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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.
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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!
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.
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.
That's because the headline is some of the worst sensationalistic tabloid journalism level garbage I've ever read. They did not observe "negative mass". They created a system wherein, under specific circumstances, part of the system behaved as if it mathematically had negative mass. Note that the entire system and every part of it individually still has positive mass: however, because of the way the system interacts with itself, when you do very specific things to it, parts of it can act (when taking very specific behavior) as if they had negative mass.
The headline and summary are the equivalent of saying "man travels through space safely without spacesuit on!", without mentioning he's inside a spaceship.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Yup, this sounds just like the reports of negative temperature. There, the distribution of particles was governed by a term like B*c*T, where B = external magnetic field strength and T = temperature. The field was suddenly reversed, but the particles didn't change their configuration immediately. The system looked like B*c*T for a while, but the field was now -B. So if you wrote the term as (-B)*c*(-T), it looked like the long-term equilibrium state at field -B and temperature -T. Of course, the system wasn't at equilibrium, so the math didn't really apply.
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Negative temperatures are actually a pretty well-defined and real thing, but that's just because of the way we define "temperature" in thermodynamics, which is not always exactly the same as what we think of as temperature in everyday life. The short explanation is that temperature (T) is the rate of change of energy (E) with respect to entropy (S) (in math: T=dE/dS). If I have a system that is bounded from above in energy (i.e. a maximum energy the system can reach), I can get negative temperatures. Simple example: let's say I have a system of particles, each of which can be in two states, a state with more energy, and a state with less energy. The entropy is the number of different states the *entire* system can be in, so if the system is in a minimum energy state (i.e. every particle is in the lower energy state) I have a minimum entropy system (every particle in the same state means I only have 1 possible state for the entire system). Likewise, in a *maximum* energy state, all the particles are also in the same state (the higher energy state), so I also have minimum entropy. Maximum entropy occurs when the energy is right in the middle between these: half the particles are in the higher energy state, half are in the lower energy state, so the entire system has the most possible configurations. So, if the system is in that state, and I add a bit of energy to it, I decrease the entropy (as there are fewer particles in the lower energy state and therefore fewer possible configurations). That means dE/dS is negative (since S goes down, so dS is negative, while dE is positive), so you get negative temperature.
In every day life, systems typically aren't bound from above, and also any particles in higher energy states like that will fall into lower energy states and release energy (this is exactly how a laser works, incidentally), so you only get negative temperature in carefully constructed systems.
The negative mass term in this case, however, is a negative effective mass (not a real mass) term that occurs in a group velocity (which is not the real velocity of particles in the system) dispersion relationship. Not to say the results aren't interesting: they are, they're just... well, not really negative mass at all.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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."
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