Hey rockstars!
A few days ago I was thinking about how we learned about the solar system in elementary school and how we studied all about the planets. I always had a soft spot for Neptune. The other day I was watching Girl Meets World and Riley had just found out (after years of being shielded from this tragedy) about Pluto’s fate. Riley, like me, is heartbroken that this poor cutie-pie planet did nothing wrong besides exist and was rudely demoted from its planet status.
I don’t think we, as a society, ever recovered from the demotion. Even when you search Pluto, Google describes Pluto as: “Our favorite dwarf planet since 2006.” But regardless of whether you consider Pluto a dwarf planet or a real planet, our universe is vast.
We are on a spinning rock circling a giant fireball at the perfect distance to grow wildflowers and laughter and rain soaked forests (instagram: @tinyjoyproject)
There is a specific kind of silence that happens when you look at a clear night sky. It is a heavy, humbling quiet. I’ve been saying lately that a day where you don’t walk outside and look at the sky is a wasted day. But at nighttime, as you sip your tea and look up, you aren’t just looking at lights; you are looking at history. Because of the vast distances of space, the starlight hitting your eyes began its journey years, centuries, or even millennia ago.
We are a species of explorers, yet we are trapped by the most frustrating speed limit in existence: the speed of light. At 299,792,458 meters per second, light is the fastest thing in the universe, yet the stars and planets are still so far away. To compete with this, you have to cheat and dance with the fabric of reality. In science fiction, we’ve dreamed up three beautiful ways to do it.
Disclaimer: All of this started because the other day, Aric was telling me about the three types of super-speed: (1) hyperspace, (2) warp speed; and (3) wormholes. While I was fascinated the first time and was inspired to write a physics mini-series post about it, I didn’t remember enough to be able to intelligently talk about any of it. Hence we had a déjà vu moment last night when I asked him to explain it all to me again. While I can’t guarantee that I’ll be as eloquent as he was, here we go:
Hyperspace: The Symphony of the Jump (Star Wars)
In the Star Wars universe, traveling to another system isn’t just a mechanical process; it is a transition of existence. As Han Solo famously warned a young Luke Skywalker, “Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?” When Han pushes the levers forward, the stars elongate into brilliant white threads, a visual representation of the universe blurring as we slip through a side door.
Hyperspace is a sub-dimension that exists “underneath” our own, and it is a place of blue mists and rushing energy. But it is not a vacuum of nothingness. Hyperspace is “shadowed” by the real world. Every star, every black hole, and every massive planet in our dimension casts a “mass shadow” into hyperspace. To travel safely, a navicomputer must compose a complex symphony of coordinates, ensuring that as you scream through the dark, you don’t collide with the ghost of a sun.
The Physics: The Tachyonic Dream
In our world, the math of Special Relativity tells us that as an object with mass approaches the speed of light, its mass becomes infinite. It would take all the energy in the universe just to nudge a paperclip to the speed of light. But physics also gives us the tachyon. Tachyons are hypothetical particles that exist only on the other side of the light barrier. They are born traveling faster than light and can never slow down to meet us.
Hyperspace is the cinematic dream of becoming a tachyon. It is the hope of slipping into a realm where the “slow” rules of mass and energy are inverted, allowing us to cross the galaxy in the time it takes to finish a cup of tea.
Warp Speed: The Slinky Effect (Star Trek)
Sometimes I’ll be doing something random and the words “warp speed, Mr. Sulu” will pop into my head. Once upon a time I knew Star Trek, but that knowledge has since dwindled as I’ve been bad at keeping up with it and my brain has made room for boring facts about the law.
If Star Wars is about finding a side door, Star Trek is about the sheer, defiant will of the human mind to reshape the universe. The Federation doesn’t look for a shortcut; they move the road.
This is the essence of the Starfleet mission: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” But to get there, you need a vessel that can bend the rules of nature. The Enterprise doesn’t just accelerate; it transforms the space around it.
To achieve warp speed, the Enterprise uses a matter-antimatter reactor and is the total annihilation of existence harnessed and calmed by dilithium crystals. This power creates a “warp bubble.” Inside that bubble, the crew is safe, still, and at peace. Outside, the very fabric of space is being torn and stitched back together. The caveat is that you’re not actually traveling “really fast,” you’re just shortening the distance you have to travel.
The Physics: The Alcubierre Wave
The way Aric explained it is that it’s the “Slinky effect.” Imagine spacetime is a Slinky. Usually, to get from one end to the other, you have to walk over every coil. But a warp drive “squishes” the coils in front of you until they are paper-thin and “stretches” the coils behind you.
This is the Alcubierre drive. In this model, the ship never actually “moves” faster than light. It sits in a pocket of stillness. It is the universe that moves. It is the ultimate poetic irony: to travel across the stars, you stay perfectly still while the cosmos bows and moves out of your way.
Slipspace and Wormholes
Then, there is the most elegant, almost romantic way to travel: slipspace. This isn’t about speed or power. It is about the realization that “distance” is an illusion. In the Halo universe, slipspace works by generating tiny holes in the fabric of reality. It is often described as a “non-Euclidean” space. It isn’t pretty. It is dark, turbulent, and defies human intuition. But it is efficient. A journey that would take a hundred thousand years in our world takes weeks in the “slip.”
The Physics: The Einstein-Rosen Bridge
Think of a piece of paper. You are at Point A at the top of the paper, and your destination is Point B at the bottom. You could walk the whole way, or you could fold the paper to dramatically shorten the distance. Once you fold the paper so that your starting point and ending point are touching, then you can step from one side to the other seamlessly.
In physics, we call this an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or a wormhole. To keep that tunnel from collapsing, you would need “exotic matter” which is a substance with negative energy that holds the throat of the wormhole open against the crushing weight of gravity.
As a daydreamer, I refuse to let limiting beliefs like reality crush my dreams. And because the universe is so vast and beautiful, we are doing ourselves a disservice by only appreciating a small part of its beauty. While I don’t have access to the Millennium Falcon or the USS Enterprise and the fastest I can go is 80 mph in a car, and 600 mph in a plane, every time someone calculates the trajectory of a probe or looks through a lens at a distant galaxy, we are folding the paper just a little bit.
Until next time!
xo
Sandhya
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