Sean Carroll
speaker
26,727 appearances
49 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard 6d ago
Sean Carroll’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
And this very, very particular form lets that little bubble move through the ambient space-time in a way that, again, if you didn't know any better, you would think was moving faster than the speed of light.
podcast-host
What it's really doing is shrinking the distance that you're actually traveling.
podcast-host
traveling, so to someone outside the warp drive bubble it looks like you're moving faster than light, but from inside you're actually barely moving at all.
podcast-host
You're the it's the space time around you that is moving and you're just kind of following it.
podcast-host
This is not trivial to do.
podcast-host
In fact, it's probably never going to be done, the actual construction of such a warp drive, um, for reasons that people have debated, mostly using the fact that it involves negative energies or exotic matter, you whatever you want to call it.
podcast-host
Something that people don't talk about as much is that it requires an enormous amount of energy.
podcast-host
Even, you know, who knows how to control negative energies if you could actually do that.
podcast-host
We think that in quantum field theory you can sort of get a little tiny flicker of negative energy occasionally, but we don't have any w controlled way of conjuring up negative energies on the regular and putting them to engineering uses.
podcast-host
And anything, because just because gravity is a very weak force, remember the whole earth, all of Earth, which is a lot of
podcast-host
Matter exerts a really tiny gravitational force on you, right?
podcast-host
You're able to stand up and walk around using your own muscles, even though the entire Earth is pulling you down.
podcast-host
So the amount of energy you need to warp space time in any noticeable way to make something like a warp drive is absolutely crazily enormous.
podcast-host
So this is just not something
podcast-host
That is even
podcast-host
conceivable in terms of technology as we can currently think about it.
podcast-host
But okay, nevertheless, let's put all those things aside and answer Eric's question.
podcast-host
Could you use it to escape a black hole?
podcast-host
So the my initial feeling was no, you can't do that because again, it only looks like you're traveling faster than the speed of light.
podcast-host
You're not actually traveling faster than the speed of light.
podcast-host
Showing 421–440 of 26,727 · page 22 of 1337
← Previous
Next →