ALTERNATIVE REALITIES,DO THEY EXIST??

Warner Bros. Pictures/Paramount Pictures

In one universe you are reading an article on WhatCulture. On another, WhatCulture doesn’t exist, and neither does this article. In another the article does, but the internet doesn’t, and it’s being published on stone tablets. If you live in that universe, you should probably be paying attention to the eight-legged dino-spiders that are roaming the scorched Earth you call home. The concept of alternate realities s one that’s appeared in science fiction throughout history, but it’s one of those sci-fi concepts that might actually have some basis in reality.
Human technology is bringing about the likes of robots and AI like you see in film and books, but apparently we’re already living out this particular trope. Scientific theories about multiple universes have been floating about for decades, and people actually take them seriously! It’s difficult to get people on board with “rational” investigations into other fringe and supernatural phenomena, but no less than Brian Cox has chatted about this thing. Brian Cox.
Quantum mechanics, different planes of existence, and a hammer that nobody can identify a time for are all compelling pieces of evidence that prove alternate realities are real. In this universe, anyway.

EVIDENCE THAT TIME TRAVEL EXISTS

Universal Pictures

What we talk about when we talk about time travel: going back to kill Hitler, Back To The Future, treading on butterflies causing irreparable damage to history, Doctor Who, whether or not it’s ethical to use it to cheat on the lottery or sports gambling or whatever, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. What we don’t talk about when we talk about time travel: whether it actually exists. Or will exist. Or has existed. We don’t know, this wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff kinda messes with our tenses a little. The idea of being able to travel backwards or forwards through history has appeared in countless forms through pop culture, conversation and daydreams for ages, but how come we don’t discuss whether it’ll actually ever be real?
Does it just seem too beyond the pale? Is the the idea of time travel so beyond the realms of possibility that we don’t even consider that it could be real? Well, we’re here with good news! Not from the future, sadly, just in the grimly predictable present. A grimly predictable present that includes quantum physics, Higgs Bosons and other science-y things we don’t quite understand but apparently have something to do with a conceivable way for us to travel through time. No less a genius than Stephen Hawking spent years looking for a reason that time travel couldn’t exist, only to find the concept didn’t contravene any laws of physics, eventually admitting “time travel may be possible, but it is not practical”.
Plus there’s that history of time travel in our culture has frequently strayed into the non-fiction – so long as you’re inclined to believe the possible crackpots that are discussing it – all of which adds up to some pretty compelling pieces of evidence that prove time travel is real. Ten, in fact

how many planets dyu think exist in the universe

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” –Ray Bradbury

It wasn’t all that long ago — back when I was a boy — that the only planets we knew of were the ones in our own Solar System. The rocky planets, our four gas giants, and the moons, asteroids, comets, and kuiper belt objects (which was only Pluto and Charon at the time) were all that we knew of.

Image credit: NASA's Solar System Exploration, http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/index.cfm.

But these were just the worlds around our Sun, which houses (according to current definition) eight planets. Our Sun is just one of an estimated two-to-four hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and looking up towards the night sky, one can’t help but wonder how many of those stars have planets of their own, and what those worlds are like.

Image credit: Free Roaming Photography, by Mike Cavaroc.

There are a vast variety of stars out there in our galaxy. Our Sun is just one example — a G-class star — of seven different main types.

Image credit: Wikipedia user Kieff; annotations by me.

We may think of our Sun as being typical and on the relatively dim side, since a disproportionate number of stars visible to our eyes in the night sky are O, B, and A-class stars. But in reality, the Sun is more massive and intrinsically brighter than 95% of stars in our galaxy. The red dwarf stars — M-class stars — which are no more than 40% the mass of our Sun, make up 3 out of every 4 stars that are out there.
What’s more than that, our Sun exists in isolation; it is not gravitationally bound to any other stars. But that is not necessarily how stars exist in the galaxy, either.

Image credit: VISTA infrared survey, ESO / J. Borissova.

Stars can be clustered together in twos (binary stars), threes (trinaries), or groups/clusters containing anywhere from hundreds to many hundreds of thousands of stars.
My point is this: if you want to accurately estimate how many planets there are in our galaxy, you can’t just take the number of planets we find around our star and multiply it by the number of stars in our galaxy. That’s a naïve estimate that we’d make in the absence of evidence. But just for fun, that’d give us somewhere around two-to-three trillion planets in our galaxy. And as we know from our own Solar System, there’s a great variety of what the surfaces of those planets could look like.

