Interstellar travel by means of Wormhole Induction Propulsion (WHIP)
Eric W. Davis
Abstract and summary · read the original at the source
In one page
Eric Davis proposes abandoning the rocket entirely and moving a spacecraft by reshaping the spacetime around it. His starting point is Claudio Maccone’s claim that a strong, cylindrically symmetric magnetic field bends space into a traversable wormhole. Davis checks the mathematics and corrects it: the field does bend space, but into a hypercylinder with a position-dependent gravitational potential, not a wormhole with a throat. What survives the correction is the useful part. Light genuinely slows inside that curved region, and how much it slows is calculable from the field strength alone — which turns a piece of exotic propulsion theory into a bench experiment. Davis argues that flux-compression magnets already reach fields rising at about a billion tesla per second, and that this rate of rise, rather than any achievable static field, is the near-term way to make and measure real curvature in a laboratory. He then sketches WHIP, a two-mode craft that would raise the curvature envelope, pinch a throat into it, and coast through.
Why it matters hereChapter 4 is the site’s account of metric engineering, and this is one of the few papers in that literature that ends with an experiment a laboratory could actually attempt: apply a very strong field to a vacuum, send a light beam through it, and measure whether the beam slowed. Chapter 8 gets the architecture — a craft that carries no reaction mass for the journey itself, because the journey is done by the geometry and not by the engine.
What it claims
01Levi-Civita’s 1917 solution for a static uniform magnetic field does create spacetime curvature, but changing to cylindrical coordinates and then to a radial angle variable shows the spatial part to be the three-metric of a hypercylinder with a position-dependent gravitational potential: no asymptotically flat region, no flared-out mouth, no throat. Maccone’s identification of it as a traversable wormhole, and his radial pressure, stress and energy-density equations for that configuration, are therefore not correct.Theoretical Brief, Equations 6 and 7
Published and peer-reviewed02The radius of spacetime curvature induced by a homogeneous, cylindrically symmetric magnetic field is a constant of about 3.4840 times ten to the eighteenth in tesla-metres divided by the field strength, and the paper tabulates the resulting ladder — a field of about 3.484 tesla gives a curvature radius of some 165.7 light-years, and each factor of ten in field buys a factor of ten off the radius, down to solar and Earth radii at the top of the table.Theoretical Brief, Equation 2; Experimental Approach, Table I
Published and peer-reviewed03Maccone’s speed-of-light function, derived from the metric coefficient, gives the gravitationally induced variation of light speed inside the field region and can be inverted to give the field strength required for a chosen slowing — so applying a powerful static homogeneous magnetic field in a vacuum and measuring the speed of a light beam through it is a direct laboratory test for induced curvature.Theoretical Brief, Equations 3 to 5; Experimental Approach, opening paragraph
Designed, not yet built04Static fields of roughly ten to the ninth or ten to the tenth tesla would be needed before the slowing of light became measurable, and chemical implosive or explosive flux compression tops out near several thousand tesla. Davis’s proposal is to exploit the peak rate of rise instead — about ten to the ninth tesla per second at the Russian MC-1 generator, Los Alamos ATLAS, the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Sandia’s SATURN, whose roughly ten-centimetre solenoids hold a thousand tesla for a few nanoseconds, which he argues is long enough for a good measurement of the speed of light.Abstract; Experimental Approach, Table II and following paragraphs
Designed, not yet built05Static radial electric or magnetic fields are borderline exotic for threading a wormhole — they would qualify if their tension were infinitesimally larger for a given energy density — and the other known energy-condition-violating fields are squeezed states of the electromagnetic field and Casimir zero-point energy. Davis argues that the alarm around this is unfounded, because every energy-condition hypothesis had already been tested in the laboratory and found not to hold in general.Technical Issues, closing paragraph
