Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 6866275" data-attributes="member: 710">I liked when some scientist said to new discoveries that the Alcubierre drive might not need exotic matter equivalent to the Jupiter mass, but only that of, say, the Voyager probe: &quot;So basically, we don't need a million unicorns to go faster than light, we just need one?&quot;But, that comparison might not be quite fair. Or at least not if we replace unicorns with pixie dust - pixie dust can have any property we want, there are no restrictions or descriptions that would allow us to test for its existence. For exotic matter of the &quot;negative mass&quot; type, we could at least postulate properties that we could test for. We're much closer to explaining how something happens - how the pixie dust does make us fly is undefined (does it remove gravity? Invert our mass? does it create an electro-magnetic field? Alter the laws of physics.)Negative Mass Exotic Matter would be in contrast well-defined.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mustrum_Ridcully, post: 6866275, member: 710"] I liked when some scientist said to new discoveries that the Alcubierre drive might not need exotic matter equivalent to the Jupiter mass, but only that of, say, the Voyager probe: "So basically, we don't need a million unicorns to go faster than light, we just need one?" But, that comparison might not be quite fair. Or at least not if we replace unicorns with pixie dust - pixie dust can have any property we want, there are no restrictions or descriptions that would allow us to test for its existence. For exotic matter of the "negative mass" type, we could at least postulate properties that we could test for. We're much closer to explaining how something happens - how the pixie dust does make us fly is undefined (does it remove gravity? Invert our mass? does it create an electro-magnetic field? Alter the laws of physics.) Negative Mass Exotic Matter would be in contrast well-defined. [/QUOTE]

Verification