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Comment by Ecco | Hacker News Reader

Fun website, but I’m not quite sure what their point is. Are they trying to say that negative mass can have a meaning sometimes? Or is it just « let’s run a simulation on those equations using a negative mass ans see what happens » ?

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I have the feeling that the second one.

That approach is not totally unjustified though. As an example, consider the complex numbers. They were first used to solve cubic polynomials, and people basically said "Let's pretend the square root of a negative number is something I can calculate with, obeying the general rules of calculus", and they did. Then they used those successfully to calculate real roots of cubic polynomials.

And where would you introduce "negative mass"? Involved, according to the presentation, in phenomena showing "creation of energy"?

Well... The website seems like it just messes with things. But I remember an article claiming that phonos of sound in atmosphere behave like they have negative mass. Cause the sound wave would travel faster in the denser layers of air from the bottom, making the sound wave to go a little upwards, like a refraction.

Phonons can have a negative effective mass - in other words, you can mostly ignore the effect of the background environment if you simply change the mass to be something else (which can be negative).

That’s very different than having a negative actual mass.

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