Negative Mass: Why It Doesn’t Exist ✦
Scientists checked if negative mass—the kind that falls up like an apple in reverse—is real. They hunted for special 'bursts' from colliding objects in gravitational waves, but found nothing. Negative mass doesn't seem to lurk in space—so what's pushing the Universe apart?
The cosmos is a silent orchestra. When massive bodies collide, they give birth to gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Usually, they sound like an ascending “chirp”: the frequency shoots up, like the siren of a speeding car. That’s exactly the kind of signal LIGO detectors pick up from merging black holes.
Negative mass would flip this music upside down. It doesn’t attract, it repels—orbits expand, frequency drops. You’d get an “anti-chirp,” which has never been observed. The weirdest part: back in 1957, it was found that a pair of “normal + negative” masses should accelerate on their own, forever chasing each other without any external push. No such exotic behavior has ever been seen.
This puts an end to hopes of explaining dark matter and dark energy—those mysterious entities that, as shown by Vera Rubin and Einstein, drive the expansion of the Universe. Even the ultra-precise pulsars discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell leave no room for negative mass. The search for answers now turns to computer models of quantum gravity.
🎯 According to Bondi’s theory, if you push a negative mass, it accelerates in the opposite direction compared to a normal object. So a pair of positive and negative mass will forever chase itself.
🎬 Science fiction author Robert Forward, in his novel “Flight of the Dragon,” described a starship built on negative matter capable of reaching superluminal speeds.