SallyStrange

cstross, 1 hour ago to random

I'm still manually approving all my follow requests and every week or so I think "are they okay now?" and then nope, some kind of spam account shows up with an AI-generated garbage user profile, AI-generated user photo, and the only toots its made are attempts to get other Mastodon folks to solve CAPTCHAs for it …

SallyStrange, 1 hour ago to science

SCIENCE!

"[Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre] discovered that it was possible to build a warp drive through a clever manipulation of spacetime, arranging it so that space in front of a vessel gets scrunched up and the space behind the vessel stretched out. This generates motion without, strictly speaking, movement.

It sounds like a contradiction, but that’s just one of the many wonderful aspects of general relativity. Alcubierre’s warp drive avoids violations of the speed-of-light limit because it never moves through space; instead space itself is manipulated to, in essence, bring the spacecraft’s destination closer to it.

While tantalizing, Alcubierre’s design has a fatal flaw. To provide the necessary distortions of spacetime, the spacecraft must contain some form of exotic matter, typically regarded as matter with negative mass. Negative mass has some conceptual problems that seem to defy our understanding of physics, like the possibility that if you kick a ball that weighs negative 5 kilograms, it will go flying backwards, violating conservation of momentum."

A warp drive breakthrough? Maybe. A breakthrough in our understanding of gravity? Probably!

(Scientists don't understand gravity very well at all.)

#Science #WarpDrive #FTL #StarTrek #science #Physics

https://www.wired.com/story/warp-drive-breakthrough-physics-star-trek/