Scienceish Lesson: The Alcubierre Drive & the Flash

Scienish Lesson – The Alcubierre Drive from Flash: Fastest Man Alive #7 in a story by Jay Baruchel and Sumit Kumar. In the story, STAR Labs is testing an Alcubierre Drive – a real (okay, still theoretical, but rumored to be of high interest to NASA) thing. But this being comics, the drive, which is being used as a means to travel through time…well, the test run has the expected result. Instead of working, it blows up, and well, you can figure out what happens to the pilot of hte craft in which the drive was located. 

If your answer has the words “radioactive” and “monster” in it, you’re in the right ballpark. 

So – the thing about the Alcubierre Warp Drive. It was proposed in 1994 by Mexican physicist (and Star Trek fan – that’s where we got the term “warp”) Miguel Alcubierre as a possible solution to the field equations of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity which would, in a way, allow for faster-than-light travel (not time travel). 

The super-basic basics of Alcubierre’s idea is that the spacetime in front of the object with the drive would contract while the spacetime behind it would expand…kind of like a wave. Inside the wave the would be located a “warp bubble” of flat spacetime, in which the ship would be able to ride. Carried in the bubble of flat, or regular spacetime while the stretching and contracting are going on around it, the ship isn’t technically moving – it’s just being carried along as the bubble itself moves. Pushed and pulled by spacetime itself. 

The patch of spacetime that contains the bubble is moving, relative to other patches of spacetime, and there are no rules against that. Spacetime itself can move faster than light – something that can be proven when looking at the expansion of the universe. The objects that we see (galaxies, etc) aren’t moving faster than light – the spacetime that they’re in is moving faster than light. Imagine a toy car that has a top speed limit of 30 cm/second traveling on a blanket. That car can only move at a maximum of 30 cm/second. But now, pull the blanket in the same direction the car is moving. From the point of view of someone standing to the side, the car is moving faster than it’s top speed. Because the “space” the car is in – the blanket – is moving too.  

The problematic relativistic effects of such high velocity that would affect mass and the dilation of time wouldn’t apply, so the passengers on a hypothetical ship with a hypothetical drive would be okay. They wouldn’t even feel like they were moving. Hypothetically. 

In short, everything that Alcubierre proposed isn’t disallowed by General Relativity, which means that it might be (“not disallowed” doesn’t give you a free pass – there are still other considerations) possible. For instance, to make the warp field possible, you’d need to produce a ring of negative energy density around the ship to make the bubble. This limits your designs to a ring-like thing that would produce the ring around the ship. And also – to create that negative energy density, you’d need exotic negative matter, a class of matter that we kind of know exists, but have never produced on such a massive scale that could surround a ship. And all of this would take tremendous amounts of energy to make work. 

If you’re not getting the idea yet – in our world, this is not something you want to just fire up in downtown Central City, no matter if it’s in STAR Labs or not. I don’t know for sure what compressing the space in which people are standing would do to a person, but I can’t imagine it would be anything pleasant or good. Or easy to watch without vomiting. 

As for the time-travel aspect of it, while Alcubierre didn’t propose it as such, faster-than-light travel does carry an element of time travel with it…although the work of Stephen Hawking, ever the enemy of proper time travel, has suggested that quantum effects – when meeting the limits of general relativity, may not allow the method to work. Just a flat…stop. 

NASA though continues to kick the idea of Alcubierre’s drive around, and the work done to refine the original ideas have both brought some of the craziness needed for it to work as originally presented to more manageable, but still crazy levels. Ideally – ideally – speaking, Alcubierre’s warp drive is at least a couple of centuries off in our world. 

So – back to the Flash’s story. After the accident, we do get a nice nod to the idea that space would expand and contract to make the drive function. From there, things get straight-up scienceish – since this is the Flash we’re talking about, the exotic matter needed to make the drive work is the ubiquitous “dark matter” of the Flash’s world. But for some reason, the dark matter fused with the pilot’s brain, turning him into a walking fission (splitting atoms) reaction, which the Flash controls with wrapping him in boron-rich control rods.

Okay – that’s a nice science nod in a scienceish bit there – control rods in nuclear reactions are made of boron, due to boron’s ability to absorb neutrons into its nucleus without bad effects. Fewer neutrons bouncing around, fewer neutrons to hit other atoms and split them. Though the idea that a human being, suddenly going all fission like this is 110% scienceish. We’re mostly carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous. There’s not a ton of energy or radiation to be gained by splitting those. Plus – like us, the pilot has only has a limited number of those atoms in him…split too many, and…things are going to start going…badly.

No worries though – the pilot opens a hole into the past and well…yeah. A very…scienceish ending. 

But hey – a namecheck of an Alcubierre Drive that might get some people wondering what it is…I’ll take it. Check out some of the links below for more on the ideas behind it, and prepare to have your mind blown.

References, Resources:

Alcubierre’s original paper (1994)

Phys.org: What is the “Alcubierre” warp drive? 

Popular Mechanics: Is NASA Actually Working on a Warp Drive? 

NASA: Is Warp Drive Real? 

Wikipedia: Alcubierre Drive

PBS Space Time: Is the Alcubierre Warp Drive Possible?