Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Biography

Biography: James F. Woodward

Abstract

Kip Thorne and several graduate students ushered in the era of wormhole physics in 1988 by reverse engineering, at Carl Sagan’s request, the needed conditions to travel to and from the center of the Galaxy 26,000 lightyears distant in little or no time. The requirement turned out to be “wormholes”, spacetime structures predicted by general relativity theory. Six years later, Miguel Alcubierre constructed the “warp drive” “metric” of general relativity that shows what is needed to zip around spacetime, seemingly at speeds faster than the speed of light. The requirement is a Jupiter mass of negative rest mass (“exotic”) matter. Before Thorne did his work a small collection of people worked on schemes to make lightspeed (and faster) travel possible. And after Thorne and Alcubierre, that collection of people has worked toward the goal of realizing the conditions dictated by general relativity for “hyperspeed” travel, be it through wormholes or encased in warp bubbles. “Advanced” propulsion is often taken to encompass all propulsion schemes more advanced than chemical rockets. Really advanced propulsion, however, is that enabling interstellar travel in short times, and that demands wormholes and/or warp bubbles. The stepping stone to such schemes is often figuring out how to accelerate a vessel without ejecting large amounts of propellant – so-called “field” propulsion. These schemes – wormholes, warp drives, and field propulsion – all involve gravity “manipulation”, whereas all other advanced propulsion schemes do not. In this talk I will recount some of the activities known to me of the collection of people working on gravity manipulation in the past decade or two. It is a tale of trial and error. Lots of error. But perhaps space-drive time is at hand.