This is a terrible analogy, I apologize in advance because I don't fully understand it yet, but:
We think of empty space as empty because its symmetry isn't broken, so it looks transparent to our matter as we move through it. Similarly to how electrons pair up to form cooper pairs, which act like bosons and pass through the atoms of a superconductor without interacting:
But the Higgs field permeates space, so if we could pick and choose where to interact with it, we could "grab" it and propel ourselves. This would be analogous to a magnet levitating on a superconducting ring, just like this video but imagine that the track is the superconductor and the puck is the magnet:
If we built a puck with two electromagnets, we could power up one of them above the critical field of the superconductor and form a resistive section which the other magnet would be drawn to or repulsed from:
By alternating the strength of the two magnets, the track would stop behaving as empty space, and the puck could accelerate along it like a maglev train. A similar technique should work with the Higgs field.
I don't know how much the Higgs field "weighs", so I don't know how much of a reactive force we would get for the force applied. My guess is that it either wouldn't be higher than light pressure, or that the probability of an interaction would stay beneath what's required to beat light pressure. As in, this may be tied to how often a photon splits into an electron-positron pair, with the remaining energy bleeding off as heat or entropy. But it would be a fun experiment to run.
I just want to add that physics terminology and notation is too big to fit in the human mind, like trying to memorize a 100 digit phone number. The same problem exists in functional programming, where stuff like monads and y combinators just won't stick in a mind trained on imperative programming. So there's a very real limit to what we can understand. No matter how long we study this stuff, we can never connect all of the dots, or see faint relationships between distant concepts. IMHO this problem is getting worse with time, despite the advances in stuff like the Standard Model.
But AI doesn't have that problem. Within 10-20 years, it will infer how to modulate stuff like the weak force and gravity with electromagnetism in a practical way. If the aliens can do it we can do it! Or we can at least build machines to tackle the problem faster than we ever could. And if that's true, then why bother keeping research secret? It's gonna all come out eventually.
Edit: added the Higgs mechanism derivation from superconductivity. Also wanted to add that axions (if they exist) only interact with gravity and electromagnetism, making them a potential bridge between the two:
I'm kind of cringing today reading what I wrote. The ideas I'm talking about are more like leads than answers, probably following a logical fallacy down the rabbit hole at each decision point. If I could ask an AI, then I could avoid the pitfalls and come up with something plausible. I also wish we could cross out and edit any sentences which are wrong. It might be better to invent a warp drive on Stack Overflow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism#Simple_explana...
This is a terrible analogy, I apologize in advance because I don't fully understand it yet, but:
We think of empty space as empty because its symmetry isn't broken, so it looks transparent to our matter as we move through it. Similarly to how electrons pair up to form cooper pairs, which act like bosons and pass through the atoms of a superconductor without interacting:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/171132/what-is-t...
https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/273894
But the Higgs field permeates space, so if we could pick and choose where to interact with it, we could "grab" it and propel ourselves. This would be analogous to a magnet levitating on a superconducting ring, just like this video but imagine that the track is the superconductor and the puck is the magnet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWojYBhvfjM
If we built a puck with two electromagnets, we could power up one of them above the critical field of the superconductor and form a resistive section which the other magnet would be drawn to or repulsed from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_field
By alternating the strength of the two magnets, the track would stop behaving as empty space, and the puck could accelerate along it like a maglev train. A similar technique should work with the Higgs field.
I don't know how much the Higgs field "weighs", so I don't know how much of a reactive force we would get for the force applied. My guess is that it either wouldn't be higher than light pressure, or that the probability of an interaction would stay beneath what's required to beat light pressure. As in, this may be tied to how often a photon splits into an electron-positron pair, with the remaining energy bleeding off as heat or entropy. But it would be a fun experiment to run.
I just want to add that physics terminology and notation is too big to fit in the human mind, like trying to memorize a 100 digit phone number. The same problem exists in functional programming, where stuff like monads and y combinators just won't stick in a mind trained on imperative programming. So there's a very real limit to what we can understand. No matter how long we study this stuff, we can never connect all of the dots, or see faint relationships between distant concepts. IMHO this problem is getting worse with time, despite the advances in stuff like the Standard Model.
But AI doesn't have that problem. Within 10-20 years, it will infer how to modulate stuff like the weak force and gravity with electromagnetism in a practical way. If the aliens can do it we can do it! Or we can at least build machines to tackle the problem faster than we ever could. And if that's true, then why bother keeping research secret? It's gonna all come out eventually.
Edit: added the Higgs mechanism derivation from superconductivity. Also wanted to add that axions (if they exist) only interact with gravity and electromagnetism, making them a potential bridge between the two:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axion