Exploring the Possibility of Negative Mass in the Universe

[Haelfix]

"In other words, I don't think there is any reason why you couldn't have negative mass, but it would behave exactly the same as what we already see, and would just be a definition. A more interesting question is 'are there imaginary masses'?"

It wouldn't make much of a difference for electroweak or strong force interactions, but it very much would for gravity. Since the equations of motion for a massless spin2 gauge field just reduces to Newtons law in the nonrelativistic limit...

 

[Hans de Vries]

"In other words, I don't think there is any reason why you couldn't have negative mass, but it would behave exactly the same as what we already see, and would just be a definition. A more interesting question is 'are there imaginary masses'?"

It wouldn't make much of a difference for electroweak or strong force interactions, but it very much would for gravity. Since the equations of motion for a massless spin2 gauge field just reduces to Newtons law in the nonrelativistic limit...

Imaginary masses would flip the sign in Klein Gordon:

$$\partial^2_t \psi - \partial^2_x \psi \ =\ m^2 \psi$$

Which says as much as: "The acceleration of psi away from zero is
proportional to psi..." This gives us the Bessel I1 and K1 functions
in the space-time propagator instead of the usual J1 and Y1 from
which the Bessel I1 nicely shows the explosive result...

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ModifiedBesselFunctionoftheFirstKind.html
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ModifiedBesselFunctionoftheSecondKind.html

(Unless you have a λ which holds it back at 4th order of course.)

The Bessel K1 is not so explosive but it still haunts us today as the thing
which is supposed to cause propagation outside the light-cone over a
range of 1/m, like in P&S (2.52) and Zee (I.23). This "leaking range"
would be infinite in the limit case of massless particles. Simulations
however don't show any propagation outside the light-cone at all.

This story goes back to RF's "Theory of positrons, 1949" where he
found the Hankel functions in the tables instead of the separate Bessel J
and Bessel Y functions. The Hankels are the complex combinations
I1 + i Y1 and I1 - i Y1 and the Y1 becomes our K1 outside the
light-cone where the argument becomes imaginary...Regards, Hans

 

[petm1]

does negative mass exists?

I would think that negative mass as it relates to us, would be the wake of our movement through existence, we are always at the flux point between where we are and where we have been and negative mass being that part of space where mass was, after it has moved on. I would think that photons show us negative matter at all times, and the only time you sense positive mass is when you touch it.