Matter with negative mass created

[deustroop]

Negative matter is like a pinball flipper. You pull it to create forward motion. Sorry geniuses but so what (except there goes my career as a pool player.)

 

[PowerEngineer]

There may be a good reason that the article's title has the words "negative mass" in quotes. Bose-Einstein condensates and so-called superfluids are strange states of matter that are not well understood and have very odd characteristics (e.g. lossless flow). In some sense, then, it isn't all that surprising that there's more odd behavior to be found.

However, what the article says is that the rubidium superfluid "behaves as if it has negative mass". I suspect that is a long way from actually saying that the rubidium atoms themselves have negative mass.

But I could be wrong...

 

[Ruptga]

I'm kind of confused on this.

Say you had a theoretical marble with negative mass.

You push it with your finger.

Instead of going in the direction that you pushed it in, it accelerates in the opposite direction.

But the opposite direction is directly into your finger... so what happens?

It smashes into your finger, further accelerating in the direction of your finger. It quickly ramps up to a significant fraction of the speed of light as its increasing speed causes it to run into increasingly more things, but you're not thinking about that. You're thinking "why did I poke the thing that I knew would break physics with my bare hand" and "I wonder if my insurance will cover this". Then, after about a squidjillion years and a squidjillion-minus-one light-years someone else will be thinking "ooh, what an interesting gamma ray bur-".

 

[Paratus]

There may be a good reason that the article's title has the words "negative mass" in quotes. Bose-Einstein condensates and so-called superfluids are strange states of matter that are not well understood and have very odd characteristics (e.g. lossless flow). In some sense, then, it isn't all that surprising that there's more odd behavior to be found.

However, what the article says is that the rubidium superfluid "behaves as if it has negative mass". I suspect that is a long way from actually saying that the rubidium atoms themselves have negative mass.

But I could be wrong...

A couple of posts mentioned using this for FTL.

For the Alcubierre warp field solution to work it requires negative mass. It doesn't seem like this Bose-Einstein condensate would warp spacetime any differently than normal matter.

 

[sdifox]

Maybe it is just supercapillary

 

[WelshBloke]

So why doesn't this stuff accelerate away from the earth.

 

[BxgJ]

A non bbc link -

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.155301

Notice the third word in the abstract -

A negative effective mass

Negative effective mass is different from negative mass.

 

[BxgJ]

A non bbc link -

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.155301

Notice the third word in the abstract -



Negative effective mass is different from negative mass.

Here for 'bbc' I was referring to the first place I saw it publicized yesterday, just to be clear.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

I'm kind of confused on this.

Say you had a theoretical marble with negative mass.

You push it with your finger.

Instead of going in the direction that you pushed it in, it accelerates in the opposite direction.

But the opposite direction is directly into your finger... so what happens?

Effectively, it should in theory push against your finger with the force it would have otherwise been pushed away. But again, this is an effect observed by altering the properties of existing matter, temporarily, within a very specific energy range. As a very vague comparison, imagine if you were running electricity through an object, the 'properties' (aka electrification level) of that object would change as long as the charge was going through it, but would stop when it didn't (so it's not permanently electrified).

There may be a good reason that the article's title has the words "negative mass" in quotes. Bose-Einstein condensates and so-called superfluids are strange states of matter that are not well understood and have very odd characteristics (e.g. lossless flow). In some sense, then, it isn't all that surprising that there's more odd behavior to be found.

However, what the article says is that the rubidium superfluid "behaves as if it has negative mass". I suspect that is a long way from actually saying that the rubidium atoms themselves have negative mass.

But I could be wrong...

Pretty much yes, based on what the paper seems to say... It's yet another oddity of superfluids moreso than 'we found negative mass'.

A couple of posts mentioned using this for FTL.

For the Alcubierre warp field solution to work it requires negative mass. It doesn't seem like this Bose-Einstein condensate would warp spacetime any differently than normal matter.

Actual full-fledged negative mass 'matter' is required for an Alcubierre drive. I'm not sure if this effect could be recreated on the scale or permanence required (utilizing this method) to see something like this come to fruition.

Maybe it is just supercapillary

It did specifically cite that force -> created responding acceleration <- which isn't really capillary action. I also doubt that the experimental parameters would have allowed for something like that. Not 100% though.

So why doesn't this stuff accelerate away from the earth.

Nothing's been stated or established that gravity has an effect on it (although it is a 'force' so in theory it should). It's also not necessarily a strong enough 'negative mass field' (whatever that phrasing would be) to cause it to counter earth's gravity. I guess in theory they could repeat the experiment and weigh the mass of the material once the properties have been changed, to see if it weighs less (and therefore is being 'pushed' by gravity to some extent).

This is all conjecture based on my limited understanding of advanced particle physics and what I could glean from the paper, along with a healthy dose of logical imagination, so don't take it as gospel!

 

[JTsyo]

What I find interesting is that they took matter with mass and got it to behave like something with negative mass. Makes you wonder if you can just flip positive mass into negative mass and it's not a property of some exotic material.

Fg = G*m1*m2/r^2, seems it should attract each other but repel regular matter. So I don't think you would be able to touch it with regular matter.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

What I find interesting is that they took matter with mass and got it to behave like something with negative mass. Makes you wonder if you can just flip positive mass into negative mass and it's not a property of some exotic material.

Fg = G*m1*m2/r^2, seems it should attract each other but repel regular matter. So I don't think you would be able to touch it with regular matter.

There's two things I'd really love to see explored with this concept, one is Casimir forces, the other is magnetism. If magnetism 'force' applies the same way, you could effectively create a mono-pole system which very quickly spirals (hah) into a perpetual motion machine.