Two Scientists Are Building a Real Star Trek 'Impulse Engine'

Get ready for the adventure! With conventional rocket fuel, it would take 15 to 16,000 years to reach the nearest

star

. Conventional rocket types are out of the question for interstellar travel. You're going to have to do something a little further. Slow to half momentum. Going at half

impulse

. What we're trying to do is build an

impulse

engine

like the one heard on "Star Trek." We'd like it to be about 0.4 the speed of light, just so we can reach the nearest

star

s within a human lifetime. There is no fuel burned. Nothing is fired out of the exhaust pipe. And it's the gravitational field that will

real

ly drive this forward.

This is the Mach Effect Gravity Assist Drive, a device that could make interstellar space travel possible. But the MEGA drive, as it is known, is also a design that relies on some rather controversial physics. For many years, you work on a project that people think is crazy, and chances are they think you're crazy too. Now, after 30 years of tinkering, this pair of

scientists

could finally be close to getting the results they were hoping for. And NASA is taking the idea seriously. If something like that were true, it would be momentous. It would be innovative and revolutionary new physics, but those kinds of advances don't happen very often.

It would be a pretty extraordinary claim to say that we've put this new spin on the way the universe works that we didn't know about before. It is a well-known Newtonian law: an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion at constant speed unless acted on by an external force. All objects resist a push to some extent, and what drives them to do so? Inertia. In the 19th century, Austrian physicist Ernst Mach conjectured that these inertial forces result from the gravity of objects in the distant universe. It became known as Mach's principle.

And although most experts have now ruled it out,

scientists

at this laboratory in California believe the idea has simply been misinterpreted. Mach's principle itself has gone out of fashion and people don't even talk seriously about Mach's principle anymore. It just depends on the way you think about it. If you look in a textbook, you might find five or six different definitions of Mach's principle. But what I'm thinking about is that distant matter out there can influence things nearby. To understand it, let's take this old analogy used to illustrate how matter curves space-time. If you place a heavy object on a trampoline, it will fall and bend the rubber sheet.

Now, if you roll a ball on the trampoline, it will continue to orbit the heavy mass in the center. This is how a planet behaves when it is attracted by the gravity of a star. The thing is that for the rubber sheet to act that way it has to be under tension. You have to stretch it. And we're saying that, basically, the distant matter of the universe is what pulls on spacetime and strains it. And that's what makes it act like, basically, like a sheet of rubber. The stretched rubber sheet is charged with potential energy. And according to the team's understanding of the Mach principle, so is spacetime.

So we think there is a lot of gravitational potential and this device can

real

ly take advantage of it. Imagine the space-time of the universe as if it were a very, very flat lake. And you're sitting in a rowboat, the kind that has a seat that moves back and forth, but you don't have oars. Instead, you have two large buckets, like big trash cans. As you slide forward in the seat, the mass shifts and the boat moves slightly. That is conservation of momentum, another Newtonian law. If there are no external forces acting on a system as it moves, its center of mass must remain in the same place.

And then the ship moves to compensate for the different distribution of mass. Now, what you are going to do is throw the cubes into the water, which is universal space-time. And now you weigh much more than before. You will now slide back into the seat. And as you slide back, the boat will move beneath you so your center of mass stays in the same place. The boat actually moves forward as you slide back in the seat. Then you can throw away the water, because you no longer need it, and then repeat that process. The MEGA unit works in a similar way.

The part that does all the work is a stack of piezoelectric crystals, the same type of material found in your electric toothbrush. When you apply a certain frequency of electrical current, the crystals expand and contract, causing the entire device to vibrate. But the MEGA drive is set to vibrate mainly in one direction, which causes it to accelerate slightly. The team says this acceleration allows the device to harness the gravitational potential of the universe. By borrowing some of its energy, the crystals change mass and the device begins to behave like our rowboat. That change in mass is what causes propulsion because each crystal moves this way.

So the whole stack is in this breathing mode, which moves back and forth. As it gains energy, it increases mass. And then it shrinks again and loses mass. If you time it right, you can make that thing move forward. All of this has been the life's work of Jim Woodward, who set out on this path more than three decades ago. Since then, he has been working alone on the MEGA drive project in his spare time until his college desk was moved to Hal Fearn's office. I was on a gap year. And I came back and there he was.

There he was. And Hal was not happy. And at first I thought he was crazy. I thought, what the hell is this guy trying to do? I looked closer at what he was doing. That's when I really got more interested. However, the change is very small. The change is not that small. I grew up watching "Star Trek" and I would love to be able to say I worked on something that would help people traverse space-time quickly. If the theory turns out to be correct and we are really harnessing the gravitational field, it would be a huge advance.

