Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency is dated 2 April 2010 and was produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It is one of a series of advanced technology reports from FY 2009. It reviews general relativistic warp drives, the cosmological constant, Casimir energy and extra space dimensions. It proposes that dark energy may come from higher dimensions and that controlling those dimensions could one day make a warp drive possible.
UNCLASSIFIED/ ,<ren QFFIOlfol, 1,16& 8111,Y In summary, quantum field theory predicts that the vacuum is an interlaced cobweb of quantum fields which are never strictly at rest, and which exhibit zero-point fluctuations. These fluctuations give rise to real and measurable phenomenon, with the Casimir effect being the most poignant. It seems only natural to attempt to relate the ideas from the previous section regarding a ubiquitous dark energy field to this quantum vacuum energy. If a relationship can be established, one would be a step closer to the technological realization of warp drive. 5. Extra Space Dimensions In connection with the Casimir effect, extra dimensions provide a rich arena for one to generate models that explain the origin of dark energy. Technically speaking, the Casimir effect is a direct consequence of the non-trivial boundary conditions that the presence of the conducting plates imposes upon the quantum vacuum. The quantum modes on the interior region of the plates are restricted, and there is a pressure difference when compared to the quantum vacuum on the exterior region of the plates. It is this pressure difference that causes the plates to attract. 7 A very similar phenomenon to the Casimir effect can occur when the quantum vacuum energy in extra space dimensions are considered. The exploration of this idea has important ramifications in the context of explaining dark energy. Before one can address these ideas it is necessary to review the role of higher space dimensions in physics. It was Riemann, with his development of differential geometry in the 19th century, who provided the necessary tools to study higher dimensional descriptions of the world (Reference 26). Riemann held the belief that 3-dimensional space was not enough to provide an adequate description of nature. Improvements in physics led to Maxwell's unified theory of electricity and magnetism, and then GR, which unified space and time with Special Relativity (SR). Inspired by these unifications, physicists of the early 20 th century wanted to unify gravity and electromagnetism. The first attempt was by Nordstrom in 1914, who used a scalar potential for the gravitational field. Later Weyl and Kaluza, using Einstein's tensor potential, followed two separate paths. Weyl's attempt involved an alteration of the geometry of spacetime in four dimensions. His early attempts had physical consequences which did not match experimental data. However, Weyl's work was extended by Einstein and Schrodinger independently in the Einstein-Schrodinger non-symmetric field theory, which is widely regarded as the most advanced unified field theory based on classical physics. S.1 KALUZA-KLEIN THEORY In 1919 Kaluza (Reference 27) offered a unique approach to unifying gravity and electromagnetism which involved adding an additional spatial dimension to GR, and populating this extra dimension with two mathematical objects called a vector potential Ap and a scalar potential ¢. The line element in this theory is given by: 1 This analogy is not strictly true as different geometries can, in fact, create repulsive Casimir forces and so the pressure analogy breaks down. It is, however, a useful visualization tool. 8 UNCLASSIFIED/ f,F8ft 8FFl@IIIIL "9C OICL I
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 33 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.