The statements about the discovery of a "liquid with negative mass" do not correspond to reality, since the discovery of physicists from the University of Washington is about imitating the properties of such matter, and not about its real version, says physicist Sabine Hossenfelder.
“Thanks to the BBC and other press, now for several years I will be writing all sorts of know-it-alls that all physicists are idiots who do not understand that the expansion of the Universe is caused by matter with negative mass. Why? After all, such matter was recently created in a laboratory!”- comments on the“discovery”of a physicist from the Institute for Advanced Research in Frankfurt (Germany).
We are talking about the publication in the journal Physical Review Letters of an article by scientists from the University of Washington, in which they describe a series of experiments and their strange results that they obtained while studying the properties of the so-called Bose-Einstein condensate.
Bose-Einstein condensate is an unusual in its properties form of matter, similar to gas and liquid, which behaves like one atom and has typical "atomic" properties. Scientists get it, as a rule, by cooling a cloud of rubidium or other alkali metal atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero.
Peter Engels and his colleagues from the University of Washington at Pullman (USA) found that a change in the spin state of individual atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate would lead to the fact that individual regions within it behave like matter with negative mass.
In this state, according to scientists, a cloud of rubidium atoms, if easily pushed, will not move forward, but backward, and will have other strange properties of matter with negative mass.
“The small but very important word 'effective mass' has escaped the attention of virtually all journalists. Physicists use a similar expression to denote something that arises in the course of a process, and is not so from a fundamental point of view. For example, the “effective radius of the Galaxy” is not its real radius. Similar stories with the charge of the nucleus and with negative mass,”the physicist continues.
In this case, according to Hossenfelder, "negative mass" is a mathematical construction, not a real phenomenon, which makes it easier to explain what happens inside the Bose-Einstein condensate when the spins of atoms change. Its negative value, she says, is simply one of two possible results from a formula describing the relationship between kinetic energy, momentum, and mass.
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“What does this mean then? If we release such a condensate from the trap in which it is contained, this liquid will first disintegrate into parts, and then it will stop doing so. This is practically all that was discovered by the authors of the article. This behavior is due to the quantum pressure inside the fluid itself, and it has nothing to do with black holes, dark energy, "wormholes" and other such things. Nobody has turned physics upside down and is not going to do it,”concludes the German physicist.
