trek the Original series has also inspired real-world scientific research, for instance theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a drive using a method of faster-than-light travel within the framework of general relativity. (In other words such a drive in no way contradicts Einstein).

Alcubierre's credentials are listed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Alcubierre

The idea is to create a “warp bubble” around a spacecraft. This bubble would contract space in front of the ship and expand it behind, effectively allowing the ship to move faster than light relative to the space outside the bubble. The ship itself would remain stationary within this bubble, avoiding the relativistic effects like time dilation.

On Earth we cannot begin to achieve such a drive. There are some very difficult blocks to overcome. It is reasonable to believe that in the future we could. If there was a way to resolve a bet, I would bet that we will.

The drive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

 

By the way, Alcubierre credits Star Trek for motivating his academic career and research into these sorts of issues.

 

 

3 hours ago, charliearon said:

Uh, Noel that picture is all wrong!  Electrons don't flow....the wire moves

Uh, yeah Charlie.  You're right!  It's been so long ago.  I forgot about that.

Noel

8 hours ago, birdguy said:

WOW!  To an old electronic technician/engineer who learned the theory of electron flow and now finding out they are just a gas within the atom blows my mind.  Is the picture I have of electrons flowing through a conductor all wrong?

If so, I wonder what the next theory that blows your gas theory out of the water will be.

Noel

 

Michelle Thaller describes it well in this video. She describes electrons in an atom as existing as waves. Shaun Carroll as a cloud. A cloud of probability, is perhaps the best description. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital#

 

WAve-like properties:

1. Electrons do not orbit a nucleus in the manner of a planet orbiting a star, but instead exist as standing waves. Thus the lowest possible energy an electron can take is similar to the fundamental frequency of a wave on a string. Higher energy states are similar to harmonics of that fundamental frequency.

According to quantum field theory a particle is just an excitation in a field. So the electron is an excitation in the electric field. A photon an excitation in the electromagnetic field, etc.

 

 

In terms of free electrons flowing in a conductor, I suspect it's different. I'm not sure if Dirac's electron hole theory is still regarded as valid.

Edited October 24, 20241 yr by martin-w

1 hour ago, martin-w said:

According to quantum field theory a particle is just an excitation in a field. So the electron is an excitation in the electric field. A photon an excitation in the electromagnetic field, etc.

[..]

In terms of free electrons flowing in a conductor, I suspect it's different. I'm not sure if Dirac's electron hole theory is still regarded as valid.

No, it's the same. However, in a conductor, and in many other situations, electrons bump into atomic nuclei all the time. This induces quantum decoherence, so that the electrons basically behave like classical particles. You need clean systems which are well isolated from their environment to observe quantum effects, and the current in a wire isn't one of them.

An analogy to quantum decoherence is the difference between ordinary light and laser light. The waves in a laser are all correlated, i.e., wave crest meets wave crest all the time, for instance. Consequently, you get this sparkling pattern that you can see when a laser pointer shines on a wall. This is called interference: crest meets crest where you see a bright spot, and crest meets trough were you see a dark spot. On the other hand, waves emitted from a light bulb are not correlated. It can emit a crest or trough randomly, so that no interference pattern is observed and you see a homogeneous light intensity.

As you wrote above, electrons are matter waves. If they are coherent, you can see interference patterns and quantum effects. If they are produced randomly, you see something like a gas or fluid of classical particles.

The Dirac hole theory is valid and an essential part of relativistic quantum field theory. However, there are some issues with it, in particular in curved space-time. The main problem is that makes bogus predictions for the energy of the vacuum. In flat space you can just set the energy to zero (it is a potential energy; and like with the electric potential (voltage), only potential differences matter, not absolute values). In curved space, energy creates curvature (E=mc^2). A wrong value for the vacuum energy would then lead to a radically different universe. And at that point I must stop since science has not found a generally accepted answer yet on how to handle that problem. 

Edited October 24, 20241 yr by qqwertz

16 hours ago, martin-w said:

intrinsic form of angular momentum

Can you explain what this means?

Well, I can.  Angular velocity is another way of saying rate of rotation or spin, which I actually learned in Physics and math courses, not from reading a Wikipedia article.  The term angular momentum is used as the particles actually conserve their momentum since they rotate but remain stationary in space.

Electrons are indeed particles and have mass, albeit extremely small.  They rotate very fast around the nucleus and occupy different energy shells located at different distances from the nucleus.  This fast rotation of electrons could visually look like a cloud since they're orbiting so fast.

Dave

13 hours ago, Fielder said:

This bubble would contract space in front of the ship and expand it behind, effectively allowing the ship to move faster than light relative to the space outside the bubble.

This is the method I'm talking about.  You don't actually move through space, but actually foreshorten the space in the direction of travel, kind of pulling yourself along.

Einstein was right that there is a speed limit for matter moving through space, so you get around that by bending the space itself.

Dave

Quantum theory is just that, a theory.  It does not explain all observed behavior of matter and energy.

Scientists have been struggling with the wave or particle issue for over a hundred years, and they still can't decide what is what.  Trying to say it is both and then come up with all sorts of complicated ways to make that work isn't sufficient IMO.

This quandary is what my hypothesis attempts, clumsily and without advanced math, to explain.  There have been attempts to reconcile general relativity and electromagnetism known as unified field theory, and this is basically what I propose.  They are not separate things, but rather manifestations of the same thing - space, or the ether as it used to be called.

The current theory is that when an electron moves from a higher energy level to a lower one, it emits a quanta of energy which then travels through space like a wave with a particular frequency.

I propose that light, for example, is merely a spatial wave, not a particle or a quanta packet of energy, whatever that is supposed to mean.  Light is a wave because it acts like a wave.  It behaves like other electromagnetic waves, albeit with some differences due to its very short wavelengths changing how it interacts with different materials.

