The possibility of FTL space travel by using the quantum tunneling effect through the light barrier
Takaaki Musha
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In one page
Takaaki Musha starts where chapter 4's warp-drive papers stop. Alcubierre's metric works on paper, but the integrated energy density needed to hold it open is out of reach, so Musha asks whether there is a different way past the light barrier — and proposes tunnelling. In quantum mechanics a particle can pass through a barrier it does not have the energy to climb over. Musha treats the light barrier as exactly that kind of barrier, writes the wave function for a violently accelerated particle, and estimates the tunnelling probability with the standard WKB approximation. For a whole spaceship the probability shrinks with every particle in it, and his own number is stark: a hundred-tonne ship would need an acceleration above 10⁶⁰ metres per second squared. His proposed way round that is Puthoff's zero-point-field account of mass — lower the cut-off frequency of the vacuum spectrum around the ship, and the ship's mass falls with it.
Why it matters hereChapter 4 keeps two things in view at once, the mechanism and the number the mechanism has to reach, and Musha supplies both — his own arithmetic names the acceleration and the negative energy the scheme would require, which is the shape a what-to-watch claim should have. It is also a clear published statement that inertial-mass reduction and faster-than-light travel are one problem rather than two.
What it claims
01Musha proposes faster-than-light travel not by warping spacetime but by quantum tunnelling: the light barrier is treated as a potential barrier, and a sufficiently violently accelerated particle has a non-zero probability of tunnelling through it into a superluminal state.Abstract; Possibility of Tunneling Through the Light Barrier
What to watch02Solving the wave equation for an accelerating particle gives wave functions on both the subluminal and superluminal sides, and a WKB estimate of the tunnelling probability; for a ship made of N elementary particles the probability falls exponentially with N and with the inverse of the proper acceleration.Equations 3 to 7
What to watch03By Musha's own arithmetic the scheme needs an acceleration above 10⁶⁰ metres per second squared for a spaceship of 100 tonnes proper mass, which no conventional propulsion system can supply.Following Equation 7
What to watch04The proposed way round that number rests on Puthoff's zero-point-field account of mass: if rest mass depends on the cut-off frequency of the ZPF spectrum, then reducing that cut-off around the ship reduces its mass, and a mass changing at zero net force produces an enormous acceleration.Acceleration generated by the manipulation of the cut-off frequency of ZPF spectrum; Equations 8 and 9
What to watch05Depleting the local zero-point field means generating negative energy, for which Musha names the two established routes — the Casimir effect and the squeezed vacuum, including the Davis and Puthoff scheme of ultrahigh-intensity lasers with a fast rotating mirror system — so that the craft would fly inside a bubble of energy-depleted vacuum.Possibility to manipulate ZPF field around the spaceship; Equation 12
Designed, not yet built06With the cut-off frequency for a 100-tonne ship taken at about 10⁴ hertz, Musha estimates a superluminal travel distance of about 1.5 × 10²⁴ metres, beyond the nearby galaxies — but the negative energy needed to cancel the positive ZPF field within a 50-metre radius comes to about 4.1 × 10⁴¹ joules, an equivalent mass of roughly half the Earth.Equations 19 and 20; Figures 3 and 5
What to watch
The way in
https://www.tsijournals.com/articles/the-possibility-of-ftl-space-travel-by-using-the-quantum-tunneling-effect-through-the-light-barrier.htmlJournal of Space Exploration 6(1), article 121, Trade Science Inc.; received 3 April 2017, accepted 10 May 2017, published 15 May 2017. Free to read at tsijournals.com. The author writes from the Advanced Sci-Tech Research Organization, Yokohama. The corpus gives the year as 2016 in one place and 2017 in another; the journal's own record dates it 2017.
How to cite it
Takaaki Musha (2017) The possibility of FTL space travel by using the quantum tunneling effect through the light barrier. https://www.tsijournals.com/articles/the-possibility-of-ftl-space-travel-by-using-the-quantum-tunneling-effect-through-the-light-barrier.html
Where it sits in the curriculum
The metric, warp drives and wormholesInertial mass reduction and transmedium craftInertia and gravity from the vacuum