Haertel And Olivares

 

Starfarers, Prologue.

Some future histories feature future successors of Einstein: James Blish's Adolph Haertel and Poul Anderson's Edward Olivares. Whereas the Haertel overdrive is FTL, Olivares' theories lead to the sub-light-speed zero-zero drive:

a Bose-Einstein condensate can be used to generate a laserlike effect that brings all the atoms in two parallel super-conducting plates into the same quantum state;

the nonlinear consequences create a singularity;

energy flowing from the cosmic substrate through the singularity is distributed evenly so that the resultant acceleration is not felt;

the quantum field collapses, returning the energy to the substrate;

however, more energy can immediately be borrowed to make another interstellar jump of about 100 astronomical units with the exact value depending on the local metric;

relativistic effects - increase of mass, shortening of length and time dilation - occur as interstellar distances are traversed.