FTL travel around the corner?
I don’t know what to make of this article. There are no references to hard studies or research, but it seems like there are at least a few people who are respectable enough and working on the theory of a magnetic starship drive that would enable FTL travel, at least from our point of view.
The basic description is a magnetic drive that allows very fast travel, and allows a sort of “dimensional shift” to occur. In theory, the drive would place a ship in a sort of mini-universe where the speed of light is faster than it is in our own, and then travel at a fair portion of that speed, resulting in travel that is FTL from our point of view.
It sounds awfully sci-fi (e.g. it’s almost exactly how the operation of the Warp drives in Star Trek claim to work), but there seems to be enough potential that people are seriously looking. I’m also noting that no one is claiming they are close to function: instead, the theoreticians promoting the idea admit that it is in the very early stages, that they bear the burden of proof, that the theory behind it may not be correct, and that a concept engine is at least 5 years away (assuming they are right). The humility gives the claims the patina of truth — I guess we just have to keep an eye on things and see what happens.