# How to Build a Warp Engine – The experiments made by Woodward (4)

## The experiments made by Woodward. How can we create “exotic matter” (negative energy).

In the late 90’s Woodward, a physicist from California State University made a first series of experiments that showed for the first time that we can achieve the effects given by what is called exotic matter with our present technological capabilities and that in fact, a traversable wormhole could be made in less than two decades from now (maybe even faster). And if we can obtain this effect given by the presence of the exotic matter (what we called the warping of the space “the other way”, at the beginning of this book) nothing forbids us to build also a warp bubble (which can be regarded as the opposite of a wormhole).

If we want to have a chance to obtain the exotic matter, so necessary to create the warp bubbles, we need to consider the inertia property (the mass) of all matter a bit different from how we all considered it until now. Until Woodward the mass of an object (its inertia) was considered as an inherent property of all objects. What Woodward did was to assume that the inertia of an object is the result of an exterior field that interacts with that object (this is called the Mach’s principle and was enunciated for the first time at about1870). Up until now, physicists considered this principle questionable.

Then from a straightforward computation it results that the density of mass can become negative just moments after the object began to accelerate. In other words, the inertia of an object does not remain the same when the object is accelerating, but has oscillations with positive and negative values. What do count in the total density of mass are also the first and second derivatives with time of this density. The mathematical expression of the density of mass ρ that results from Woodward computations is given below:

$ρ≈ρ_0+\frac{1}{4πG}*\frac{ϕ}{ρ_0 c^2 } (\frac{∂^2 ρ_0}{∂t^2 })-(\frac{ϕ}{ρ_0 c^2})^2 (\frac{∂ρ_0}{∂t}^2)$

where ϕ is the gravitational potential that causes the inertia.

These negative values of the density of mass are exactly what we were searching for: the exotic matter that warps the space “the other way”. What does count is not the initial assumption about inertia made by Woodward (the Mach’s principle), but the fact that his experiments demonstrated that the mass of an object (its inertia) is not an inherent property of that object that stays the same. Instead, when accelerated the mass increases and is subject to small oscillations of its value.

What Woodward did in his experiments was to take a capacitor and power it from an alternating source. The bigger the frequency of the voltage source (the biggest the values of density of mass derivatives) was the bigger was also the variation of capacitor mass that he obtained. These oscillations of the capacitor mass were obtained when the power source was turned on and off.

Starting from these observations Woodward proposed what he called a dumbbell LC circuit that could in theory create a large quantity of negative mass (exotic matter).

This dumbbell LC circuit was constructed and tested by NASA’s engineer Harold White as the first possible variant of a warp engine. In principle a dumbbell LC circuit (called by NASA the EM drive) is an oscillator LC circuit powered from an exterior alternating voltage source. When this circuit is powered, oscillations of L and C individual components happen (as Woodward found in his experiments). As speculated in GTR all mass (and therefore its associated gravitational potential) oscillations propagate with the speed of light. Thus the geometry of the dumbbell LC circuit can be chosen in a way that the minimum of mass value of C (for example) arrives (and is felt) by the other component L exactly when L itself has its minimum mass. With each oscillation the gravitational potential at one of the components increases and at the of the component decreases. Here there is, thus the first warp engine (Alcubierre drive) that works in theory.
References
James F Woodward, “Twists of fate…”, Foundations of Physics Letters, 10, 153-181 (1997)