What does 'Warp Speed' mean? Is it a theoretical future possibility?

[CharlesTheHammer]

Obviously warp speed is how the ships in Star Trek travel long distances. I used to think warp speed was just light speed, for instance, warp 5 was 5 times the speed of light. But thats not true apparently......

I've seen episodes where they have a 'Warp Field' around the ship. What does warp supposedly do to speed up distant space travel?

Is it a theoretical possibility in the very distant future, or is it just something made up by the writers of Star Trek?8)

I ask because there are many things talked about in Star Trek that are maybe possible in the future, but others that are not......

 

[amapola]

It has to do with bending (warping) space. Kinda like if you want to get from one end of a hotdog to the other end you can travel the length of it or bend the hotdog into a circle until the ends touch. I'm going to have a hotdog now. Try reading this
http://science.howstuffworks.com/warp-speed.htm

 

[ebola?]

Yeah...so it was pretty common for preliminary Star Trek scripts to have "put sciencey stuff here" in various portions of them. "Warp Speed" is some type of ill-defined faster than light travel. I always got the impression that the scale was exponential, as ensigns start flippin' shit once warp 9 is breached.

ebola

 

[Zulkifar]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treknobabble

Ha ha. That being said though, the idea is supposed to be a little similar to an Alcubierre_drive, which in itself has some amusing limitations (like an Alcubierre drive needing an Alcubierre drive in the first place), but the idea hasn't seemed to be dismissed outright among physicists, from what I've seen so far anyway.

I always got the impression that the scale was exponential, as ensigns start flippin' shit once warp 9 is breached.

Yeah it's supposed to be logarithmic or something. I used a simulation of it on Celestia and if you push it too far you zip straight out of the universe LOL.

 

[Belisarius]

It's a theoretical possibility, but that usually is synonymous with thought experiment, such as the Einstein-Rosen bridge Kip Thorne whipped up for Sagan's Contact: not strictly forbidden by physics, but requiring god-like technology.

 

[DwayneHoover]

Some scientist recently published a paper showing it was theoretically possible, by creating a "Space-Time Bubble" then doing something I cant recall to get it to be sucked forward... since the ship would be stationary inside the bubble it is not moving and is therefore not violating any laws about lightspeed... and there is nothing that says a spacetime bubble has any speed limits, so theoretically yes that would allow you to move about the universe at infinite speeds...

BUT: the paper estimated it would take the entire mass of Jupiter converted to energy to accomplish, so, not really realistic, until that is we invent a means of sucking energy from the "vacuum energy" or until we are able to manufacture antimatter at will and collide it with matter for instant infinite energy just like the supposed design of the Star Trek warp engines... gee perhaps Gene Roddenberry did in fact recieve communcations from the Spock of the future or something, haha