Warp Idea

 I have always been interested in space travel after being inspired by Star Wars and Star Trek. So when Alcubierre published his paper describing the warp metric, I could not wait to see the dream of interstellar travel turned into reality. It should be remembered that this paper came out shortly after Kip Thorne published his paper on transversable wormholes. So it seemed that there would be a hot bed of academic activity somewhere exploring these ideas. Little did I know that was not how the world worked.

As an early stage career engineer, I thought I could make my own little contribution by trying to combine the two ideas. The probelm with the Alcubierre drive was that it would need an infinite amount of negative energy and nobody really knew how to expand spacetime. To my mind I could treat spacetime as a working fluid, so it could be compressed and expanded in much the same way as a ramjet treats air. 

 

 

 

 

In spherical co-ordinates the geometry can be described by

 

 where

 The matter threading the wormhole can be described by

 Where

 Which leads to

 

If the above function is negative, then ordinary matter will suffice, if it is positive ten the matter is exotic. If it is zero, then the matter has properties typical of electromagnetic fields.

The metric of the moving wormhole in gemeral relativity is given by

 

 This should then be used to describe the stress energy tensor.