starship-design: "warp drive" in January 2000 _Scientific American_

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

The January 2000 issue of _Scientific American_ has an article on
negative energy and its potential applications to FTL travel and
time travel.  Of course, as usual, the problem is that
theoretically a large amount of negative energy could be used to
accomplish either of those things, but quantum physics makes it
essentially impossible to create and hold on to any large
quantity of negative energy.  The article is quite informative
and includes recent results like the improved "warp bubble" that
requires much less negative energy than Alcubierre's original
theoretical construct.

Although the article is not currently available on the sciam.com
web site, there is a shorter item about why superluminal travel
is not directly prohibited by general relativity:

http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/physics/physics57/physics57.html