Washington State University physicists have created a fluid with negative mass, which is exactly what it sounds like. Push it, and unlike every physical object in the world we know, it doesn’t accelerate in the direction it was pushed. It accelerates backwards.
The phenomenon is rarely created in laboratory conditions and can be used to explore some of the more challenging concepts of the cosmos.
Hypothetically, matter can have negative mass in the same sense that an electric charge can be either negative or positive. People rarely think in these terms, and our everyday world sees only the positive aspects of Isaac Newton’s Second Law of Motion, in which a force is equal to the mass of an object times its acceleration, or F=ma.
In other words, if you push an object, it will accelerate in the direction you’re pushing it. Mass will accelerate in the direction of the force. With negative mass, if you push something, it accelerates toward you.
Story source:
https://news.wsu.edu/2017/04/10/negative-mass-created-at-wsu/
Journal article:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.155301
Image: Experimental TOF images of the effectively 1D expanding SOC BEC for expansion times of 0, 10, and 14 ms.
Scents of Science 
June 5, 2017 at 1:15 am
Interesting stuff. However there is a lot more to it then negative mass , once this phenomenon is understood completely it will rewrite some scientific laws that we believe to be absolute. Negative mass stands at the doorway of a completely different realm of scientific understanding. beyond the threshold is a new world of understanding that will make quantum physics look like standard physics in the way matter behaves in our universe.
This will give a complete explanation of what dark matter really is proving it to be a concept of the universe instead of being something that dwells with in the universe.
Unfortunately the door will remain closed until those who look at the world through a scientific stand point,
can learn to look at the world through a open-minded scientific stand point. (logicallyunbiased)
So it might be a while.
Keep fighting the good fight sweetheart, science needs more people like you.
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June 7, 2017 at 12:16 pm
I notice within the paper as published by the American Institute of Physics that what they are talking about is never referred to as negative mass. It is called: negative effective mass. To me this is a subtle way of saying it looks like it is, but it is not really negative mass. It looks like someone started to call this “Physicists create negative mass” as a way to hype the article. It probably all started off by a science writer at the WSU News (Washington State University News) entitling his article this: ‘Negative mass’ created at Washington State University. Corina gave us the precise link for that and the precise link to the paper in the refereed academic journal: Physical Review Letters. I found some people saying that the article never said what has been reported widely. So, I began to check because I have access to the full article through my affiliation with a major academic university. Well, the article is actually entitled: “Negative-Mass Hydrodynamics in a Spin-Orbit–Coupled Bose-Einstein Condensate.” The article’s abstract actually starts off with this sentence. “A negative effective mass can be realized in quantum systems by engineering the dispersion relation.” The full article carefully avoids referring to what the experiment entailed as negative mass. I know it’s incredibly exciting, but as far as I know Newton’s second law of motion has not been violated here and has not been repealed. Here’s a link to it:http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/Lesson-3/Newton-s-Second-Law “The acceleration of an object as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force, in the same direction as the net force, and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.”
There’s a lively discussion going on about what this article is really saying. I found some of it by looking up this phrase in my google search window: negative mass ; sometimes when I get too many bad hits I also put double quotes around my term like this: “negative mass” ; it forces the two words to appear immediately adjacent to each other and not just somewhere in a sentence or a paragraph appearing many words apart. Google works generally to try to make this happen in searches, but I give it an extra nudge by doing this when I need to. I found this helpful string of thought that made me think carefully about the article in the WSU News:https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/327450/negative-mass-or-just-the-appearance-of-negative-mass-whats-the-acid-test and this one too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093860 . There were actually many more, but I had found enough to make me dig in. There is one other thing that may help you. I have my google search options set up so I get something like 30 to 50 citations or hits per page. I find that is about the right amount for me. I could set it as low as 10 or as high as 100, but my eyes have gradually gotten pretty good at rapidly scanning about 30 hits at a time to check on about how many are relevant. If I get too many irrelevant ones, I modify my search strategy to be more precise and do things like try to discover how a science or international relations or astronomical concept is most often spoken off or written about. I do the same type of thing if there are too few hits. I also broaden or narrow the range of years I am looking at for literature off. Most often, I find that I am narrowing my concept and the terms uses because I am getting too many hits to review effectively.
