Psience Quest

Bizarre ‘dark fluid’ with negative mass could dominate the universe

Jamie Farnes

Quote:It’s embarrassing, but astrophysicists are the first to admit it. Our best theoretical model can only explain 5 percent of the universe. The remaining 95 percent is famously made up almost entirely of invisible, unknown material dubbed dark energy and dark matter. So even though there are a billion trillion stars in the observable universe, they are actually extremely rare.
The two mysterious dark substances can only be inferred from gravitational effects. Dark matter may be an invisible material, but it exerts a gravitational force on surrounding matter that we can measure. Dark energy is a repulsive force that makes the universe expand at an accelerating rate. The two have always been treated as separate phenomena. But my study, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 2018, suggests they may both be part of the same strange concept – a single, unified “dark fluid” of negative masses.

Negative masses are a hypothetical form of matter that would have a type of negative gravity – repelling all other material around them. Unlike familiar positive mass matter, if a negative mass was pushed, it would accelerate towards you rather than away from you...

Quote:Unlike familiar positive mass matter, if a negative mass was pushed, it would accelerate towards you rather than away from you...

I inferred this from reading the thread title. It leads inevitably to the old question: what happens when an irresistible force meets an immoveable object? In other words, if we tried to kick  a football made of this substance, it would not fly through the air, but would rush towards the boot. Perhaps such weirdness may only exist as a mathematical construct, rather than having real-world existence. A bit like imaginary numbers. They are extremely useful within our equations, but we can't point to them in the real world.

(2020-10-19, 07:56 AM)Typoz Wrote: [ -> ]I inferred this from reading the thread title. It leads inevitably to the old question: what happens when an irresistible force meets an immoveable object? In other words, if we tried to kick  a football made of this substance, it would not fly through the air, but would rush towards the boot. Perhaps such weirdness may only exist as a mathematical construct, rather than having real-world existence. A bit like imaginary numbers. They are extremely useful within our equations, but we can't point to them in the real world.

Yeah I feel like "dark" is eliding definitions. It really represents complete ignorance about what is happening to ~95% of supposed physical reality, but the term makes it sound like there's some black substance out there camouflaged by the lightless Void.

I liked Neil Degrasse Tyson's suggestion that instead of dark energy and dark matter we say something like Wilma & Fred. Then the public could more easily see that the assumption of "dark" stuff is a placeholder that was assumed because the alternative is to go back to the drawing board for models of reality.