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Bizarre 'Dark Fluid' With Negative Mass Could Dominate the Universe (theconversation.com)
One of the most galling mysteries in physics is that of the dark matter and dark energy. Scientists believe that together, these could account for up to 95 percent of the total mass in the universe. Now, a researcher at the University of Oxford says a new theory could explain all that "dark phenomena." From a report: The two mysterious dark substances can only be inferred from gravitational effects. Dark matter may be an invisible material, but it exerts a gravitational force on surrounding matter that we can measure. Dark energy is a repulsive force that makes the universe expand at an accelerating rate. The two have always been treated as separate phenomena. But my new study, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, suggests they may both be part of the same strange concept -- a single, unified "dark fluid" of negative masses.
Negative masses are a hypothetical form of matter that would have a type of negative gravity -- repelling all other material around them. Unlike familiar positive mass matter, if a negative mass was pushed, it would accelerate towards you rather than away from you. Negative masses are not a new idea in cosmology. Just like normal matter, negative mass particles would become more spread out as the universe expands -- meaning that their repulsive force would become weaker over time. However, studies have shown that the force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe is relentlessly constant. This inconsistency has previously led researchers to abandon this idea. If a dark fluid exists, it should not thin out over time.
In the new study, I propose a modification to Einstein's theory of general relativity to allow negative masses to not only exist, but to be created continuously. "Matter creation" was already included in an early alternative theory to the Big Bang, known as the Steady State model. The main assumption was that (positive mass) matter was continuously created to replenish material as the universe expands. We now know from observational evidence that this is incorrect. However, that doesn't mean that negative mass matter can't be continuously created. I show that this assumed dark fluid is never spread too thinly. Instead it behaves exactly like dark energy.
Negative masses are a hypothetical form of matter that would have a type of negative gravity -- repelling all other material around them. Unlike familiar positive mass matter, if a negative mass was pushed, it would accelerate towards you rather than away from you. Negative masses are not a new idea in cosmology. Just like normal matter, negative mass particles would become more spread out as the universe expands -- meaning that their repulsive force would become weaker over time. However, studies have shown that the force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe is relentlessly constant. This inconsistency has previously led researchers to abandon this idea. If a dark fluid exists, it should not thin out over time.
In the new study, I propose a modification to Einstein's theory of general relativity to allow negative masses to not only exist, but to be created continuously. "Matter creation" was already included in an early alternative theory to the Big Bang, known as the Steady State model. The main assumption was that (positive mass) matter was continuously created to replenish material as the universe expands. We now know from observational evidence that this is incorrect. However, that doesn't mean that negative mass matter can't be continuously created. I show that this assumed dark fluid is never spread too thinly. Instead it behaves exactly like dark energy.
You mean grasping at Strings
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Yes. I majored in physics, and I find this theory utterly repulsive.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Is it just me or has the physics community been grasping at straws lately?
Certainly TFS is, or string theory for that matter. Dark matter and dark energy are a bit different: they're observed phenomena that we can't explain. Gotta call them something. It's only been a few years since is was confirmed that dark matter was even "mater" (not modified gravity or somesuch), and it's still just guesswork that dark energy is "energy" in te way we currently understand it.
Minor quibble, but I cringe when stories talk about energy having mass. While you can express that mathematically and be fine, it doesn't match the meaning of those words in common usage. It's better to say that mass is a particular kind of energy than to say that e.g. a magnetic field "has mass" or that a spring has more mass when compressed. Being cryptic for the sake of being cryptic doesn't belong in science.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
At the edge of knowledge, you will always find strange concepts. That is nothing new. It never was different. Wave-particle-dualism, morphing spacetime, magnetism, electricity and light being the same thing -- all of those have been fringe ideas at first (or as Max Planck once put it: acts of desperation). Only in hindsight, when they are long established in the scientific community, we consider them matters of course.
Anonymous troll posts have existed on Slashdot for as long as I've been reading, but the sheer volume of them started climbing dramatically a few years ago.
Back in the day, I used to read with my threshold at 0 because you would see a fair number of thoughtful comments which were anonymously posted for whatever reason - I was willing to tolerate the crap posts in order to see the good ones. But the sheer number of garbage posts we see nowadays drove me to change my mind - nowadays my "one line comment threshold is set to 1. I know I'm missing some things which probably deserve consideration, but I am unwilling to slog through the cesspool.
#DeleteChrome
There is a Mexican mathematician by the name of Miguel Alcubierre who came out with description of a theoretical method of propelling a solid object in space at extremely high speeds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
His theory pencils out as internally consistent, but when you start to match it up the the observable universe, you get into things that we didn't think actually existed - like a requirement for a material with negative mass.
Fellow Slashdotters, I need a few hundred liters of this stuff for my DIY Alcubierre drive. Anybody got any advice on how I can collect a material that starts to run away faster and faster as I get closer and closer to it?
TIA!
Entire gravity is one big phenomenon that we can't explain. Negative mass fluid sounds like the same as Luminiferous Aether, something we made up on analogy with our lower level phenomena. Occam's razor suggests that it's better to expect an explanation for metric expansion of space in future improved versions of existing theories. Perhaps quantization of gravity will help?
There is also the question of how a negative mass fluid would react with other n/mass fluid particles around it. If positive masses attract each other, and a positive-negative mass interaction results in repulsion, how would two negative-mass particles interact with each other?
If you did the math or read the original paper, you'd know that positive masses attract, positive-negative masses accelerate in the same direction, and negative masses repulse.
Anybody got any advice on how I can collect a material that starts to run away faster and faster as I get closer and closer to it?
TIA!
It's called a woman