Slashdot Mirror
Physicists Observe 'Negative Mass' (bbc.com)
Physicists have created a fluid with "negative mass," which accelerates towards you when pushed. From a report on BBC: In the everyday world, when an object is pushed, it accelerates in the same direction as the force applied to it; this relationship is described by Isaac Newton's Second Law of Motion. But in theory, matter can have negative mass in the same sense that an electric charge can be positive or negative. Prof Peter Engels, from Washington State University (WSU), and colleagues cooled rubidium atoms to just above the temperature of absolute zero (close to -273C), creating what's known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this state, particles move extremely slowly, and following behaviour predicted by quantum mechanics, acting like waves. They also synchronise and move together in what's known as a superfluid, which flows without losing energy.
I'll get my coat
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
nope. And wouldn't that imply perpetual motion?
>But in theory, matter can have negative mass in the same sense that an electric charge can be positive or negative.
Was it actually theoretically predicted? I don't mean just supposing it exists because you flipped a sign in an equation.
This sounds actually groundbreaking. Does anyone have more details? Were the authors trying to generate negative mass or was this an unexpected side effect? Obviously this is going to require some replication, but I'm excited.
But if it truly had a negative inertial mass, it should spontaneously move upwards, because there already is a force pulling it downwards (gravity).
As it is, it just behaves like a negative inertial mass under certain strict conditions, which is somewhat interesting, but not a ground breaking discovery. That said, go science!
Time for a new topic. We already discussed millennials today.
It's analogous to negative mass (if such a thing could actually exist) in that some of the observed behaviours map to those calculated for negative masses.
This is an important difference, much like when we saw pop science reporting on 'table top black holes'. They weren't actually black holes.
And in related news, imploding socialist government in Venezuela illegally steal GM plant.
... and sell it as a weight-loss drink.
I seem to recall the Alcubierre drive requiring something like this. Perhaps it's time to start designing a warp drive now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#Mass.E2.80.93energy_requirement
Its too early to have this as a groundbreaking physics. Tomorrow they would come back saying "No we made an error in computation". Happens all the time. Remember the fiasco of the dark matter. Its still going see-saw.
It is called nationalization, and it isn't illegal because the state also makes the laws.
I think the only decent science reporting for the lay person in in Scientific American, Economist and Discover.
Every where else it's so oversimplified that the science is misunderstood and even wrong.
TV science reporting - unless they have someone like Bill Nye - is just pathetic.
So, would this be considered antimatter?
A long time ago, I recall reading about the theory of negative mass, and if I recall correctly, it should allow for the creation of pseudo-reactionless drives. Technically, it isn't reactionless because it's obeying all the laws of reaction drives, it's just that f=ma gets weird when m0.
So if you have a ship that contains equal parts mass and negative mass, its "total mass" will be 0, and any force applied to it will instantly accelerate it to lightspeed.
It's always been one of those things I assumed would be permanently theoretical. If they actually made some, that's absolutely fascinating.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
One of the fundamental "flaws" in Warp drives is need for exotic states of matter like negative mass. One step closer to FTL travel! Only 2000 years more of technology development needed!
Seize the means of production before the means of production seizes you.
Not really negative mass. We like often to model some behavior in the "effective" counter behavior in case of negative. E.g. model electron holes.
The correct title should be 'physicists observe a range of dynamical phenomena in fluid with negative _effective_ mass'.
Interesting, but nothing groundbreaking. Move along.
Does amazon sell this yet?
You're brilliant. Just wait until your home is taken away because "nationalism.". Oh wait...my bad. Your mom's home and your basement bedroom.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170417095534.htm
Take a two chunks of mass, A and B. If A is mass and B is mass there is a force between them, gravity. If A is mass but B is changed to photons, there is NO gravity (little) between them. Yet B is what it was, so where did the mass go. What actually happens when matter turns to energy and energy to matter?
Let me have another go at convincing you what's going is simple.
I described a simulation yesterday, using nothing but two simple particles one +ve and -ve they organize themselves into complex twisting spinning closed hoops given time. There's bits to this I didn't cover. The dipoles are *massless*, yet can form particles with mass.
How?
Dipoles exhibit a force on each other, its an organizational dipole force. You see it in water, you see this in dust, it's well understood. Diploes always arrange themselves so the attraction ends line up and the repelling ends are pushed apart. This is true of spinning dipoles too, they exert a force on remote points that is wave, that wave 'kicks' other distant dipoles into sync, just as those dipoles kick the original into sync. Let's call it dipole force for short.
Dipole organisation force is always an attraction.
