IT HAS to be one of the world’s most sluggish spacecraft, taking 10 years to reach a speed of just 10 centimetres per second. But don’t knock it. The craft, as envisioned by two American physicists, would reach the stars by extraordinary means: pushing against empty space itself.
Quantum theory says that the apparently empty space of a vacuum is not empty at all. Instead, it is seething with electromagnetic waves. “And it’s these that could be exploited to propel a spacecraft,” says Jordan Maclay, chief scientist of Quantum Fields, a company based in Wisconsin that studies the use of…
