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An Illustrated Alcubierre Warp Bubble
In episode 9, Its back to the A team (which stands for Apple, which points to “g”, cuz their words have weight!) with Jocelyn Read and Dave Tsang! Today We’re talking about the Alcubierre Warp Drive. You’ve probably heard of this before, There’s a lot of buzz on this topic. Oh, we definitely brought our Bee game to this episode!
To help keep us in line and on time, we’ve invited Zach Weinersmith from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and our sister podcast: The Weekly Weinersmith. It’s lively and fun, so Sit Down in your seat, turn up the podcast, pay attention, and bee hive yourself.
Note: There’s some Extra bits after the end music. Two extra bits actually. There was a third very long conversation about bees, but It didn’t make the cut.
Guest: Zach Weinersmith
Physicists: Jocelyn Read, Dave Tsang
Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Exit Music: John Vanderslice
This discussion was awesome! Fascinating stuff. I’m a big fan of Zach’s and SMBC (where I came across the link to this podcast) and I’ll likely be back to check out more episodes. Now to start harvesting some negative energy from those emo teenagers…
yaaaay.
Alternative title: “Fun and Science with Bubble Warp”!
More bees? I thought everything was going to be expressed in terms of speed boats.
Jocelyn, you’re such a heart-breaker. I’ll bet that poor guy never recovered.
Jocelyn is awesome. That is all. So is Dr. Dave because he brings up the Honey Badger.
It’s bees all the way down.
http://i.imgur.com/DsXYT.jpg BEES!!!
Also, the books go kind of ‘out there’ at times, but I’d suggest reading Travis S. Taylor’s “Warp Speed” and “The Quantum Connection”. In those books they discuss FTL travel via Alcubierre drive powered by the Casimir effect. Something they also talk about in the books are devices that compress space into a small size, around the Planck length if viewed from the outside; however, much, much larger inside. So it could be possible to construct the tiny drive within that compressed space, that only has to effect a very small space. Something like that.
Re: “Cooking”. What if you just turned it off once in a while? To prevent the accumulation of radiation? What about the sides of the bubble? Can photons escape through the sides? If so, could you build “sinks” around the sides of the bubble, to conduct radiation to the outside?
Also, if I understand correctly, the random particles would show up and get “stuck” at the front, but not the back, right?
Haha! nobody knows! (no one has done that calculation yet)
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