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Concept
Negative mass
Summary
In theoretical physics, negative mass is a hypothetical type of exotic matter whose mass is of opposite sign to the mass of normal matter, e.g. −1 kg. Such matter would violate one or more energy conditions and show some strange properties such as the oppositely oriented acceleration for an applied force orientation. It is used in certain speculative hypothetical technologies, such as time travel to the past and future, construction of traversable artificial wormholes, which may also allow for time travel, Krasnikov tubes, the Alcubierre drive, and potentially other types of faster-than-light warp drives. Currently, the closest known real representative of such exotic matter is a region of negative pressure density produced by the Casimir effect.
In December 2018, astrophysicist Jamie Farnes from the University of Oxford proposed a "dark fluid" theory, related, in part, to notions of gravitationally repulsive negative masses, presented earlier by Albert Einstein, that may help better understand, in a testable manner, the considerable amounts of unknown dark matter and dark energy in the cosmos.
Negative mass is any region of space in which for some observers the mass density is measured to be negative. This may occur due to a region of space in which the sum of the three normal stress components (pressure on each of three axes) of the Einstein stress–energy tensor is larger in magnitude than the mass density. All of these are violations of one or another variant of the positive energy condition of Einstein's general theory of relativity; however, the positive energy condition is not a required condition for the mathematical consistency of the theory.
In considering negative mass, it is important to consider which of these concepts of mass are negative. Ever since Newton first formulated his theory of gravity, there have been at least three conceptually distinct quantities called mass:
inertial mass – the mass m that appears in Newton's second law of motion, F = m a
"active" gravitational mass – the mass that produces a gravitational field that other masses respond to
"passive" gravitational mass – the mass that responds to an external gravitational field by accelerating.
Official source
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