Image composite: credit Mike Malaska. For individual image credits, see lower left.

But over the past two decades, we’ve been looking. We’ve been looking with a few different methods, in fact, and the two most prolific are the “stellar wobble” method, where you can infer the mass-and-radius of a planet (or set of planets) around a star by observing how it “wobbles” gravitationally over long periods of time:

Image credit: European Southern Observatory.

And the transit method, where the light coming from a distant star is partially blocked by the disk of a planet in its solar system passing in front of it.

Image credit: ESA / NASA's Solar And Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), 2006.

It’s important to recognize, when we do this, that we will not see the vast majority of planets that are out there. Take NASA’s Kepler Mission, for instance, which has discovered hundreds (if not thousands) of planets by looking at a field-of-view containing around 100,000 stars. But that does not mean that there are only a few planets-per-hundred-stars. Consider the following: if Kepler were looking at our Solar System, and our Solar System was oriented randomly with respect to our perspective, these are the odds that the alignment would be good enough to observe a transit of our star by one of our planets.

Planet	Degree Range (out of 180)	% chance of good alignment
Mercury	1.37 degrees	0.76% chance
Venus	0.738 degrees	0.41% chance
Earth	0.533 degrees	0.30% chance
Mars	0.320 degrees	0.18% chance
Jupiter	0.101 degrees	0.056% chance
Saturn	0.0556 degrees	0.031% chance
Uranus	0.0277 degrees	0.015% chance
Neptune	0.0177 degrees	0.0098% chance

Now you may think those are not-so-good odds, but you don’t even know the half of it. Mercury and Mars are too small, meaning they don’t block enough of the Sun’s light, to be detectable with Kepler, and the four outer planets, despite their large sizes, take too long to orbit for Kepler to observe more than one transit, a necessity for a planetary candidate.

So this means that if Kepler were looking at 100,000 stars identical to our own, it would have found 410 stars with a total of 700 planets around them.

Illustration credit: NASA / Jason Rowe, Kepler Mission.

But as of today, Kepler has found over 11,000 stars with at least one planetary candidate, and over 18,000 potential planets around those stars, with periods ranging from 12 hours up to 525 days. In other words, there are:

1. a huge variety of planetary systems out there, most of which are very different from our own,
2. orbiting a wide variety of stars, including binary and trinary systems,
3. and we are only seeing the ones that are large enough, orbiting their stars close enough, that also have unlikely, fortuitous alignments with respect to our line-of-sight.

You may have read this week that there are at least 100-to-200 billion planets in our Milky Way, and that’s true, but that’s not an estimate; that’s a lower limit. If you instead were to make an estimate, you’d get a number that’s at least one (and more like two, if you’re willing to make inferences about outer planets) orders of magnitude higher: closer to ten trillion planets in our galaxy, alone!

Image credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser.

In other words, based on what we’ve seen so far, most stars are likely to have planets, and based on what we’ve seen in the inner solar systems of the ones that do, a large fraction of them are likely to have more rocky planets in their inner solar systems than even our own has, to say nothing of the outer solar system!

Image credit: J. Pinfield / RoPACS network / University of Hertfordshire.

This doesn’t even include orphan planets (without a parent star), which we know exist, even if we don’t know their numbers yet. Over time, we’ll continue to learn more and refine our estimates, but right now, there are at least about as many planets as there are stars in our galaxy, and quite possibly many, many more than even eight times that number.
Our solar system may turn out to be average, slightly above average, or somewhat below average; we’re still not sure. But regardless of which way it goes, we’re talking about trillions of planets in our galaxy alone. And remember, our galaxy isn’t alone in the Universe.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team.

With at least 200 billion galaxies out there (and possibly even more), we’re very likely talking about a Universe filled with around 10²⁴ planets, or, for those of you who like it written out, around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in our observable Universe.
That number’s only going to get more accurate, but I’m tired of people giving the lowball-estimate when it’s eminently likely that there are so many more. Let’s keep looking, for not just planets, but for water, oxygen, and signs of life. With all of those chances, we’re bound to get lucky if we persevere and look hard enough!

