Posted on 11/29/2013 7:58:18 PM PST by Star Traveler
HOUSTON — Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory.
Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects.
He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it travels in a certain area, and then observing the change with a device called an interferometer. So sensitive is their measuring equipment that it was picking up myriad earthly vibrations, including people walking nearby. So they recently moved into this lab, which floats atop a system of underground pneumatic piers, freeing it from seismic disturbances.
The team is trying to determine whether faster-than-light travel — warp drive — might someday be possible.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If you think about it, even were there a way to accelerate a spacecraft to near the speed of light, it seems likely that over interstellar space there would just have to be a solid particle to collide with somewhere on the line between point A and point B - and it would seem that a particle impact at such a speed would be exceedingly dangerous to the spacecraft.
At that point the spacecraft would no longer be a solid
object and would not even be in the same time frame as a
particle. At least that’s how I remember my last trip.
This is where you can read some great sci-fi.
I read Georgette Heyer (Regency romances--only Heyer) and Ellis Peter, murder mysteries where the "hero" is a 12th century Benedictine monk, a former soldier of fortune and Crusader, who solves the murders by his knowledge of plants, poisons, etc.
Those are all I read now. But, thanks!
Perhaps we will be able to make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.
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