🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 26 Mar 1997 09:37:01 GMT, malcolm@pigsty.demon.co.uk (Malcolm
McMahon) wrote:

>>I'm _almost_ proud of you, you nearly came up with the answer, but you went
>>the wrong way. You would not want to get rid of Higgs bosons, you'd want to
>>attract more and more of them. 
>>
>>Think of it this way. We are trying to warp space right?

>Not exactly, no. We (at least I) am interested in finding a way of
>travelling fast. If it doesn't involve a "warp drive" that won't break
>my heart.

But you're limiting yourself to travelling only at the speed of light that
way. With a warp field, you have the possibility of faster than light.

Anyways, your way wouldn't work. Once you make a particle of matter get rid
of its attraction for mass, it ceases to be a particle of matter and
becomes a particle of some other kind of energy. You no longer will have a
proton, but instead you may have a photon of the same energy level as a
proton. Yes, you've achieved light speed this way, but how are you going to
become matter again?

>> You warp space by
>>concentrating particles inside it. If you can attract lots of Higgs bosons
>>to a volume just in front of your ship, you have created a gravity well
>>there. Manipulating the Higgs field may be the secret to warp travel. 

>But the _hard_ part, on all the warp or wormhole concepts being played
>with to date, is that some part of the field requires negative mass
>density to bend space in the opposite to the normal direction.

Not at all. All you need is compressive forces, which you can manipulate to
give you regions of expansion elsewhere. Think of the cannon ball sitting
on a trampoline. Where the cannon ball sits it compresses the trampoline,
but elsewhere the trampoline has had to expand to accomodate the
compression near the ball. 

				Yousuf Khan
--
Yousuf J. Khan
ykhan@achilles.net
Ottawa, Ont, Canada
Nation's capital