BLACK HOLES

Don't let the name fool you: a black hole is anything but empty space. Rather, it is a great amount of matter packed into a very small area - think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City. The result is a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. In recent years, NASA instruments have painted a new picture of these strange objects that are, to many, the most fascinating objects in space.

Intense X-ray flares thought to be caused by a black hole devouring a star. (Video)

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Although the term was not coined until 1967 by Princeton physicist John Wheeler, the idea of an object in space so massive and dense that light could not escape it has been around for centuries. Most famously, black holes were predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which showed that when a massive star dies, it leaves behind a small, dense remnant core. If the core's mass is more than about three times the mass of the Sun, the equations showed, the force of gravity overwhelms all other forces and produces a black hole.

Using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere scientists have produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy. (Video)

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Scientists can't directly observe black holes with telescopes that detect x-rays, light, or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. We can, however, infer the presence of black holes and study them by detecting their effect on other matter nearby. If a black hole passes through a cloud of interstellar matter, for example, it will draw matter inward in a process known as accretion. A similar process can occur if a normal star passes close to a black hole. In this case, the black hole can tear the star apart as it pulls it toward itself. As the attracted matter accelerates and heats up, it emits x-rays that radiate into space. Recent discoveries offer some tantalizing evidence that black holes have a dramatic influence on the neighborhoods around them - emitting powerful gamma ray bursts, devouring nearby stars, and spurring the growth of new stars in some areas while stalling it in others.

Astronomers have identified a candidate for the smallest-known black hole. (Video)

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One Star's End is a Black Hole's Beginning
Most black holes form from the remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion. (Smaller stars become dense neutron stars, which are not massive enough to trap light.) If the total mass of the star is large enough (about three times the mass of the Sun), it can be proven theoretically that no force can keep the star from collapsing under the influence of gravity. However, as the star collapses, a strange thing occurs. As the surface of the star nears an imaginary surface called the "event horizon," time on the star slows relative to the time kept by observers far away. When the surface reaches the event horizon, time stands still, and the star can collapse no more - it is a frozen collapsing object.
Even bigger black holes can result from stellar collisions. Soon after its launch in December 2004, NASA's Swift telescope observed the powerful, fleeting flashes of light known as gamma ray bursts. Chandra and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope later collected data from the event's "afterglow," and together the observations led astronomers to conclude that the powerful explosions can result when a black hole and a neutron star collide, producing another black hole.
Babies and Giants
Although the basic formation process is understood, one perennial mystery in the science of black holes is that they appear to exist on two radically different size scales. On the one end, there are the countless black holes that are the remnants of massive stars. Peppered throughout the Universe, these "stellar mass" black holes are generally 10 to 24 times as massive as the Sun. Astronomers spot them when another star draws near enough for some of the matter surrounding it to be snared by the black hole's gravity, churning out x-rays in the process. Most stellar black holes, however, lead isolated lives and are impossible to detect. Judging from the number of stars large enough to produce such black holes, however, scientists estimate that there are as many as ten million to a billion such black holes in the Milky Way alone.
On the other end of the size spectrum are the giants known as "supermassive" black holes, which are millions, if not billions, of times as massive as the Sun. Astronomers believe that supermassive black holes lie at the center of virtually all large galaxies, even our own Milky Way. Astronomers can detect them by watching for their effects on nearby stars and gas.

Astronomers may have found evidence for a cluster of young, blue stars encircling one of the first intermediate-mass black holes ever discovered.Read the full article

Historically, astronomers have long believed that no mid-sized black holes exist.  However, recent evidence from Chandra, XMM-Newton and Hubble strengthens the case that mid-size black holes do exist. One possible mechanism for the formation of supermassive black holes involves a chain reaction of collisions of stars in compact star clusters that results in the buildup of extremely massive stars, which then collapse to form intermediate-mass black holes. The star clusters then sink to the center of the galaxy, where the intermediate-mass black holes merge to form a supermassive black hole.
 

