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Comment by nynx | Hacker News Reader

There is another paper on warp drives that came out around the same time, Breaking the Warp Barrier: Hyper-Fast Solitons in Einstein-Maxwell-Plasma Theory [0].

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07125

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Wow, is that paper saying what I think it is? Previous papers only found a negative energy requirement (pg. 12) because they only considered interior spaces which could reduce down to a point-like region? That's an extraordinary claim, and, I hate to use the phrase, but "big if true".

Indeed it is. There are still significant (in the case of the required mass-energy, massive) issues.

The writer has a blog [0], which is worth reading if you're interested in next steps for the theory.

[0]: https://eriklentzphd.blogspot.com/

> Once the energy requirement is lowered, the space–time signatures of positive-energy solitons may be studied in a laboratory setting using existing or novel methods. ... The highly magnetized energetic and diffuse atmospheric plasma of magnetars may also bea natural place to look for signatures of positive-energy soliton geometries even prior to advances in energy reduction.

It is an important paper. However, it is also important to realise that superluminal solutions introduced there are still prohibited by the laws of physics. Making such superluminal drives is at least as hard as making superluminal matter, which we believe requires infinite amount of energy. In physics, they say that such spacetimes violate the dominant energy condition. The issue is relatively clearly stated in E.Lentz's paper accepted in the journal, but not in his arxiv paper or the press-release.

Very good paper. However, it doesn't overcome the problem of superluminal travel. Rather, one of the problems. There are other remaining fundamental physical issues related to FTL, including the need for superluminal matter, causality violation, the impossibility of accelerating past the speed of light and and a few more. Subluminal warps, instead, can be fully consistent with physics.

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