I've got VIP seats to see NDT on May 20th at the Orpheum in San Francisco! This one is right up my alley: An Astrophysicist Goes to the Movies Anybody got any physics in the movies questions I should try to ask?
Not so much as related to movies (and when I saw NDT back in '15 or so, I'd have asked him if I got the chance) but it does involve his hero, Carl Sagan. Kirsten Dunst was friends with one of Sagan's kids and she says that Sagan smoked more weed than anyone she knows, so did NDT and Sagan ever burn one together? BTW, since he'll most likely be speaking the entire time, it's real easy to get halfway decent audio using your phone (and any Bluetooth headset you might have for it). Somebody who knows what they're doing with freely available audio editing software can also tweak the recording and get a surprisingly clean result. Not quite as good as having video of the event, but one isn't going to attract too much attention with a Bluetooth headset around their neck, or earpod in their ear. The resulting audio file could be easily distributed on the web. Not legal, of course, but if Deadheads are going to share bootlegs of a meandering concert that lasts 27 hours, then us nerds can share bootlegs of a 5 hour science talk.
Oh, and now that I think about it, I do have a movie-related question you could ask him: Would it be possible to pick up the signature of a warp drive space craft with a gravity wave detector (not the one we've got now, of course, but perhaps that big one the EU's planning to put in space)?
@Paladin A good question to ask NDT is IF faster than light space travel will EVER be a TRUE REALITY? And also HOW LONG will it take for humanity to reach that MILESTONE?
Oooh, that's not bad. I have my primary question, but I may ask that if I get a second! I think he gets that one a lot. There's a video on YouTube of him answering that.
The biggest problem to solve, after figuring out how to bend space in the first place, is how do you get the bubble to expand in front of you faster than light? Once you have the bubble, you can go FTL within it, but outside the bubble, gravity just travels at the speed of light, so you'd have to wait years for the bubble to Alpha Centauri to form anyway. To get it to be as instant as Trek, we'd have to discover something like tachyons, or find a way to make entanglement without having to have the particles touch first, and tether the bubble to the entangled particle to zip it out there. If progress keeps rolling along unhindered by bullshit, anywhere from 100-1000 years depending on how hard the technical challenges turn out to be. If people like Putin and Mitch McConnell succeed in regressing us to "Little House On The Prairie" fucking never.
That is exactly right. You might be able to go from here to Alpha Centauri in one second, but you have to wait 4.5 years for the bubble from here to there to form before you can even set out. If it were not so, the device that creates the warp bubble would be an FTL communication system. Still, if it's going to take 4.5 years to get to Alpha Centauri, it would be better to spend 4.4999 years doing whatever on Earth before hopping into the bubble for the one second ride, than spending years crammed into a spaceship.
Saw NDT last night. Great show. I was in a group that got to have a more intimate Q&A session with him afterward. (I didn't get to ask my question, though. ) His presentation was on how some movies get the science right, others wrong. Star Trek VI and surface tension (floating Klingon blood, right), The Wizard of Oz and math (wrong), Mary Poppins and the fourth dimension (right), Love Story and cold hands (wrong). The Orpheum, San Francisco NDT. I was *very* close. Is Pluto a planet? Once you see it... Topology and Zoolander... Higher dimensions and 2001... When Neil met Superman... NDT Getting set to roast Gravity... NDT.
