back in the old days people use to think the earth was the center of the solar system, that the freakin' earth was flat, they never thought that electricity would be f *ckin' available…

whats to argue??!! we are in the midst of technological progress…. y'all dig??

The First Time Machine

The 'Star trek Technical Manual' is not a real manual, but a work of fiction! I understand that so I don't go around arguing about how a transporter works. When they invent one, then we'll have a real manual that we can argue about.

But no investor wants to be sold a bill of goods only to be told that what he was sold on was fraudulently misrepresented.

And as one of the people funding these projects I have a moral and legal obligation to point at the bare naked emperor and complain about the lack of clothes…

There are actually people on this thread who believe that the 11th dimension has been proven to exist and is waiting to be exploited. I'm not one of them. I say, show me the monkey!! Err, money!!! (sorry obscure reference to TNT TV network's old monkey commercials where they parodied current movies using monkeys as the cast).

That's what I come across as…

My first post was simply hoping that dollhopf find the courage again that he once demonstrated in questioning his professors, for him to find again that fire he lost when he left university.

I would have actually loved to discuss this topic of a viable 11-th dimension warp drive with him. While I don't feel it's worth the effort to discuss how it might be implemented, I would relish discussion on whether there might be other viable alternatives, or ways to actually verify higher dimensions so that REAL discussions of using them could ensue.

I merely shot down the idea that using 'n'th dimension for FTL travel is viable since there is no empirical proof that higher dimensions exist and we are unable to even test for the existence of higher dimensions, which demonstrates that there is no basis on which we could presume to know how FTL travel could be done.

But 'n'th dimensions isn't the only potential route to FTL travel. No one bothered to counter my assessment of current technology with alternatives or to even challenge that assessment I made.

Nope- you instead chose to make your response a personal attack.

One of the downsides of posting here is that a person can actually post multiple messages under different IDs. I can't say that I've seen 'Cookie' posting on any messages before, and certainly not on this thread. Is this your fist time posting? If it is I'm honored by your indulgence to make me your subject.

Or is it that there is only one person using multiple names when posting. This is something we'll never now…

I really hope that you aren't as fragile as you try to portray. That certainly doesn't sound like someone who challenged their professors in school! Maybe you've lost your edge.

Nancy named the article "Warp Drive and Cloaking Devices: Not Just Science Fiction Anymore". Then she proceeded to prove that while cloaking technology exists and works in the lab, Warp Drive is entirely different animal that is still just science fiction. She used SciFi to link the two, but even in her title she discounts that casual link.

I thought how she did it was elegant, but misleading since the science of cloaking has been around since before the first Star Trek broadcast (which I watched) and was firmly entrenched in empirical science. Meanwhile warp drive depends on elements that at this point in time are purely speculative and unable to be tested (IE- science fiction).

Now I could join in the fun and discuss the possibilities of this method creating a warp drive, and when I was younger I might have. But to what purpose?? There is no empirical proof that spacial dimensions above 4 exist, and there is no way of testing for any higher dimensions. If you can't test for higher dimensions, why would we even discuss how they might be harnessed? If they COULD be harnessed, then they could be tested for so any argument to use higher dimensions is immediately shot down.

But I REALLY would like to see the problems of traveling to other stars solved within my lifetime, and that means science needs to get serious about it! Cosmology is stalled out because of untestable ideas (not even hypothesis or theories, just ideas), such as dark matter and dark energy. There are far more viable theories (not just ideas) that explain the background radiation as something other than a Big-Bang afterglow. Same with red-shifted light.

So when someone takes the CMB and uses it to measure dark energy, we really don't know what was measured since dark energy is still just an idea and the CMB is still just the hypothetical afterglow of the big bang. And in both cases there are alternative ideas and hypothesis that do as good of a job explaining the phenomenon or better!

We are forging ahead in directions that we know may not be right, engaging in junk science in the process. This warp drive idea in this article is one such item of 'junk science'.

But, dollhopf, I don't know you and if you are that fragile to think I have ANY emotion about you what so ever then I can't say that I would care to know you. So no, I don't hate you…

My parents had no television receiver that time. So on Saturday afternoon at 5 pm I sat in front of the tube in the living room of the neighbour's house across the acre together with my friend Armin eagerly awaiting the beginning of the show. As soon as it started, his father muttered something about 'what an idiocy' and grabbed his bottle of beer to go outside and feed the rabbits.

Several years later I took courses on critical rationalism at university and eagerly tried to find weak points in the explanations of the instructors, which was of less success by itself but helped me a lot to understand and absorb the topic.

And again a serveral years later a certain Mr. James B. reads an article of Nancy Atkinson about Warp Drive and Cloaking Devices and asks in the forum: "How you can link these two topics together in the same article", whereupon I posted him a simple answer: "Well, I guess that link is the TV show Star Trek where both topics are combined in the Klingons space ships."

Since that moment I ask myself, what's wrong with me, that he hates me

If we all we do is chase pipe dreams, in 100 years when we'll still just dreaming about FTL travel because no one bothered to actually understand reality. I simply can not sit still for such an outcome!

How can you try to harness the 11th dimension (or any other dimension) for travel when empirical science doesn't support that these higher dimensions even exists?? Figure out if there really ARE any dimensions higher than the 4 spacial dimensions, THEN figure out how to use it for practical application.

How is wanting to do something so simple and practical arrogant?

Nevertheless, tx for lending The Enlightenment your personal mental flamethrower.

First thing you need to do to ground yourself in reality is look up the definitions for four words 'idea', 'hypothesis', 'theory' and 'law' as they apply to scientific discovery.

You'll find that 'n'th dimensions are still only at the 'idea' stage, it's not even a 'hypothesis' yet! Understanding doesn't even enter the picture until 'theory', and then is very limited (where we are with relativity and quantum mechanics).

Most scientific 'laws' are 200 or more years old. How well do you think we really understand reality given that?

Sending photons through a medium at greater than c?…but it can't be used to send data.

Quantum entangled particles communicate instantaneously…but we can't control what they'll say so we can't encode them.

Well, I guess that link is the TV show "Star Trek" where both topics are combined in the Klingons' space ships.

But you are right when saying "why not just invest those resources into understanding it first?" So do you have any literature? I have a favour for titles like
"The 11th Dimension in a Nutshell" or
"m-Theory for Dummies", please.

How you can link these two topics together in the same article and have them look like they are related is sheer elegance…

Maybe they need to quit wasting time on mystical dark energy and higher dimensions and just concentrate on trying to make synthetic 'spice' so we can just fold space… Oops, I guess 'spice' is just science fiction too!

Instead of wasting time and energy on how we might manipulate reality, why not just invest those resources into understanding it first?

When we are able to afford 10^45 Joule for one of our space ships then we can as well fly it to every point in our galactic vicinity by conventional methods

We'd build unmanned ships, shoot out for, say, a second, turn back and see the results.
Do this again with longer time periods if required.

Eventually equations will be formed to calculate distances and potentially speeds.