Making Starships and Stargates: The Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes (Space Exploration)

The essential disclosure: The author and his work have ties to my place of business, the Space Studies Institute (founded by Princeton Physicist Gerard O'Neill). There are some very smart and highly educated people among the membership of SSI and they very strongly support the book and the hard work behind it.That said, I was not a member of SSI when I first heard of, bought and read this book for myself. And I am not penning this review in any official role for my organization.When I purchased the book on its release I was just a regular space/science interested person who had tried some "extreme science" books before that said 'even a layman can understand this' and usually found the statement to be incorrect for my level of laymanism. This book however IS accessible to me where it counts and I have and will recommend it.Not all of it is readable for me. When the math parts come up even a slide rule would not save me ;-). As to whether the math itself works as he describes, I can not say. But the author does a very good job of writing comprehendible prose to frame contexts and introduce the math segments so that the ideas make sense. The whole book works this way, basing new material on what has already been fully explained, and so in the end it is a satisfying read.I believe that most anyone with a high school or higher general understanding of math and physics and a desire to look at the cutting edges of practical science will get something out of this book. Geniuses will likely get far more out of the details, but there are more of us regular people than brilliant ones and it is to 'us folks' that I address this: It is not dry at all, the background and historical information is written very conversationally. I even laughed at couple of the jokes (I hope they were jokes, I thought they were).I wish that I were more educated in the types of Maths used in the book, but even without that personal education I made it through to the end in a matter of days with an understanding of Mach basics, new things to ponder and some cautious excitement for the potentials that Dr. Woodward spells out.And THEN I joined SSI :-).Try it. I look forward to reading more reviews, hopefully somewhere between mine and the ones who speak fluently in numbers.

I am still reading Jim's book. It has some very good discussions of standard Einstein gravity theory and Wheeler-Feynman theory. Jim even discusses my low power warp drive theory although his critique of it at the end is not relevant. Jim restricts himself to radiative far fields in meta-materials when I am only talking about non-radiative near fields.I am still having trouble with Jim's basic model from a very old paper by Dennis Sciama on a vector gravity theory that resembles Maxwell's electromagnetic equations. It seems to me that Jim is applying these equations to a domain where they are no longer valid. The Sciama vector equations are a linearized version of Einstein's tensor equations approximately valid only in the weak field limit. Modern cosmology equations must go beyond this limit because our observable universe (aka "causal diamond") has both past and future cosmological horizons with Hawking radiation. Indeed, dark energy may be Wheeler-Feynman Hawking radiation back from our future cosmological horizon - this is still my speculation work in progress. The gravity thermodynamics of horizons cannot be described by Sciama's vector classical equations. Jim uses "phi = c^2"which is a strong-field effect beyond his weak field equations. He is not clear in his exposition how that large-scale cosmic constraint from Sciama's old papers can apply at the tiny scale of his instrument. Also he is not clear how it fits with his differential equation for his instrument. Presumably, phi = c^2 is the mean value and his differential equation describes externally driven fluctuations around the mean. Jim also goes off on what to me is an irrelevant tangent about fictitious forces. The basic idea of Mach that Jim makes more complicated than need be in my opinion is that the rest masses of elementary particles must be multiplied by a Mach screening factor that depends on the global properties of the stress-energy tensor of all the matter fields. If we believe causality, we must constrain the domain of influence of the matter fields to the past light cone of the particle at some moment on its world line. This neglects the Wheeler-Feynman back from the future effect as well as quantum entanglements outside of the light cone. These are issues still at the cutting edge of physics today that get us into recent ideas on the universe as a hologram (e.g. Leonard Susskind's Stanford University videos online).

Which makes it hard to evaluate. The writer has obviously spent a career considering these matters, while I have a 30 year old BSc in Physics, so there's that. He develops a lot of interesting ideas about inertia, based on Mach's principle, then eventually hits on some some interesting speculations on nuclear physics. These eventually tie in to the possibility of tapping into exotic matter (negative mass), which could be used to generate stargates (wormholes or other anomalous space-time structures). He goes into some depth about his experimental and theoretical work on the inertia.It's tempting to be skeptical, but it was published Springer, which is hardly a crank scientific publisher. Plus, NASA has thrown some money at these ideas, in their very long range planning for advanced propulsion systems. One also gets the impression that there was a desire to make sure his ideas were put down in a comprehensive text, "just in case". Maybe this is all wishful thinking, or maybe it is visionary. It might be centuries before we can really know. I guess that's good enough for me.

I bought this book for my son, as he was having to write a report for his A2 Physics course on the practical possibilities of a mission to Mars. The report had to be written from a Physics perspective and was supposed to entail indepepdent study, so he needed information which included the Physics equations etc. (I am a biology and chemistry graduate, so know nothing about Physics).Based on my son's response, this book really fills a gap. I liked particularly that it was a recent book, which is very important in some areas of science. I liked also the step-wise approach taken by the author. And, let's face it, if a book can be read by a reluctant A-level student, then it can't be bad at all.Overall, if you find your offspring in a similar situation of needing more advanced material than provided by the school, then I recommend this book highly.

A must read for any hard sci fi fan or amateur physicist, if you think you have a working understanding of the key concepts of physics working forward from the 1880's you NEED to read this. The maths can get a bit dense but well worth the journey to your own mountain moment (makes sense once you read it).

Very interesting

A very informative book.