Journal of Applied Mechanical Engineering

At the cutting edge, or beyond the fringe: Does physics allow rapid space time transport?

4^th International Conference and Exhibition on Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

October 03-04, 2016 Orlando, USA

James F Woodward

California State University, USA

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Appl Mech Eng

Abstract:

For much of the past century a small group of people, never more than a dozen or two until the late 1990s, have pursued schemes that, if successful, would revolutionize how we get around space-time. After World War II, public attention was focused on spaceflight both by flying saucer crazes and by rocketry. The military end of rocketry was ICBMs. Their civilian counterpart was first the Apollo program and then the Space Shuttle. But almost none of the legions of people involved with either ro9cketry or flying saucers devoted serious effort to trying to solve the propulsion problem. The dozen or two who did found themselves isolated and shunned by mainstream scientists. But all that changed when Kip Thorne and several graduate students ushered in the era of wormhole physics in 1988 by reverse engineering, at Carl Sagan�??s request, the needed conditions to travel to and from the center of the Galaxy 26,000 light years distant in little or no time. The requirement turned out to be �??wormholes�?�, space-time structures predicted by general relativity theory. Six years later, Miguel Alcubierre constructed the �??warp drive�?� �??metric�?� of general relativity that shows what is needed to zip around space-time, seemingly at speeds faster than the speed of light. The requirement is a Jupiter mass of negative rest mass (�??exotic�?�) matter. This requirement is seemingly so preposterous that almost no one has worked solving how to make wormholes and warp drives. But a fair number of people have worked at less ambitious goals. In this talk I will relate how the work of people known to me has moved us closer to the goal of rapid space-time transport.

Biography :

James F Woodward completed a PhD in History (of science) at the University of Denver in 1972 after obtaining Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Physics at Middlebury College and New York University in the 1960s. He has retired in 2005 and is Emeritus Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Physics at California State University Fullerton where he continues to do experimental work on advanced propulsion and the enigmatic sciences (gravity manipulation). Noting that inertia in general relativity is a gravitational phenomenon where local objects are seemingly instantaneously coupled to distant matter in the universe, he has elaborated a way that transient phenomena can be used to perform said manipulation. This, and other material related to this talk, can be found in his recent book: “Making Starships and Stargates: The Science of Interstellar Propulsion and Absurdly Benign Wormholes” published by Springer Verlag in 2013.

Email: jwoodward@Exchange.FULLERTON.EDU