In December, NASA announced that its Kepler spacecraft had spotted a handful of Earth-size spheres orbiting a distant star. So, now would seem like a good time for mankind to fire up the starship and make haste for the space lanes. It’ll be a long trip, though — tens of thousands of years. And despite what you’ve seen in sci-fi fantasies, there’s not a lot of hope for a shortcut.
In their new book, Allen Everett and Thomas Roman, both physics professors and confessed “Star Trek” geeks, contemplate the viability of speeding up interstellar travel by using wormholes and space warps. “By chance — or good insight — Star Trek’s ‘warp drive’ turns out to be an apt description of one conceivable mechanism for traveling at faster-than-light speed,” they write. And they go on to describe how real physicists check it out, chapter by intense chapter, complete with diagrams and equations.
I intend to read the book. To read more, click here.