Scientists create a fluid with negative mass in lab. What are the implications?

Water would run uphill.

Colonial Drones would destroy themselves with their own missiles.

It seems to me there are no pra tical applications at this point. To advance beyond a microdrop would be quite costly, and unlikely to happen any time soon.

Oh, and you could create negative space time distortions, essential for an alcubierre style warp drive.

I see it being used as a means of movement for craft that use magnetic torsion fields.

I don’t think it’s as simple as it sounds. I don’t really understand what exactly it means, but I don’t think it’s like they’ve got a nice negative-mass block of aluminium. If they did, hey look anti-gravity, maybe. But no, I’m pretty sure they don’t. But I’m not sure what they do have, exactly. Seems to involve quantum coupling.

Cars that don’t run on gasoline???

Effective negative mass. Not actual negative mass.

@Rarebear Does that mean I won’t be able to loose weight by drinking a shake of supercooled rubidium atoms?

In all seriousness though, what’s the difference between effective negative mass and actual negative mass? Also is anti-matter related to negative mass? or are they completely separate things?

This is why I hate science press releases.

No it’s still matter, and is not antimatter. Antimatter, by the way, still has positive mass as far as a gravitational well is concerned.

Weird shit happens when you start messing around with BEC state of matter. This finding goes into the box of “wow, cool” but that’s about it.

Thanks for clarifying.

I don’t even begin to pretend to understand the physics of this. But Bose Einstein condensates make their way into science fiction stories from time to time. This will probably be no exception.

But in terms of any practical use? Probably not.

Cool post though, thanks for posting. I hadn’t heard of this experiment. I used to keep up with this stuff but I have gotten out of the habit.

I had never heard of this concept until I came across this article. Physics is so counter-intuitive. I guess this stuff will accelerate towards a force applied to it instead of away from the force. I’m guessing this doesn’t mean you can accelerate it past the speed of light because the mass is negative. The mass will simply increase with speed in the opposite direction?

I think this is is pretty reasonable proof that if a God does indeed exist he’s got a very strange sense of humor… Or it could be viewed as evidence against the watchmaker argument for Intelligent Design.

It’s pretty cool to see Physicists pushing the boundaries and learning more about how our reality works.

I would think the practical uses would be really small scale surprises. Like if you said “hey, I just discovered liquid crystals”, you probably wouldn’t be thinking they’d revolutionize televisions and displays, right?

I would imagine anything that pushed back when pushed would have interesting applications in setups with a “normal” liquid on one side of a flexible barrier and this new negative mass liquid on the other. It could potentially be like a self activating elastic system, I’d guess.

Like a shake weight that shakes itself, but probably only at tiny scales with a ton of energy put into the system right now. But who knows. Perpetual motion is always tantalizing, right?

Or a switch that has this on one side to make an imbalance on a tiny scale? We’ve gotten really good at making switches, but there’s always specialized needs and if it somehow outperformed silicon in some limited application, then it gets really interesting.

But right now, with two lasers holding a tiny bit for fractions of a second, it’s tough to make magic there.

@gorillapaws In a BEC the speed of light actually slows to normal speeds. So you can theoretically trap light. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK6HxdUQm5s

As I said, weird shit happens in BEC

The article does not say what the effect of gravity is. All it says is that forces acting on the fluid cause it to accelerate in the opposite direction. If gravity were just another force acting on the object then it would seem that the object should accelerate upward like the upsidaisium on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. In the 19th century there was a theory that what we now call oxidation resulted from the release of the substance phlogiston. That some oxidized substances gained weight when the phlogiston was supposedly released was explained by saying that it has negative mass.

@LostInParadise Gravity will still act in the same way.