Maybe the people who will solve this problem are alive today.  Let them try.  

I am so sick of war and being told to be afraid.  I am so sick of poverty and the harm we are doing to the most vulnerable among us.  I am so sick of people who underline, bold and put in caps the word "THEORY" when they talk about Global Climate Change.  

The people who don't want to fund this research know we will leave them behind on this planet; a science based Rapture.  

We shall become the Advent.

backs out of the room slowly...  

I don't know about you, but I personally adopt new technology based on its results, not cheap marketing ploys. If I did it the other way around, I'd still be believing in homeopathy, a flat earth, that men weren't meant to fly, that we never went to the moon, that 9/11 was an inside job, god... and so on.

But we are really dancing around the subject here, which is - can the makers be trusted and what do they have to show that supports them? And I tend to fall back on this old gem; "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". And a very good rule of personal finance - only invest in what you understand.

Well, say Dr. White sat down and showed you the equations, would you understand them and the loopholes (that math is pretty high falootin' )? You have that much math training? Not saying that you don't or wouldn't WITH the right training, though.

A good rule, as far as it goes. Problem is, it doesn't go the whole distance. How much of the mathematics of statistics does one have to understand to buy a winning lottery ticket?

Perhaps at some point in the past, people could claim to understand the theory behind X or Y. Perhaps that's true about some things today though probably far fewer than yesteryear. 

Even using your investment example, economists can explain some market forces and some market behavior, but in fact admit they cannot predict the behavior of the market at any given moment of time. 

I think there are enough folks around who do understand the math and at some point Dr. White et al, will have to 'put up or shut up'...either with experimental results (replicable) and/or communication with higher math mavins (probably sooner than the experimental results) regarding those 'loopholes'.

By the way, he might also be right about the loopholes, just shy of a way to prove they might be usable, at the present. You never know...after all, what was true about many peoples' beliefs 25-50 years before Columbus took his boat ride wasn't 25-50 years afterwards.

trolls...dom't you just love 'em? ...

I would love to see the math on these equations. It would be a great to see exactly what parts he is looking at for the loophole. I find it completely, neat that we may find a way to create warp drive.

I'm curious, if we create warp drive, would this also imply that we can get to a semblance of teleportation?

Well, this stuff is just an instance of an Alcubierre drive.  If you want to see the math, the wikipedia link I had above has links to the relevant journal articles.  It also has a number of links to arxiv preprints if you don't have the journal subscriptions.

In any case, there isn't really a loophole here.  Einstein's field equations basically tell you what spacetime will look like given a distribution of mass energy.  What it doesn't do is check to see if the distribution of mass energy is physically possible (given our current understanding of physics).  So the problem is that the Alcubierre drive requires a physically impossible configuration of mass energy (essentially, it needs a pocket of negative mass/energy).  That doesn't really factor into the field equations since they never check that, but physics overall has a problem with negative mass.

Now, there is some speculation that you can work around this by actually getting your hands on some negative energy.  As I said earlier, this isn't completely insane, but probably isn't that plausible right now either.  If you want to know more about this, you can read this:

http://earthtech.org/publications/davis_STAIF_conference_2.pdf

But thats just a whole bunch of wild handwaving.

In any case, there may still be a problem with causality.  See, the main reason that traveling faster than the speed of light is generally considered impossible is causality.  Its fairly simple to show that if you travel faster than the speed of light, causality breaks - essentially, effects can happen before their causes, which is considered paradoxical.  It is not clear that a warp drive would allow you to work around this problem, so a warp drive might still be impossible for causality reasons.