I admit that I am likely wrong, and there are thousands of well educated scientists who can easily blow my hypothesis out of the water.

But maybe someone should look into this a bit further?

Dave

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

Can you explain what this means?

Well, I can.  Angular velocity is another way of saying rate of rotation or spin, which I actually learned in Physics and math courses, not from reading a Wikipedia article.

 

 😒  I did physics too. I don't get all my info from Wikipedia. Why do you have to be competitive and combative? Just have a nice chat. I'm not here to compete with you. 

 

Quote

 

Quantum Particles Aren’t Spinning. So Where Does Their Spin Come From?

 

Naturally, physicists call this behavior “spin.”

But despite appearances, electrons don't spin. They can't spin; proving that it's impossible for electrons to be spinning is a standard homework problem in any introductory quantum physics course. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-particles-arent-spinning-so-where-does-their-spin-come-from/#:~:text=Naturally%2C physicists call this behavior,any introductory quantum physics course.

 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

This fast rotation of electrons could visually look like a cloud since they're orbiting so fast.

 

No. Its nothing to do with orbiting fast and hence, looking like a cloud. That's not why electrons are a wave within the atom. An electron is a quantized fluctuating probability function. The illustrations you saw in physics books depicting an atom like a tiny planetary system, isn't accurate, its a simplified version. Atoms being mostly empty space isn't really accurate, either. 

I posted a video for you.

 

 

Quote

 

 Image of an electron orbital within a hydrogen atom. This is a computer-generated image. It was created by scientists in Amsterdam and appeared in the May 29, 2013 edition of the on-line science journal, New Scientist,   

An electron within an atom doesn’t have a velocity. Despite what we are usually taught in grade school, it isn’t a particle zipping in an orbit around the nucleus. An electron is better described as having an orbital rather than an orbit. “Orbital” sounds something like an orbit, but it isn’t.

An analogy for an orbital is a cloud. The image to the left is a computer-generated reconstruction of an electron orbital, also called an “electron cloud.”

 

 

 

 

Edited October 24, 20241 yr by martin-w

29 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

This is the method I'm talking about.  You don't actually move through space, but actually foreshorten the space in the direction of travel, kind of pulling yourself along.

Einstein was right that there is a speed limit for matter moving through space, so you get around that by bending the space itself.

Dave

 

Indeed. The Alcubierre Metric I mentioned early. The trouble is that you require negative energy or mass, and we don't know for sure that such a thing exists. And the amount of negative energy required is colossal. Hence, the Alcubierre warp drive might not be practical. Currently the energy requirement is said to be as much as a medium sized star.

14 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

I propose that light, for example, is merely a spatial wave, not a particle or a quanta packet of energy, whatever that is supposed to mean.

 

Its both. 

14 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

Quantum theory is just that, a theory. 

 

And as you know, there's a difference between a layman's theory and a scientific theory. A laymen's theory is more like a hypothesis, whereas a scientific theory is on more solid ground. Quantum Field Theory is arguably the most successful theory of all time. But yes, we still have unanswered questions, there's still much to learn 

15 hours ago, charliearon said:

Electrons don't flow....the wire moves.

Well, no, the wire doesn't move.

This is yet another problem with the current theory.  We are told that electrons don't actually "flow" through a conductor but behave in some mysterious way as an interaction between charged particles and producing a force.

Well, why then do conductors need to be made of materials that have lots of free electrons that can be easily moved between atoms?  Is it not simpler to explain electrical force as the kinetic energy of moving electrons from place to place, using their momentum to make things happen?

How do you get electrons moving in the first place?  You have to physically move a conductor through a magnetic field.  This is how generators work.  I propose that you are simply transferring motion or kinetic energy from one location to another using electrons.

What do moving electron actually do?  If I push them through a resistant material, like a light bulb element, then they produce friction between particles which produces heat and light.  If I connect the conductor to an electric motor, then those moving electrons move into the field coils and produce a strong magnetic field that actually moves another actuator coil and makes the motor physically rotate.  This field, in my hypothesis, is made by the motion of trillions of electrons around a coil distorting the space around it and affecting the electrons in the other coil.

There are a lot of analogies to electricity and water flow, which makes sense as they are two forms of the same thing, the main difference being that electrons can only easily move through a solid conductive material like metal.  However, with enough potential difference, they can move through air and produce spectacular heat and light in the form of lightning.

Yes, this goes against current theories, but if the math works out then it may be a viable explanation.

Dave

 

Strip the insulation off of the wire(s), energize the wire(s) , grab on and watch you and the wires move like crazy! 

20 minutes ago, charliearon said:

Strip the insulation off of the wire(s), energize the wire(s) , grab on and watch you and the wires move like crazy! 

 

🤣

You remind me of that Electroboom guy on YouTube, young Charles

The video about energy not flowing is interesting, but I propose that it doesn't require mysterious charged fields in order to explain how energy is transmitted through a conductor.

Here's an example: if I move a lever that is 1 million miles long, the other end of the lever will move almost instantly as the force is transmitted though the lever at nearly the speed of light.  The same could apply to electrons in a conductor.  All those electrons are there, and when a potential difference is applied they all move at the same time and produce a force in whatever device is connected anywhere along the conductor.

Current theory is built around a framework of charged particles and electromagnetic waves, so all scientists are taught these concepts as fundamental and must work within the confines of this framework.

I'm more of an outside the box kind of guy.  I say someone should go outside of this framework and see if there is an alternative explanation.

Like I said, I'm just brainstorming and throwing radical ideas out there, and I am likely wrong.

Dave