June 1, 2021 Warp Speed

The Liberty Gazette

June 1, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: The first time I heard of warp speed was as a kid when it was introduced into our lives via the TV series Star Trek. What it meant in the series was a speed that was faster than the speed of light, that it may take only minutes to reach a star 30 or 50 light years away. But this flew in the face of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which says, in part, that as mass approaches the speed of light, it expands to infinity. 

So why didn’t the starship Enterprise blow up? The answer is that the Enterprise was operating in a protective bubble at sub-light speed. The ship’s warp drives, acting like the afterburners for supersonic jets but for starships, convert energy, both matter and anti-matter, to bend both space and time—warping it. The space in front of the bubble contracts and the space behind it expands, creating a wave of energy. This wave moving faster than light, pushes the ship along as if it were a surfer. 

This is all great science fiction, and with enough unknowns in physics, there is a vague plausibility to the idea. Einstein didn’t say space couldn’t be expanded or contracted. One thing is certain, the Star Trek TV program brought physics into the average American home, even if it wasn’t exact science. 

The imagination of Gene Rodenberry, the show’s creator, spawned things we take for granted today, like the communicators and tricorders we call cell phones today. It also got people interested in space, and it garnered support for the United States manned space program. 

Interestingly, the original series was canceled after just three years. When Neil Armstrong was making his small step for man, the lights were going out on the Star Trek set. But not for long. Trekkie conventions still have sellout crowds, and each generation brings another set of fans. 

Rodenberry was an Army Air Corps pilot in WWII and flew 89 missions in B-17s operating out of Hawaii. After the war, he became a commercial pilot for Pan Am World Airways. He left that career to pursue writing and become a police officer. In his spare time, he wrote scripts for the TV shows Highway Patrol and Have Gun Will Travel. Then came his breakthrough with Star Trek, where he not only introduced physics in general, but he incorporated many aviation terms and practices as well. When Rodenberry passed away in 1991, his ashes were among the first human remains to be taken into space. 

Can something travel faster than the speed of light? Recently, scientists measured a couple jets of energy inside the black hole identified as M87. X-ray data appears to show particles in the jets traveling faster than the speed of light due to a phenomenon known as superluminal motion. One such cluster, or knot, was measured at 6.7 times the speed of light. Like Gene Rodenberry’s imagination that has inspired countless other imaginations—those particles appear to be traveling at warp speed.

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