According to official Star Trek lore, the eccentric genius Zefram Cochrane is scheduled to test humanity’s first warp-driven spacecraft on April 5, 2063. But a Scottish newspaper article suggested last week that this timeline may be moving up a bit:

AN EXTRAORDINARY “hyperspace” engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.
The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in… New Scientist magazine.

 

The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.

 

Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.

The article I quote here goes on to say that a best-case scenario could lead to a test device within five years. Before you get too excited, however, let me clarify that they’re not talking about a working propulsion system within five years, but rather some kind of gadget to test the principles behind this idea. Even so, if such a device worked, easy access to our solar system and relatively easy access to others could arrive in short order. Maybe even by 2063, which could conceivably be within my lifetime, if I’m blessed with a little bit of longevity. What a dizzying thought, that I might live long enough to see an actual starship depart from Earth orbit, just as I’ve always imagined…

The New Scientist report mentioned above provides a little more background behind this intriguing concept. Burkhard Heim was an obscure German physicist who tried to reconcile the differences between quantum physics and Einstein’s general theory of relativity, two branches of modern physics that lead to radically different conclusions about the basic nature of space. I recommend you read the New Scientist article yourself if you’re interested, but briefly (and as I understand all this gobbledygook), Heim thought that the conflict between relativity and quantum physics could be cleared up if there was more than the four physical dimensions Einstein believed in. He postulated six dimensions as well as a link between the forces of magnetism and gravity:

[Heim] claimed it is possible to convert electromagnetic energy into gravitational and back again, and speculated that a rotating magnetic field could reduce the influence of gravity on a spacecraft enough for it to take off.

Heim died in 2001, but an Austrian named Walter Droscher has continued noodling with his ideas, adding two more dimensions to come up with “Heim-Droscher space,” an eight-dimensional universe. If that’s not weird enough for you, there’s a lot of other mind-bending stuff in the New Scientist piece, including Droscher’s idea of particles he calls “gravitophotons” (oddly similar to the “gravitons” so often mentioned on Star Trek: The Next Gen), “a repulsive anti-gravity force,” and spacecraft voyaging into a “multi-dimensional hyperspace” where the constants of nature are different, enabling the ship to reach unbelievable speeds without all those pesky relativistic effects that Einstein was always on about. (Now that I think about it, all of this sounds a lot more like Star Wars tech than the Star Trek variety. I remember reading articles in fan-mags that claimed the Star Wars-ian hyperdrives worked by shifting the ship into another dimension where the “speed limit” was much, much higher, whereas the Enterprise‘s warp drive “worked” by causing space to bend around the ship, hence the term “warp.” And of course, Luke’s landspeeder floated along on a “repulsorlift field,” which sounds a lot like that anti-gravity force Droscher is on about. Hmm…)

So is any of this for real? Who knows? The New Scientist notes that a couple of experiments seem to verify some of Heim’s thinking, but many scientists can’t understand the mathematics behind Heim’s theories, which is not a good sign. Also suspicious, to my way of thinking at least, is the fact that Droscher is a retired patents clerk, not a physicist or other professional astronomer. I know Einstein came from a humble, non-scientific profession as well, but that was Einstein, who I believe was probably a unique case.

True or nonsense, this is all great fun to think about, and it’s kicked off a lot of interesting discussion around the blogosphere. John Scalzi, who has some grounding in science on account of his writing a book on astronomy, seems rather enthused about the possibility of this, as does a LiveJournaller named Groovychk (her entry on this subject led me to the original New Scientist piece). However, Phil Plait, a professional astronomer who maintains the amusing Bad Astronomy site and its related blog thinks Heim and Droscher’s ideas are a load of felgercarb.

As for me, I haven’t decided what I think. I like to imagine that I have a slightly better grasp on this stuff than the average schmoe — slightly meaning that I have maybe 1/3,000th of a better understanding of physics than the nosepicker sitting next to me on the train — but I don’t have any idea if a Heim-Droscher hyperdrive is possible. It at least sounds plausible to me, but I’m willing to admit that I may not be terribly objective because I’ve always wanted to believe so much in the trappings of the stories I loved as a child. Hell, I thought there was something to cold fusion back in the day, too, so what do I know?

Nevertheless, I do hope that this isn’t a scam, and that it all comes to fruition while I’m still here to see it. How wonderful would it be to witness your most fanciful childhood daydreams turn into the real thing? I can’t imagine anything cooler…