And
Let's get the bad news out of the way so we can focus on the good stuff: Robert Schroeder's theoretical propulsion concept is damn good fun to hear about, particularly for those of us addicted to theoretical physics topics, but at this point it's a house of cards build upon a tesseract riding upon a unicorn. To date, there's no evidence - not even indirect evidence, of any higher dimensions beyond the four we know and love. And string theory, and it's red-haired step-child M-theory, are the wildest speculations known to science. Recall the Ptolemaic model of the "celestial spheres" where all of planetary motions were considered to be based upon circles - and how an ever more complex system of spheres within spheres were required to preserve the model, as the eccentricities of elliptical orbits were discovered, until an impossibly complex network of wheels within wheels toppled the original postulate of divine simplicity and elegance. That exactly correlates to the advent of string theory and M-theory: failing to find the underlying laws of nature, theoretical physicists have been forced to introduce a mind-boggling variety of new degrees of freedom to try to explain our observations of particles and forces. If there's any physical validity at all to string theory or M-theory, nobody's found a way to demonstrate it yet. I think these theories more properly belong in the category of "conceptual art based on physical ideas and modeled with abstract mathematics." Beautiful, but useless.
But the good news is actually rather wonderful: we don't need higher and as-yet-undiscovered dimensions or "the bulk" to seriously consider the technological prospect of manned interstellar spaceflight or gravitational field propulsion - this is a valid area of academic research that requires little more than Einstein's field equations - among the most well-tested and proven models of physics in history (along with quantum mechanics).
Most of us are probably already familiar with Miguel Alcubierre's seminal 1994 paper describing warp field propulsion - the idea of creating a spherical dipolar gravitational field around a spacecraft. Star Trek TNG adopted this model to describe the propulsion system for the Enterprise. But most people are unaware of some fascinating developments that have brought this concept much closer to human technological feasibility. Dr. Harold “Sonny” White at NASA's Eagleworks program created a canonical formulation (with Dr. Eric Davis) of this warp field theory, and he ran some optimization tests on the computer, which brought the mass requirements down from the scale of Jupiter's mass, to the mass of a VW bug automobile. (Note: links below) That's still a lot of mass-energy to try to contain as an energy field, but it's a huge step in the right direction. And using a very speculative higher-dimensional physics model, he's designed and built a little test rig to see if he can detect a spacetime distortion at their lab in Houston, which employs a laser interferometer which may be able to detect an Alcubierre-type of spacetime distortion field. Personally I think he's barking up the wrong tree by relying upon that higher-dimensional physics model, but it's a neat effort, and if he succeeds then we could have an announcement about a viable warp field propulsion concept literally any day now.
The really fun part of Dr. White's idea has to do with "dark energy" - that mysterious effect which is accelerating distant galaxies faster and faster apart. Because the "dark energy" effect has the earmarks of a *repulsive gravitational field." And that's the key to warp field propulsion (and more broadly, any form of gravitational field propulsion). That was missing from mainstream academic physics until "dark energy" was discovered - most physicists thought that a repulsive gravitational field (or more colloquially, "antigravity") was unphysical, if not laughable, until "dark energy" was observed by astronomers. But now we see that nature appears to manifest an antigravitational effect - and anything that nature can do, we can do better...at least that's the way everything else has gone so far. So warp field propulsion is back on the table, and that's extremely exciting.
Because if you can build a device which generates positive gravity in front of your craft, and antigravity behind your craft, then everything we've been taught about rapid spaceflight goes right out the window: wanna go to the nearest star system and be back in time for dinner? No problem! There's no upper limit to your rate of travel with a gravitational field propulsion system, because your spaceship isn't actually moving -through- spacetime; spacetime is moving around your craft. So you could travel to Alpha Centauri and back in an hour, with no time dilation effects… if you can control enough energy to produce the acceleration field.
It's even more interesting when you consider the nature of constant acceleration (gravitation) on spaceflight: greater distances become less and less relevant with passing time-of-flight. It might take you an hour to reach the nearest star, two hours to reach the galactic center, and eight hours to reach the Andromeda galaxy, and three days to reach the observable limit of the known universe (numbers for illustrative purposes only; I'm too lazy to do the calculations for precision). At a constant acceleration, distances become compressed to a startling degree, so a gravitational field propulsion system opens up the whole universe to manned exploration in ways that we can scarcely imagine.
