3 ms·
My thoughts center not so much on all of the conjecture, but of the concept of negative mass itself. The author asks where it might be, but I think it would be
by jeromec 17y ago
My thoughts center not so much on all of the conjecture, but of the concept of negative mass itself. The author asks where it might be, but I think it would be better to ask when it might be. It's likely mass is always positive because time is always positive. We take it that all things in existence have mass; if it doesn't have mass it doesn't exist. The concept of negative mass would imply not only that something doesn't exist - it doesn't occur in time - but it specifically doesn't exist, and impacts the universe in the opposite way it would with positive mass. An illustrative example would be a tennis ball on a table. The tennis ball has positive mass, and relates to the universe in ways we are familiar with. If we said the tennis ball's mass was negative, then we are saying that in the universe on the table there specifically isn't the tennis ball, and not just that it doesn't exist, but it's missing (because we're negative) at that point and time, and the universe is affected proportionally.
- jrockway 17y agoHow is time positive? All we have in the universe is change in time; right now, 1 second goes by every 1 second, if that makes any sense. So time itself is the integral of this quantity, and because of the +c term, it could be positive or negative.
- jeromec 17y agoTo clarify, I mean time always goes in one direction: forward.
- tjarratt 17y agoSo you'd say that any object without mass does not exist? Perhaps you'd like to brush up on photons and gauge bosons. The author was no more saying that an object with negative mass is non-existent than a debt is a hole in your wallet. Negative numbers have more meaning than subtraction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massless_particle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massless_particle
- jeromec 17y agoDiscounting relativistic mass, yes. I'm not sure what the author's specific thoughts on that are; I was only pointing out my view, but your "debt is a hole in the wallet" is actually similar to what I'm proposing. The key is the object doesn't only not exist, it's missing. By the way, whoever upvoted my comment above, good one. It's not easy to wrap your brain around the implication. :)