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harry potter - Is the Principle of Apparition Theoretically Similar to the Alcubierre Drive (Warp)?


Apparition seems to be a very quick process, through which a witch or wizard moves almost instantaneously from one place to another. Could Apparition be related to the Alcubierre metric or would this idea violate the rules of relativity involving faster-than-light (FTL) travel in some way, specifically that a slower-than-life object may not travel FTL?


The Alcubierre Drive holds that:



  • the object moving FTL is actually being held stagnant within a "bubble" of space, and is on a free-fall through that bubble of space, going from point A to point B (i.e. warp) as space surrounding the bubble moves faster than light. Think of an object in a wind tunnel -- the object remains stagnant while the air rushes around it.

  • The object free-falling within the bubble of space (the moving volume of the metric) experiences no mass increase and is immune to time dilation (meaning a clock would continue to keep real time, not time that is sped up.)


  • The object or person within the bubble experiences no G-force.

  • Enormous tidal forces would be present near the edges of the flat-space volume because of the large space curvature there, but by suitable specification of the metric, these would be made very small within the volume occupied by the object. Wiki link to basic overview of the Alcubierre Drive and a second source from the Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine


On one hand, it seems that Apparition may cause some G-force-like reactions:



[Harry] was being pressed very hard from all directions; he could not breathe, there were iron bands tightening around his chest; his eyeballs were being forced back into his head; his eardrums were being pushed deeper into his skull, and then –

He gulped great lungfuls of cold night air and opened his streaming eyes. He felt as though he had just been forced through a very tight rubber tube.

Half-Blood Prince - Page 60 - British Hardcover



Second to the original question, if Apparition is in any way analogous to warp, would incorrectly cresting the tidal forces near the edges of the Apparition destination explain Splinching?


ETA: Holy cow, I seem to have totally thrown the Baby Ruth into the swimming pool with this question. . . Yeesh, sorry about that! It's something I've been thinking about and thought perhaps some people more learned in warp might have some thoughts on it. I will now slink back to the dungeons :/



Answer




I don't think apparition is a form of Alcubierre drive, if for nothing else than the fact that the instruction is "[feel] your way into nothingness." (book 6, ch. 18) Nothingness is different than extant space, even if said space is just a moving bubble. Perhaps it's a 4th dimension, perhaps the "quantum slipstream" that comes up a couple times in Star Trek. Or maybe it's just nothing at all, they cease to be in one place, and come back into existence in another. That sounds like what it's supposed to be, although it doesn't quite explain the pressing feeling.


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