10.3 The "Picture" this Gives Us of Warp Travel
Description
This article is from the Relativity and FTL Travel FAQ, by Jason W. Hinson jason@physicsguy.com with numerous contributions by others.
10.3 The "Picture" this Gives Us of Warp Travel
Given the previous discussion, we see that the fourth provision seems
to fit Star Trek like a glove. Thus, it may be best for us to view warp
travel in Star Trek like this: Subspace is a field which defines a
particular frame of reference at all points in known space. When you enter
warp, you are using subspace such that you keep its frame of reference
regardless of your speed. Not only does this mean that normal warp travel
cannot be used to produce unsolvable paradoxes, but since in warp your frame
of reference would no longer depend on your speed as it does in relativity,
relativistic effects in general do not apply to travelers using warp. Since
relativistic effects don't apply, you also have a general explanation as to
why you can exceed the speed of light in the first place.
(As a note, this is similar to Alcubierre's idea for "warp" travel
(mentioned earlier), but in his idea the traveler did not take on a
"special" frame. Instead, he took on the frame he had before entering warp,
but that allows two trips from two different frames of reference to produce
an unsolvable paradox. If we add subspace as a special frame of reference to
Alcubierre's idea, we could get a self consistent situation which would be
very similar to what we see in Trek.)
For more information on how this might conceptually work in the science
fiction world of Trek (at least one way I imagine it) you may want to read
my other regular post, "Subspace Physics"
(URL=http://www.physicsguy.com/subphys/). Here, however, we can at least use
this "picture" of warp to consider how the outside universe might appear to
someone traveling at warp speed. Remember, at any point the warp traveler's
frame of reference it is as if he is sitting still in subspace's reference
frame. We could illustrate the way such an observer would picture a
particular event by using the following idea: Picture a string of cameras,
each a distance (d) away from the one before it. Let these cameras all be
stationary in the frame of reference of subspace, and let them all be
pointed at the event of interest. Further, let each camera have a clock on
it, and let all the clocks be synchronized in the subspace frame. Then, we
can set each camera to go off with the time between one camera flash and the
next being d/v (where v is the FTL velocity of the observer we want to
illustrate). Then, each picture is taken in the subspace frame of reference,
but the string of pictures (one from each camera) would form a movie in
which each frame was taken from a different place in space from the previous
frame. Thus, we can use this to produce a film of how an event would look to
a warp traveler.
Of course, in Trek they have subspace sensors which do all their seeing
for them (faster than light, of course). However, the above does illustrate
one's ability to use this view of warp travel to answer various technical
questions.
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