Although its a wave, the force is not net zero, because the force is applied to other matter which itself is a wave, and the net force depends on both wavelengths.
So think of small bead magnets in a bag, shake them, they arrange themselves to stick together. Now think of large bar magnets in a bag, they stick together with much stronger force because the separation from the poles is larger. Dipole force is stronger if you put more distance between the ends of the dipole, and obviously it's stronger for stronger charges and stronger between hoops of the same wavelength.
Take a cloud of disorganized random spinning dipoles. These are ZERO mass in the conventional sense. They spin in all-different-ways, and a remote chunk of matter experiences net zero dipole force.
After these dipoles have arranged themselves into a twisting hoop, a simple one wavelength hoop for example, has half of the hoop +ve upwards and half -ve upwards. It is a stronger charge and clear separation. It exerts a net attractive force on other matter. It's the *same* dipoles, just in a different organization.
It goes from energy to mass just by a change in organization of the dipoles. Same group of dipoles, different arrangement, one exhibits an attraction force, the other exhibits minimal attaction force.
So if you treat matter as potential gravity, not as 'stuff' then the difference between energy and matter is whether it can exhibit a force or not.... i.e. its the same, just down to the structure.
...I thought they were talking about an unhappy religious ceremony of some sort.
Take a group of atoms, remove heat, and suddenly they change from having positive mass to negative mass. Children, what have we been telling you about critical thinking and not buying into obvious bullshit?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Have gnu, will travel.
Interesting. So in theory you could create thrust inside a sealed container? Sounds like troll physics to me.
Back in the day, misleading / unfounded click-bait had to end the title with ?, to claim minimal legitimacy.
The new standard appears to be '' quotation marks to cover any interpretation of alternate facts.
*sigh*
This negative mass effect looks a lot like the usual negative mass effect to describe some collections of holes/electrons. One can explain some of the phenomena of these as acting like they have a negative mass or negative (negative) charge. But they are mathematical fictions since they only arise as apparent behaviours on a fictional individual represeting the effective forces created by the correlated motions of a large ensemble. One can do something similar with magnetic monopoles. There are not (supposedly) magnetic monopoles but if you stack dipoles end to end then one can get two very well separated poles that behave as though they were independent monopoles.
Maybe I'm wrong, but Ive seen this negative mass explanation before so I'm guessing this is similar, not a new effect.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I bet negative mass engines are just around the corner too... ;-)
Isn't it actually a case where gravity behaves like a curvature of space and time? Seems like we can describe the effects of gravity and make analogies of those effects, but do we really have any idea how it actually causes those effects?
The only thing I predict is a negative on the conclusions.
I'm not convinced it's doing exactly what is described, or at least not for the reasons they described.
I gots lots of negative mass experience.... *&%@!##*11
My cat has been doing this for years. Many children behave this way too.
Like described in this /. story back in 2014...
so wasnt negative mass a requirement for making warp drive? if so is it usable for that purpose ?
It's not illegal within the country, but it may be a violation of international law (ultimately enforced with guns) or a treaty violation (also punished with guns). Aside from that, it's pretty stupid because while multinationals can tolerate a tax increase, they generally won't tolerate 100% confiscation. Thus, it's unlikely that anybody will invest in your country until after regime change. They've crossed a threshold with this move--radical isolationism with very limited trade because none of their agreements are honored, or full revolution.
No They Didn't, You Bloody Idiots
Reporters at the BBC discovered today that reporting on scientific experiments without basic background knowledge can result in wildly inaccurate headlines. The reporters' usual technique of absentmindedly skimming someone else's account of an event, copying a few juicy-sounding words, and filling in the rest with fluff turned out to completely misrepresent the actual science.
When asked for comment, a BBC spokesman said, "Piss off, egghead. You clicked on it, didn't you? Mission fucking accomplished on our end."
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
Okay, so we know by now that this isn't actually negative mass.
Would any physicists here care to chime in on whether this particular experiment is any different from the dozens of others that have resulted in Bose Einstein Condensates and, if so, what sets this one apart?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I've always viewed gravity as being the mass interacting force that warps space-time, ie: the curvature is an effect of gravity rather than gravity itself.
Sovereign immunity.
You don't have to like it for it to be legal.
A stolen GM plant? Monsanto's going to be pissed ... wait, you meant cars?
Pfft. Negative Catholics have been observing Negative Mass for centuries.
(Well, to be fair, most are non-observant and only show up for Negative Easter.)
Next: Phlogiston and magnetic monopole phenomena discovered!
Sadly, I had a girlfriend like that.