Silent and Deadly: Fatal Farts Immobilize Prey

The adult form of a silent and deadly predator: a Beaded Lacewing. This species is from Udzungwa, Tanzania. Patrick Coin/CotinisClick to Open Overlay Gallery

The beautiful animal in the photo above is a Beaded Lacewing. While the adults are delicate and lovely, they begin life as ferocious tiny predators lurking in the nests of termites. These larvae live unmolested in their nest, silently striking down termites from behind—and for one species, with their behind.
When a baby Lomamyia latipennis gets hungry, it stuns a termite with a “vapor-phase toxicant” released from its anus. That’s a fancy way of saying it farts on it. In fact, their farts are powerful enough to immobilize six termites with one blow.
This is how you wield a Death Fart, if you are a small predatory neuropteran:

“A larva repeatedly approached and retreated until the tip of its abdomen was directed at the termite’s head. The apex of the abdomen was lifted and waved past the termite’s face, without contact. The termite… was not repelled, as it made no obvious effort to escape. One to three minutes later it was incapacitated, lying supine, with its legs moving irregularly.”

Once the larva delivers its toxic toot, it can leisurely scuttle over and chow down. If a few extra termites are caught in the backdraft, that’s just extra food.
In laboratory tests, experimenters determined the fecal fume-induced paralysis lasted for three hours, and if not eaten, the termites eventually died. Even more astonishing is that early stage L. latipennis are tiny, about 0.07 mg in size. The average size of their termite prey was 2.5mg. That is some seriously potent flatulence.
The experimenters coaxed the larvae into farting on other insects commonly found in termite nests—fruit flies, two kinds of small wasp, and book lice—but they were unaffected. The spectacular sphincter specificity of the species seemed only affected by size; very large termites (>5mg) were slightly stunned.

How Do You Weaponize a Fart?

Beaded lacewings have been described as “unaccountably neglected… Generally speaking, very little is known about Berothidae at present.” There aren’t any good photos of this species, other than some older black and white blurry photos.
Unfortunately, just what chemicals create air biscuit asphyxiation were never identified by the researchers in the original study. There is a fairly deep literature on insect farting; a survey of more then 110 species found many of them were significant methane producers, especially roaches and termites.
That’s mostly a consequence of a high-fiber diet and a lot of gut bacterial symbionts. But it’s unlikely that beaded lacewings are ripping enough methane to knock out a termite—it must be something else unique to the species.
And their gassy butts aren’t the only thing strange about L. latipennis. The first and third instar larvae are highly mobile and carnivorous. But in between, there is a strange stage that doesn’t move and is non-feeding. Why? We have no idea.
Indeed, this whole group of insects (Neuroptera) has something just not right going on with their colons. A constriction between their stomach and hind-gut prevents immature stages from pooping. They work around this problem by acting more like spiders than insects. Their pointy, straw-like mouthparts inject digestive enzymes into the bodies of their victims.
Once the innards of their prey are liquified, they slurp it up. Any solid matter that happens to be ingested is retained until they turn into their adult form and can finally take a giant dump.

Tooting Their Own Horn—Or a Bum Rap?

To date, no one has been able to repeat the original experiments, so it’s possible that this is just a vapor trail. We don’t know what makes a death fart; maybe nothing. All insects have weird and wonderful chemical secretions; perhaps the original experimenters missed something. In the words of neuropteran expert Professor John Oswald: “the gaseous allomone story in larval berothids still requires further investigation and confirmation.”
Several kinds of lacewing relatives have anal attack plans. The species Chrysoperla comanche exudes a droplet from its anal glands and waves it around threateningly if disturbed. They are master contortionists, raising their abdomen over their heads to anoint the head of an annoying ant. It seems to act like chewing gum; it’s incredibly sticky and ants work frantically to clean it off. (I’m not sure why the experimenters thought to test this, but the larva can still perform this yoga move after decapitation. It’s a reflex to being prodded in the side.)
Unfortunately, no one has identified the chemical component for this species either, but whatever the stuff is, they have a lot of it up their butt. In lab tests, larvae were able to defend themselves from an average of eight ants before they began to run out. It’s the same adhesive that they use to cement themselves to a leaf when they change from a larva into a pupa. In this case, the insects found a new use for a previously existing substance.
Adults of the common green lacewing produces a compound called skatole, which smells just as bad as the name sounds. In Sweden, adults have the nickname Stinkslända [stink-fly].
Maybe all around us farts are causing death and destruction on a tiny, tiny scale. We just don’t know.

Specifically, Sphincters

I’ve focused on the scatological part of this story, because seriously, we all have that one officemate that seems to exist on falafel and bean burritos. But beyond that, it’s a fascinating example of just how little we know about the natural world around us.
This investigation into insect farting came about because some biologists were curious. Not because they thought they would find an important compound to control termites; but because they thought this was a nifty little animal and wanted to learn more.

