When I was young, my father brought home an apple computer. This was back at the beginning of this whole “computer revolution”. It was a paperweight at best by today’s standards, but at the time it was the top of the line. It had a 256 KB hard drive. My father explained to me, 256 kilobytes is an astronomical amount of memory. We will never use all of that. It should be noted that 256 kilobytes is about 10 blog articles in Word format. My iPhone has about 10 thousand times more memory than that apple, and I can fill it in a heartbeat. Here lies the problem though. How could my father have possibly envisioned our world back then. How could he even fathom the concept of an iPhone in a time when we had tiny hard drives, 10 megahert computers, and cell phones the size of mini coopers. If he had, we would have skipped 18 years of learning and understanding. I learned very well from my father’s comments. I learned that we can never say never, and we can never say impossible.
As I grew older, I started getting told by teachers that nothing is impossible. I still believe that. That’s why I’m perplexed when I see people say that things are impossible or hear a someone tell me, “This is a fact.” In college, a professor of mine who was a major asshole (and won the Nobel prize for creating Bose-Einstein Condensate), told my physics 3 class that these strange quantum rules he was explaining were fact, and there was no argument about it. Well, that may or may not be true, but who knows what we will find when we look at the systems underlying the quantum world that we have observed. It is impossible to say with absolute certainty that anything is true. We have only had modern science for a few hundred years at best. I think it’s still probably a bit immature to believe that anything that we say is fact. Not long ago, we thought it was a fact that we moved through ether in the universe. Not long before that, the universe rotated around the Earth. Even before that, we thought that the world was flat.
What do you think cavemen thought when they saw lightning? They probably didn’t think, “Oh, that’s a stream of electrons moving from an area of high electrical potential to an area of low electrical potential over a route through the air who’s composition, pressure and temperature offer a path of least resistance.” Fuck that! Those guys where probably scared shitless by the seemingly random and completely unpredictable fire that the gods were attacking with from the sky. For them, fire from the gods was a perfectly reasonable explanation that matched their observations of lightning (Although, to steal a line from Dawkins and butcher it, when something is mysterious it doesn’t make sense to postulate that an even more mysterious super being is behind the mystery.) Just like now, quantum weirdness doesn’t make much sense to us, but we have postulated rules for the system that seem to match our observations.
The only reason that this came up is because I read an article this morning that said that warp drive is impossible. The word impossible was even used in the article. What a narrow minded interpretation. In 1994 a physicist theorized that warp drive would be possible by surrounding a spaceship in a bubble of space-time. The idea was that the ship itself couldn’t travel faster than light, but there is no reason that a bubble of space-time couldn’t move faster than light through our space-time. There were problems, such as the equations showing that the bubble would be filled with Hawking radiation. Regardless, it was interesting and it opened our eyes. The article I read this morning though, reports that the quantum theory predicts instability in the bubble as it passes the speed of light. Therefore, it’s impossible. Bullshit. Maybe that approach to the problem of faster than light travel is flawed, but that doesn’t in any way rule out other methods of solving the problem. Furthermore, what if that instability in space-time is like the instability in radioactive isotopes and leads to remarkable discovery. Maybe we will find a way to stabilize the region of space with some future understanding and manipulation of the underlying principles of the universe. The fact is that we just don’t know enough to be making comments like, “That’s impossible.” By the way, the scientist who wrote the original paper, Semiclassical Instability of Dynamic Warp Drives, doesn’t come to any conclusions about warp drive being possible or impossible, he simply states that the system becomes unstable (A true scientist.) The report that he wrote though, will only be read by scientists and reporters. The mainstream is reading articles written by narrow minded science reporters that jump to the conclusion that warp drive, or any faster than light travel, is impossible. It’s shameful, and completely unfounded.
I don’t think it’s a big stretch to imagine a future in which superstrings or quantum gravity or the Higgs field can be manipulated by man. The possibilities in that world will be endless and amazing. If we can make computers with electrons, what could we do with streams of quarks or by manipulating bosons? I don’t know, but I hope I’m alive to find out. If you leave this blog with one simple concept in your mind, your time here will not have been ill spent. If Joe can do the splits, nothing is impossible.
Now, go chase a dream.