Give ‘er all she’s got, Scotty!
No, for a change, that’s not a metaphor.
According to The Scotsman.com, appropriately, someone is working on a “warp” drive. A physicist at the Applied Sciences University in Salzgitter, Germany, and a former chief of aerodynamics at the European Space Agency, Professor Jochem Hauser, who’s one of the scientists putting forth the idea, warned that they’re in the very early stages of this project, but indicated that an propulsion system based on ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s is possible. The drive would work by creating an intense magnetic field that, in theory, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.
That is the catch, though. It’s all theory. Now, there is a somewhat mysterious “Z Machine” that was created by the US Department of Energy that could generate the kind of magnetic fields required to drive the engine, so it is possible that some very interesting tests might be run in the near future. Apparently, NASA and the US Airforce took notice of this work after Prof Hauser and an Austrian colleague, Walter Droscher, wrote a paper called “Guidelines for a space propulsion device based on Heim’s quantum theory”.
Now, all they need to do is get a Scot on their maintenance crew and they’ll be all set.
