Year: 1999
Type: article
Abstract: This NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Workshop seeks to explore concepts that could someday enable interstellar travel. The effective superluminal motion proposed by Alcubierre (1994) to be a possibility owing to theoretically allowed space-time metric distortions within general relativity has since been shown by Pfenning and Ford (1997) to be physically unattainable. A number of other hypothetical possibilities have been summarized by Millis (1997). We present herein an overview of a concept that has implications for radically new propulsion possibilities and has a basis in theoretical physics: the hypothesis that the inertia and gravitation of matter originate in electromagetic interactions between the zero-point field (ZPF) and the quarks and electrons constituting atoms. A new derivation of the connection between the ZPF and inertia has been carried through that is properly co-variant, yielding the relativistic equation of motion from Maxwell’s equations. This opens new possibilites, but also rules out the basis of one hypothetical propulsion mechanism: Bondi’s “negative inertial mass, ” appears to be an impossibility. The objective of this NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Workshop is to explore ideas ranging from extrapolations of known technologies to hypothetical new physics which could someday lead to means for interstellar travel. One concept that has generated interest is the proposal by Alcubierre (1994) that effectively
Authors: Bernhard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1848836498