The cover of Astounding Stories, June 1932, clearly foreshadowing the Ass-Yodel method of termite control. Astounding Stories, H. W. Wessolowski, artist.Click to Open Overlay Gallery

Insects make up nearly 80 percent of described animal species so far, but an estimated 60 percent of insect species are undescribed. We don’t know much about them other than a few specimens.
Entomology is fairly friendly to interested amateurs; the natural history of many of our insects were worked out by people who were observant and kept careful records. Perhaps someone will be inspired to start recording and collecting these little predators.  An enormous unknown world awaits you at your feet.
And if you ever happen to be attacked by giant termites like these fellows, now you have a new weapon to try.

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J. Johnson & K. Hagen. 1981. A neuropterous larva uses an allomone to attack termites. Nature 289, 506 – 507 1981); doi:10.1038/289506a0

Don’t Try This at Home: Making Lightning Bolts With Rockets

Click to Open Overlay Gallery

1M frames per second: Speed of the camera used to document the strikes. Courtesy of the International Center for Lightning Research and Testing, University of Florida

Lightning, for obvious reasons, is difficult to study. But Martin Uman and a team of scientists at the International Center for Lightning Research and Testing at the University of Florida have rigged together a contraption that enables them to make their own bolts of electrical power on demand. Their method: Walk into a storm and send up a rocket on a string.
To trigger the lightning bolts, Uman and his team attach the 6-foot-tall hobby rockets to a 2,300-foot spool of copper wire grounded to a strike rod. As the rockets launch into the heart of a thunderstorm, the wire unspools and a positive electrical discharge propagates upward in a jerky zigzag, going three to seven miles high.
Once the positive current makes it to the clouds, it stops flowing for an instant. Then a negative charge shreds back down, hitting the strike rod at the end of the wire. A current runs back upward, and that creates the bright flash known as lightning. Triggered lightning reproduces almost the exact behavior and effects as natural lightning. So, now that they know where lightning will strike next (and they can even leave stuff out there to get hit), the team can gather data about the basic physics of bolts as well as info about how lightning affects the materials it strikes with 1 million-frame-per-second high-speed photography.

The Ligtning Machine

1. Rocket Tubes

2. Insulating fiberglass launch supports

3. Electronics box for measuring current

L-Dopa

Uman’s team has found that lightning isn’t powerful enough to break the casing on most nuclear waste containers, so whew on that front. Their next big project is a nutso-sounding, DARPA-funded plan to study very low frequency radio waves (10-30 kHz) that are generated and propagated by lightning in the earth’s ionosphere (about 30 to 60 miles up). “Navies around the world use VLF signals for communications with submarines,” explains Robert Moore, the study’s lead researcher. Historically, VLF waves (known as “whistlers” when produced by lightning) were also used for geo-location, and Moore believes they could play a role in today’s navigation when GPS equipment fails. The ICLRT is deploying VLF receivers all over the world (stretching as far as Greenland and Antarctica, among other places) and taking measurements with rocket-triggered lightning and narrow-band transmitters. The overall goal is to “bring VLF remote sensing into the 21st century,” says Moore. After that? May we suggest a DeLorean with a flux capacitor?

