About me

Short summary

Hello, I am a Ph.D. physicist. My research currently focuses on the theoretical, computational, and experimental aspects of searching for dark matter candidates such as the QCD axion. My research interests also include the fundamental interplay between gravity and media, space travel, and novel approaches to challenging physical problems.


Where to find my CV and more

In case you found my blog first and would like to know more about me, here is the link to my personal website:

https://www.eriklentzphd.com/




Popular posts from this blog

The Horizon Problem for Faster than Light Travel

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Hello all, As I have mentioned in previous posts, a major hurdle for autonomous FLT travel is the horizon problem. But what is a horizon? Is it some single well-defined concept or a catch-all term for many phenomena? In this post, I present some thoughts on horizons in general relativity theory and their implications for FTL travel using warp drives. A horizon is a limit to the region that can be observed or communicated with in a space. On Earth, horizons can be used to refer to edge of what can be seen when looking out over a vast body of water like an ocean. The limit to what can be seen in this case is caused by the curvature of the Earth's surface and is a cute problem to calculate how distant the horizon appears given the height of an observer above the surface of a spherical Earth (ignoring effects of the Earth's atmosphere) that is straightforward to solve as it is embedded in a Euclidean geometry.  An observer looking out to the Earth's horizon from a height h abov...
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Warp Drive Soliton Inertia

Hello All, In this post I log some thoughts on another proposed challenge to superluminal warp drives: acceleration of the soliton past the speed of light. In their paper published earlier this year, Bobrick and Martire ( Introducing Physical Warp Drives ) state on page 17 of their pre-print that one cannot accelerate a subluminal warp drive to superluminal speeds for similar reasons as why one cannot accelerate masses moving through space-time to superluminal speeds: Warp drives can move superluminally only in the same sense as any ordinary inertial mass, test mass, or any other object. Namely, there is no known way of accelerating regular material beyond the speed of light. However, one may postulate a test particle which moves faster than light in relativity, in which case it may continue moving inertially. In the same way, a s warp drives are shells of material, there is no known way of accelerating a warp drive beyond the speed of light. However, one may also postulate the warp ...
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Response to new paper: "Generic warp drives violate the null energy condition"

 Hello all, I was pointed to a paper that appeared on the arXiv yesterday ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.03079v1 ). I am glad to see people taking a close look into my paper ( https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6382/abe692 , and the latest arXiv version https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07125v2 ) and the other recent papers on the topic of warp drives ( https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6382/abdf6e ,  https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06488 ). I have also been contacted in the last months by several other researchers working to reproduce and expand upon my results. I wanted to make a running post on this paper and a series of posts on other appraisals of my work in this field and the resulting discussions. After reading through their entire paper, I noticed that this new manuscript seems to have overlooked my complete discussion of the weak energy condition (WEC) contained in my published paper, instead referring to an early arXiv manuscript that tracked quantities of energy, momentum, etc. in only an E...
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