Now get ready to be really blown away ; The military has known how to create an antigravitational field effect via Einstein's general theory of relativity for over 50 years. This is the kind of stuff you only uncover when you're an obsessed physics freak who's dedicated most of his adult life to chasing down weird leads, but it's worth it. A brilliant physicist, engineer, and science fiction author named Robert L. Forward got an amazing gig at the fledgling Hughes Research Laboratories back in the early 60's, when he was still a grad student. Presumably after torturing some Ph.D's versed in the tensor calculus of Einstein's field equations, he learned of the linearized Einstein field equations for gravity (which are useful approximations of Einstein's equations that make calculations simple for special cases) and thereby re-discovered the exhilarating principles of gravitoelectromagnetic induction (Oliver Heaviside had originally discovered these effects in the late 19th Century, but few physicists noticed), and with it, he devised the first technological method for creating a dipole gravitational field - one side of the device would create an attractive gravitational field, and the other side would manifest an antigravitational field. If that doesn't shock you then you're not paying attention. By 1963, one of the most elite military black budget research corporations had a viable method for producing an antigravity field effect, which required nothing more than dense matter spinning around a toroidal (donut-shaped) test body.
Here's the paper at the American Journal of Physics (sadly, all of the free copies online have vanished):
http://aapt.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1119/1.1969340
I could go on forever about this stuff - hit me up if you have any questions or if you'd like a copy of that paper. He published the foundation for that discovery a year earlier in a paper called "General Relativity for the Experimentalist," but I don't think he has the dipole gravitational field generator in that one. But the point is simply this: it doesn't take exotic physics to achieve the effects we’re looking for - we already know the basic principles. The hard part is the engineering, which might be ameliorated by a little ingenuity ;
There's definitely something more going on with the Lazar story, but it's probably not what most people think. The US intelligence community is very sneaky - we have to wise up to their crafty ways to understand what they're up to with some of this stuff. There's no way that a guy like Bob Lazar would be let anywhere near a top-level security clearance - he was a low-grade tech with a crap education and little in the way of ethics or reliability. There's an in-depth examination of his life based upon all of the available public records on him, and it paints a clear picture of a clever weasel with a huge ego. A terrible candidate for a highly classified research program...but an ideal candidate for a massive public disinformation campaign.
So I think we can safely throw out all of the rubbish he claims about UFOs and alien technology. But element 115 is a whole other matter - there may well be isotopes of element 115 that exist on the "island of stability" - superheavy neutron-rich elements with surprisingly long half-lives that exhibit exotic properties. I think that Lazar was recruited by high-level intelligence officials to get the word out to other compartmentalized research programs (and to Congress for funding) to get them working on those elements because they found something interesting. It's possible that what they found involves gravitational waves, for technical reasons that would probably bore everyone to death. So they hired Lazar to tell this crazy story about UFOs, as a mass-dissemination wrapping for wide public exposure, to get the word out that they found stable isotopes on the island of stability that were worth looking into for defense applications. He did apparently work at Los Alamos as a fairly low-level tech. But his claims about an MIT education and working at Area 51 were almost certainly pure crap - they can hire the best people on the planet for top research positions; a guy like Lazar wouldn't even make their radar, his nifty rocket-car notwithstanding.
The problem with highly compartmentalized research is that when you find something juicy, you can't tell anyone about it. So how do you let your friends in other highly classified research programs know when you've got something useful? You hire some shady little weasel with no future to go out and tell a zany sensational story that will get an avalanche of press exposure, and bury your meaningful info inside his story as a footnote. You make sure that there's just enough verifiable data in the story, like security protocols that only "insiders" will be able to verify, to make your friends in other high-security research divisions sit up and notice. Then while the public chases down fake leads about imaginary research facilities and little green men, you send in an appropriations request for funding to look into the exotic properties of some stable elements that you haven't looked into before, then blammo - you have a useful new tool for your advanced military technology toolbox.
Here are some links to Dr. White’s papers that laid the foundation for his warp field experiment, currently underway at NASA:
A Discussion of Space-Time Metric Engineering, white 2003
http://crowlspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Warp-Metric-White-2003.pdf
The Alcubierre drive in higher dimensional space-time 2006
http://earthtech.org/publications/davis_STAIF_conference_2.pdf
Warp Field Mechanics 101, 2011
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936.pdf
Warp Field 102: Energy Optimization
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20130011213.pdf
And here’s Miguel Alcubierre’s original 1994 paper that founded the warp field propulsion concept in the public domain:
“The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity”
http://arxiv.org/pdf/grqc/0009013.pdf