Nanotechnology, the mysterious Casimir Force, and interstellar spaceships
Date: Saturday, September 20, 2008 @ 14:41:12 GMT
Topic: Science
 (Nanowerk Spotlight) Travel through wormholes, time machines
and hovering landspeeders are the stuff of science fiction novels.
Nevertheless, scientists have suggested that the quantum mechanics of
something called the Casimir effect can be used to produce a
locally mass-negative region of space-time, a phenomenon that
theoretically could be used to stabilize a wormhole to allow faster
than light travel ("Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition"). For many years the Casimir effect was little more than a theoretical curiosity.
With the advances in micro- and nanotechnology and
the fact that the Casimir force affects nanoscale devices such as NEMS,
research in detecting and manipulating this mysterious force has
generated substantial interest.
Now, the secretive DARPA,
a research agency of the U.S. Department of Defense that often dabbles
in far-out technologies – and that also brought us the Internet's
predecessor ARPANET – is soliciting innovative research proposals in
the area of Casimir Effect Enhancement (Solicitation number DARPA-BAA-08-59.
...
As it now turns out, this is becoming a serious
research area with DARPA being interested in funding approaches that
can lead to the ability to manipulate Casimir forces.
Ok, so what about those interstellar spaceships? In 1996, NASA actually started a program called Breakthrough Propulsion Physics
– now practically dormant due to lack of funding – that looked at
concepts like space drives and faster-than-light travel, the kind of
breakthroughs that would make interstellar travel practical.
The basic idea is that if one could exploit the fact that vacuum is an
energy reservoir, thanks to zero-point energy, future space travelers
would have access to a limitless energy source. The only thing they
need, of course, is some kind of propulsion system that harvests the
required energy from the vacuum. That this is not totally crazy was
demonstrated in a 1984 paper ("Extracting electrical energy from the vacuum by cohesion of charged foliated conductors").
Serious research efforts are being made in various laboratories to
harness the Casimir and related effects for vacuum energy conversion.
...
Full article By Michael Berger: http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=7337.php
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