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http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2017/04/...492444496/
Physicists have created a fluid which appears to have some properties of negative mass.
What does anyone make of this? Would it be useful for anything, technology wise? The article already states it could be used to better understand some properties of black holes and neutron stars.
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Interesting - although the supercooled nature of the material would rather limit macroscale applications.
This kind of thing tends to get mentioned in connection with things like quantum computers or nanotech - which may be the case or may not. So far Bose-Einstein Condensates and the like seem to be very interesting, but are rather thin on the ground in the applications dept.
I have an article by Robert Forward about the use of negative matter (assuming we had any) in space drives. I don't think this stuff would apply there, but some of the surrounding information in the article might apply and be interesting. I'll see about digging it out and giving it a skim to see if anything jumps out.
Todd
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The experiment's interesting but I agree with most of the commenters on that article, appalling headline. It's not negative mass, the superfluid just acts like it has negative inertial mass. It's hard to see what the applications are for things like this given that they only occur in incredibly controlled, extreme environments.
OA Wish list:
- DNI
- Internal medical system
- A dormbot, because domestic chores suck!
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This sort of thing might have applications in very small technology. It's just that we don't know what they are yet. The same applies to Bose-Einstein condensates in general; a very weird state of matter, but we haven't figured out what to do with them yet.
