I’ve been thinking about outer space my whole life. This worked for Einstein, so I figured I’d at least write it down.
To create interstellar warp drive, the kind used in Star Trek and rationalized by Alcubierre, you have got to create a pulling force. Like the cartoon about dangling a treat on a stick, tying it to the dog’s collar, and watching the cute pup run as far as its legs can carry, but it feels like falling down a black hole.
Think about it, a black hole bends space and time, the same as bed flat at every edge stretches and bows under the weight of a bowling ball. Near-infinite mass at the center of the hole has a pull so strong that light cannot escape, and time slows down.
Time slows down because the fabric of space-time stretches around an object that has so much mass, its own field powerful enough to slow down pure energy. Gravity creates waves, invisible ripples that can be felt billions of light-years away, moments where our reality elongates momentarily, distorting like a glance in a funhouse mirror.
What happens if we try the opposite?
So, what else can create a pull, like mass? Energy can. Electromagnetic fields do, on a much smaller scale that still powers technology like laptops.
Electrons are responsible for this. Impossibly (for us to fathom) negative charges that race between objects, pushed on by the electron behind (like charges repel), and pushing the electron in front.
Electrons also have a pull, infinitesimally small, on other particles, the cores responsible for mass, protons, and neutrons. Move enough electrons, and those Higgs-Boson particles that give us mass, trapped in the nucleus of atoms, start following. There is strength in numbers, especially exponents.
We can collect electrons easily enough, at the cost of pulling them from atoms of other things. There is only so many of them in the universe. Conservation of Mass and Energy are intertwined Laws, after all.
If you imagine the Higgs field as an invisible river, a ‘fabric’ of space-time that surrounds us and flows through us so much like pebbles in a cold current. The friction between water and rock is felt by both. The water’s path changes, and fraction of its energy is absorbed by the rock, traded for a few atoms. Erosion, entropy, time, all the same, all decay. The Higgs Field moves like the ocean, with gentle peaks, valleys, undercurrent, and energy.
So, take that field and stretch it, never mind how, not yet. If you stretch the Higgs Field like taffy, you affect how quickly time passes. Faster at the ends where it’s denser, and time slows down in the stretched-out middle, where the ‘stuff’ is less dense and frailer.
What about distance? That is affected too. Best guess is the same way, distance get closer at the ends, further in the stretched-out middle.
How would this appear to us? We would not notice. We are too big, wrapped up in our own small reality to feel the subtle songs of the fabric of the universe.
But then again, there is the whole exponential power thing. See, with enough energy, you can make big stuff move too.
Build a ship that can disrupt the flow of the fabric, the same as current around a rock. Make a bubble of energy around the ship, that allows the field to flow past and the ship crosses distances in the mere wink of an eye.
How do we make that bubble? Alcubierre field, create a specialized electromagnetic field that repels electrons and atoms out of the way the same way a rock dropped in still water pushes it out, or a diver forms an arrow to pierce the water. Make it a bubble, the electrons will move all around it, out of the way, carrying other atoms with them.
The ship inside the bubble moves forward, towards the open space free of matter, a vacuum in front of it, that pulls it forward. Same as a vacuum cleaner pulls forward, ever so slightly, while cleaning up the mess from a mud-covered dog, panting from a run in the backyard, and happy with itself because it figured out how to break that treat free from the stick.