Published and peer-reviewed06The proposed craft, Wormhole Induction Propulsion Integrated Technology, runs in two modes: an advanced conventional system for moving through the throat and for orbital manoeuvring, constrained to regenerate or gather its own fuel; and a stardrive mode that raises a static cylindrically symmetric ultrahigh field to pre-stress space into a hypercylinder envelope no smaller than the craft’s largest dimension, then turns that field radial with a tension greater than its energy density so a throat is induced and patched to the envelope.WHIP Spacecraft Concept, both modes; Conclusions
Designed, not yet built
Read it · abstract
Abstract
Space flight by means of wormholes is described whereby the traditional rocket propulsion approach can be abandoned in favor of a new paradigm involving the manipulation of spacetime. Maccone (1995) extended Levi-Civita’s 1917 magnetic gravity solution to the Morris and Thorne (1988) wormhole solution and claimed that static homogeneous magnetic/electric fields can create spacetime curvature manifesting itself as a traversable wormhole. Furthermore, Maccone showed that the speed of light through this curvature region is slowed by the magnetic (or electric) induced gravitational field there. Maccone’s analysis immediately suggests a way to perform laboratory experiments whereby one could apply a powerful static homogeneous magnetic field in a vacuum, thereby creating spacetime curvature, and measure the speed of a light beam through it. Magnetic fields employed in this scenario must achieve magnitudes greater than 10¹⁰ Tesla in order for measurable effects to appear. Current magnetic induction technology is limited to static fields of ∼several×10³ Tesla. However, destructive chemical (implosive/explosive) magnetic field generation technology has reached peak rate-of-rise field strengths of ∼10⁹ Tesla/s. It is proposed that this technology be exploited to take advantage of the high rate-of-rise field strengths to create and measure spacetime curvature in the lab.
Eric W. Davis, National Institute for Discovery Science, Las Vegas, Nevada. AIP Conference Proceedings 420 (Space Technology and Applications International Forum, STAIF 1998). The same work was printed as Wormhole Induction Propulsion (WHIP) at pages 157 to 164 of the NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Workshop Proceedings, NASA/CP-1999-208694.
(Abstract only — see the rights note above for which copy was read and why no text of the published paper is reproduced here. On this site, the proceedings volume that carries the companion copy is at NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Workshop Proceedings. Davis’s later survey of how to make the exotic energy this concept needs is at Experimental Concepts for Generating Negative Energy in the Laboratory. The wormhole literature Davis works from and against is here as Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever’s Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition, Visser’s Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking, and a modern attempt to thread a throat with Casimir energy in Traversable wormholes induced by stress energy conservation: combining Casimir energy with a scalar field.)
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.54779SOURCE READ, TEXT NOT REPRODUCED. The work of record is Eric W. Davis, ‘Interstellar travel by means of Wormhole Induction Propulsion (WHIP)’, AIP Conference Proceedings 420 (Space Technology and Applications International Forum, STAIF 1998), which is closed at the publisher, so none of its text appears here. The abstract below is the author’s own as deposited with Crossref by AIP; the deposited copy lost its superscripts, and the exponents have been restored from Davis’s own copy of the same paper — the numbers are unchanged. The summary, the claims and every locator below were read from Davis’s companion version of the same work, ‘Wormhole Induction Propulsion (WHIP)’, printed at pages 157 to 164 of the NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Workshop Proceedings, NASA/CP-1999-208694 (NTRS document 19990023204), a United States Government publication that is free to read; that copy is a scan and was re-read by optical character recognition, so locators point to the paper’s named sections rather than to line numbers. Author affiliation on both copies: National Institute for Discovery Science, Las Vegas, Nevada. Davis credits Marc Millis with coining the names WHIP and WHIPIT at the February 1997 NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics regional brainstorming workshop in Austin, Texas, and thanks Matt Visser, Dean Judd, Johndale Solem, George Hathaway and John Alexander; the research was partially supported by the National Institute for Discovery Science.
How to cite it
Eric W. Davis (1998) Interstellar travel by means of Wormhole Induction Propulsion (WHIP). doi:10.1063/1.54779
Where it sits in the curriculum
The metric, warp drives and wormholesInertial mass reduction and transmedium craftWhat the vacuum is