As I said above, I looked at the actual article and found that newspapers and reports were hyping it, but most probably didn’t have access to it online because AIP journals are generally behind a pay to read firewall. If you go to a large university or are affiliated with it they likely license it and pay a fee to allow their faculty, staff and students to read it. Also, many larger public libraries participate in larger state licensing networks and you may have access. My state of Minnesota is one of those. They support libraries with our taxes and we get very good access to academic journals this way. Unfortunately, many people do not have this access and they have to depend on the science journalists to offer accurate summaries of the scientific research. Well, it’s happening less and less and I’ve found this type of hopeful exaggeration going on more frequently as newspapers cut thousands of science journalists and writers with a good knowledge of science. It’s an actual crisis because more and more medium and even large market papers have cut their science writers. There is actually a fair amount of very bad science writing going on too. It’s hard to catch this kind of mistake because people like me who actually are willing to check on papers that seem to have dubious claims are rare. It just takes too much time. But I know something about basic science through over 70 some quarter and semester hours I have taken in courses related to science. I want to thank all the people I find when I do Google searches who help me to think a little more about what I read to be a critical thinker and trust my judgement and my academic background and critical reading more and more. Corina is one of the primary ones. She writes excellent science, astronomy and physics articles and does a wonderful job of explaining and making very complex topics more meaningful. I hope my thinking and comments are useful to many of you. I am offering them in that way. My desire is always to try to make something clearer and more understandable. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to comment here Corina Marinescu.
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June 7, 2017 at 2:16 pm
Thank you Frank for the comment and references.
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June 7, 2017 at 8:44 pm
You are very welcome. It is also a dear inner joy. It is an unexpected relief to be healthy enough to pick up my writing again and be learning to love how to share about science, animals (and our lives with them), psychology, physics and astronomy/space. My days are becoming much meaningful again too after having to drop most of my writing a year ago for the second time.
I forgot to leave a good reference earlier on what I’m thinking about when more and more popular science writing and journalism doesn’t frame difficult concepts in as little jargon as possible so that the major concepts are relatable and understandable to as many people as possible. In fact I see that almost any reporting about science and medicine in the major broadcast and cable networks avoids mentioning any statistical concepts at all. Most of them are really not very difficult. But I think I am fortunate to have had outstanding teachers and professors who learned to teach through stories that brought the whole class to life. I’m thinking of a wonderful statistics professor who made the first two courses in statistics more memorable and vibrantly real by telling wonderful true stories of the statistics and reasoning through statistics that enabled him to do his job well when working to locate huge power plants and the power grid needing to be built around them. Here’s a very good article I found in Nature as world view column this year: http://www.nature.com/news/give-the-public-the-tools-to-trust-scientists-1.21307 . Alan Alda is also very interested in making science concepts and communication clearer. To help with this he established The Alan Alda Center For Communicating Science at the State University Of New York at Stony Brook. It’s been in existence for several years now: http://www.aldakavlilearningcenter.org/ The Center works a great deal with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and other science and communications to help scientists to become better communicators and tell their important and revealing stories of exploration and discovery in a way that reaches their audiences. He often likens it to story telling or creating a memorable set of vivid images in each person listening. National Public Radio (NPR) also did a wonderful segment on it just three days ago (Sunday). It’s seven minutes long and there is a thoughtful and well-written summary of the interview. http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/04/531271710/alan-aldas-experiment-helping-scientists-learn-to-talk-to-the-rest-of-us
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June 7, 2017 at 9:30 pm
Corina, I meant to insert the word organizations after the word communications in the 8th line up from the bottom of my comment and just under Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); my mind got a little bit ahead of my fingers. I thought I had done it. Could you please make that slight edit for me prior to approving my comment above or send it back to me to change and repost? I sometimes find a missing word error after writing and correct it then. Is there a way to edit after posting for review with Word Press blogs? If so, I don’t see any way to do it. A minor thing, but it would help people to make sense of that sentence. Thanks for considering.
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