Kajetan Maciuszko - blog

Alcubierre drive, more widely known as warp drive, is yet another scientific concept originating from Einstein’s theory of relativity. Its purpose would be to allow travel faster than light for any object equipped with such technology. Its name comes from scientist Miguel Alcubierre, who published a paper, explaining how such theoretical warp drive could work. It is well known that no known object is capable of travelling faster than the speed of light. This is bypassed by forming a warped bubble of space around the object, essentially forming a separate “universe”, in which travel faster than light is possible. The only problem is that in order to form this bubble you would need a large quantity of a material with negative mass, and all known matter has positive mass. Existence of such matter would violate more than one energy conditions, hence why even Alcubierre himself said that unless such matter is discovered and able to be artificially created, warp drive is highly unlikely to...

Quantum immortality theory comes from a thought experiment published in 1987 by Hans Moravec and in 1988 by Bruno Marchal. The experiment proposes the same setup as the famous Schrödinger’s Cat experiment, with the change that you are both the subject and the observer. In the Schr ö dinger’s experiment, after putting the cat in the box, it is in a state of superposition – both dead and alive at the same time. So, after being put and closed in a box, you two have to be in a superposition. Now we have to assume, that there are infinite universes, meaning that every possible world, past, present and future will always exist on a quantum level, with which the quantum physics generally agree. After running the experiment on time and letting some highly lethal gas or a radioactive material in the box, in an infinite amount of universes you will die, and in an infinite number of universes you will live. After rerunning the experiment the same happens – you die in an infinite number of uni...

Wormholes were first mentioned by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity, linking to the possible existence of white holes and them being direct exits of black holes, connecting to points in space. In 1935, Einstein and another physicist Nathan Rosen expanded on the idea, and proposed existence of “bridges” connecting two points through space-time, that could theoretically be used as shortcuts in space travel. These formations came to be called “wormholes”. They are theorized to have two spheroidal “mouths”, connected by a tunnel. According to the theory of general relativity, a wormhole’s mouth could be spotted by the way its gravity affects light passing near it, similarly to a black hole. Even if such a wormhole was discovered, travel through it would be a huge unknown, since primordially wormholes are theorized to have a size of around 10 -33 cm, though it is possible that with the universe constantly expanding they could increase in time. Second problem with trave...