That NASA Warp Drive? Yeah, It’s Still Poppycock

A week ago, in a far-off corner of the Internet, a little website called NASAspaceflight.com published a story about a futuristic propulsion drive that produces thrust without propellant. Amazing! said the rest of the Internet. A drive that can run without heavy propellant opens up travel to the farthest reaches of space. Not only that, but the NASA-based group testing the drive had detected a slight spatial distortion around it—a warp, in other words. As in “warp speed” and “warp drive.” Not only could humans get to deep space unencumbered by fuel, but they could even travel faster than the speed of light!
Does that sound too good to be true? Excellent. This isn’t the first time that this theoretical drive—tested by a small lab called Eagleworks, based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center—has surfaced. Every time it comes up, it gets the space nerds frothing about the possibility of interstellar travel. And every time, physicists have to settle everyone down.
This time is like those times.
Last year, the Eagleworks lab—headed up by Harold “Sonny” White—said at a conference on propulsion technologies that they had measured thrust from an electromagnetic propulsion drive. The basic idea behind an EM drive, which is based on a design from a British engineer named Roger Shawyer, is that it can produce thrust by bouncing microwaves around in a cone-shaped metal cavity.
That would be awesome, of course, except it violates one of the fundamental tenets of physics: conservation of momentum. Saying that a drive can produce thrust without propellant going out the backside is kind of like saying that you can drive your car just by sitting in the driver’s seat and pushing on the dashboard.
Now, the last time this idea popped up it made a bunch of noise, which eventually settled down because of some pretty (ahem) obvious flaws in Eagleworks’ experiments. The physicists hadn’t run the tests in a vacuum—essential for measuring a subtle thrust signal. And while they had tested the drive under multiple conditions, one of them was intentionally set up wrong. That setup produced the same thrust signatures as the other conditions, suggesting that the signals the physicists were seeing were all artifacts.
This time around, Eagleworks researchers said they had addressed one of those problems. “We have now confirmed that there is a thrust signature in a hard vacuum,” wrote Eagleworks member Paul March in a forum. It was that post—all the way back in February—that led to most of last week’s hullabaloo.
Let’s be clear, though: Just because this time the group conducted its experiments in a hard vacuum doesn’t mean that an interstellar warp drive is soon to come. Marc Millis, who headed up the now-defunct Breakthrough Propulsion Physics lab at NASA’s Glenn Research Center—which, like Eagleworks, was dedicated to finding science-fiction-sounding ways to move a spaceship—says there are plenty of other interactions between the drive and the test chamber that could account for the results. “Even if it was done in a hard vacuum,” Millis says, “you have to take into account the distance between the drive and the chamber wall, whether those walls were conductive, and the geometry of the system.”
On top of that, there’s no way to be sure that the tests were run in a hard vacuum—because the only source of information is a post on an Internet forum. Not a peer-reviewed published result, not even a one-off conference proceeding. Let’s not do science like that, OK?
You’ve just read nine paragraphs of credulity, which is frankly more than the work deserves. The reason the Eagleworks lab presents results in unrefereed conference proceedings and Internet posts, according to Eric Davis, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, is that no peer-reviewed journals will publish their papers. Even arXiv, the open-access pre-print server physicists default to, has reportedly turned away Eagleworks results.
Why the cold shoulder? Either flawed results or flawed theory. Eagleworks’ results so far are very close to the threshold of detection—which is to say, barely perceptible by their machinery. That makes it more likely that their findings are a result of instrument error, and their thrust measurements don’t scale up with microwave input as you might expect. Plus, the physics and math behind each of their claims is either flawed or just…nonexistent.
For example: How might the EM Drive get around that pesky conservation-of-momentum problem? Eagle works says the microwave field generated in the drive’s cavity could be pushing against quantum vacuum virtual plasma. “The problem is there’s no such thing,” says Davis. Millis, for his part, doesn’t even pay attention to White’s work out of Eagleworks: “If it’s not impartial, I don’t read it.”
So who are these guys? Despite the fact that the group works out of Johnson, under the auspices of NASA, Eagleworks still only runs on $50,000 a year in funding. “That’s not enough to conduct a high-quality experimental research program,” says Davis. “They’d need $1.5 million, $2 million for five, six, seven years.”
Research into breakthrough propulsion physics—even when it had its own lab at Glenn, under Millis—has never been particularly well-funded. So “the way that this really happens is people dabble in addition to their day job,” says Millis. According to him, Eagleworks started with White working on concepts in his free time, not officially supported or sanctioned by NASA, and then eventually got a little money to run his lab out of Johnson. But the NASA banner doesn’t legitimize the work—if anything, NASA seems to want to keep the project under the radar. The press office at Johnson Space Center denied requests for interviews with March and White.
Davis and Millis both admit that they’re on the fringe. They’re scientists who strongly believe in the potential for warp drives and interstellar travel. So maybe it’s a little funny to hear them essentially say that other would-be warpsmiths are crackpots. But White and his colleagues exist on the fringe of the fringe. “We’re all open-minded people,” says Davis. “We’re all in the business of finding the breakthrough. But we have a standard of rigor, based on incremental research and development—not big leaps in logic.”
When someone builds a warp drive that violates conservation of momentum, you’ll read about it here, accompanied by a big old mea culpa. But until then, don’t believe the hyperspace.