I just have to prove it. Hello Shell, are you there? Yes I'm here. But proving this idea has been a problem. The device's movements have been extremely small, not large enough to be recorded with the naked eye. But after receiving two grants from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts, or NIAC for short, the team managed to greatly improve their existing prototype. Jim was basically paying for all of this with his own money. He must have invested between $30,000 and $50,000 in this project. He didn't want to buy off-the-shelf equipment because some of it wasn't available when he started doing this 30-odd years ago.

He couldn't buy part of the equipment. You just had to do it and build the circuits yourself. At one point, some people came and saw Jim's homemade boxes. They didn't really take it that seriously. I had to convince Jim to purchase some off-the-shelf equipment that we could fully calibrate. Trying to set things up so we could do some runs that would make for interesting video footage. Many new collaborators have joined along the way and the team has designed a new configuration for the device, hanging it from a pendulum to increase thrust and eliminate any vibrations that could be confused with it.

Well, here it goes. Three, two, one. And finally they began to see it move with their own eyes. You can physically see this thing shake, vibrate, and you can physically see it move to the side. That's actually quite exciting. If we can actually show this on video, I think that should convince quite a few people. It's in a reflector in the frame. Well? I still think we should give Jim that wormhole-like air horn. No. Because I think it looks cool. Yes. The devices we build now produce those kinds of forces 100 to 1000 times greater than the forces we produced even a year or two ago.

It's very, very small. If you think about a small pulley with a little bit of mass held at the end of a rope, the force that would produce if you dropped, say, two or three grams of weight. You would almost barely feel it in your hand. It's almost like the weight of a feather. Maybe a little more than a feather. Maybe two feathers. I'll be generous, I'll give you a couple of feathers. The team calculates that the smaller the device, the greater the force it can generate. So instead of expanding it, they hope that one day arrays of thousands of tiny MEGA

engine

s powered by a nuclear battery can be deployed to accelerate large probes into interstellar space.

In fact, they are enough on their own to make it possible to take a spacecraft, a human-manned spacecraft, to nearby stars and back in a reasonable fraction of a human lifetime. So the question is: have we all been wrong? Are we collectively smoking something? Don't we know what we're doing? I guess you could argue that's the case. But the way to know is to find out if the gadgets we make really do what we say they do. Some other teams already tried to replicate the results of the MEGA unit, but the results were negative. People don't expect this to work.

It sounds so strange. There are several things that could happen that could cause these false positives. And that's what people think is going to happen. If they say this weird effect is actually real, then... and then someone else comes along and proves them wrong, then it looks like they have egg on their face, basically. Therefore, it is much harder to say that something has a real effect when it is controversial. Because of this controversy, NASA is now funding an independent study of the MEGA booster at the Naval Research Laboratory. The cool thing about this statement is that they say there is revolutionary new physics that allows you to vary your inertial mass, meaning you can be heavier and lighter at different times.

And if you can move at the same time as you change your mass, now maybe you have a way to move and make some kind of movement, movement, movement throughout space. Now, is that possible in this universe? Maybe? Maybe not. Mike McDonald is part of the team testing the device, but even he admits that conclusively proving or disproving this theory won't be easy. Will the test be conclusive? Let me answer that question with a question. What if I ask you to prove to me that there are no pink elephants? Now, you could say that all the elephants I've seen are gray, but how do I know you haven't looked hard enough?

The answer is that you can't really prove a negative. Tests give us enough information to decide whether the way we think the world works is valid enough to continue moving in that direction. And that's what this type of test can tell us. If you asked me to put on my betting hat and say, will we really see exactly the effect that is claimed and will it be so strong that we will think, oh yeah, that's definitely the mechanism that is claimed too? You know, I would say it's a number probably between one in 10 and one in 10 million, and I would lean toward the higher end.

To be honest, the odds are zero, but the odds are zero for every new idea that comes along. And remember that science is not a tool that gets dirty with use. You know, the scientific method emerges from any encounter as brilliant as when it began. And if we use it well, even if we don't find any new effects here, we'll learn something about how to do these kinds of tests better in the future for whatever comes next. There is a small but real chance that nothing will happen. To me, it's extremely unlikely, but there's been more than one occasion where things haven't gone well on a particular day and I've started drafting an apology to people who are interested in this, saying, "Geez, guys, I'm really sorry.

You know, it wasn't real after all." I haven't had one of those episodes in several months. Assuming the device passes its replication tests and nothing else can explain the forces the team claims, the ultimate test one day would be a series of MEGA units maneuvering a CubeSat in space. I'm 79 years old, so I don't know how long I'll live. In a few years, maybe I'll see something in space, maybe I won't. If I live longer, I'm pretty sure I'll see something in space. In that sense, science fiction will be claimed as transformed into scientific fact.