Live data from Hacker News

'Dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe

theconversation.com

291–300 of 302 posts

Re: 'Dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe

#291
This then leads to the inevitable questions, is an Alcubierre Warp Drive possible, since one of its pre-requisites was particles of negative mass?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

>>a spacecraft could achieve apparent faster-than-light travel if a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum (that is, negative mass) could be created

If this matter is popping into space continuously as the author describes, it could be possible to harvest it. The question is, how much of it is popping into existence in lets say a square km of space (something we could feasibly cover with our current tech), and how do we detect and capture it.

The author does readily admit that his theory may be wrong, but useful as a mathematical tool. It's like saying "My theory may be the Newtonian Mechanical model of dark matter + dark energy, but not the quantum (read: real) theory." I sure as hell hope he is correct and its a real particle we could capture. It could open up technology we have yet to realize and get us off this rock.

Re: 'Dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe

#292
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because they are fluctuations of the metric tensor field, a symmetric rank-2 tensor. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton#Gravitons_and_renorma... for details.

That does not appear to have any details that relate to your comment whatsoever. All it says is that renormalization doesn't work on gravitons. However, if I understand your comment correctly, you're saying that the underlying non-quantum theory (GR) uses a symmetric rank-2 tensor, therefore you have to have a spin 2 particle - as opposed to photons, whose underlying non-quantum theory has an antisymmetric rank-2 ten…

Two-days-later addition: If you drop the # and following from the URL, it does have details that relate to duality's comment.

Re: 'Dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe

#293
post #278
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It looks like this doubling happened in ~2000 so it wouldnt show up in your chart. Since 2000 many new satellite measurements were done and the values improved. As I've quoted your page Planck in 2013 ultimately made the most precise CMB measurements that most conclusively fit the "dark matter" model and provably don't fit the "MOND" model. And for that proof there were no "factor 2" corrections, as you also confir…

>"Since 2000 many new satellite measurements were done and the values improved." The point is that "suddenly" people started measuring a higher baryon density to make it fit what was required for lambda-CDM model to fit the CMB measurements. Ie, the lambda-CDM model did not pre-dict the spectrum beforehand, they had to tune it to match the data. And see how the squares and triangles start moving upwards once the blue…

> The point is that "suddenly" people started measuring a higher baryon density to make it fit what was required

W...what? Do you really believe that different scientific organizations in different countries around the world financed and sent different satellites into space but misrepresented the actually measured values only to "fit" some old theoretical predictions?

Really?

Then there's really no point discussing anything about science with you.

Re: 'Dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe

#294
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or is there something about the nature of the dark fluid hypothesized that would make it useless for something like that? Assuming it was, literally, some kind of magical FTL juice... it all seems to be outside the galaxy, which means tens of thousands of years' travel just to get to it. If we're willing and able to do that, why bother with FTL at all?

He is also implying that it spontaneously emerges from space on a continuous basis. If that's the case then it may be possible to setup a harvester of negative mass. The question is how much of it emerges in so many square km of empty space. It could be 1 particle per light year.

I'm not a huge fan of the Fermi paradox but if it has any validity, it would seem to suggest the problem is difficult to say the least.

Re: 'Dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple little things I won't turn into literal ETA3, just in case you've already been reading the long post above. :) (2) below is also mostly for me, I think. 1. Thanks, Michael Weiss. This is essentially the same argument I'm making, only terser. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/expandin... 2. One important thing about the expansion of the universe is that people hear "expansion of space" and r…

Could I interpret it this way? In the EFE, if we move the cosmological constant factor to the right handside, where the stress–energy tensor is, then stress–energy tensor and the cosmological constant factor have opposite signs and stress–energy tensor can overcome the cosmological constant factor. When we say EM-forces/Strong/Weak forces "cancel out" the expansion of the universe, it isn't because of those forces ar…

Well, so you write down an initial values surface with that approach and let the matter evolve: either you get something physically plausible or you don't. We have some guides as to what is physically plausible, and of course evidence that any of them is wrong would be very interesting.

More theoretically, the LHS doesn't care about how you arrange the RHS at all. More finely, the metric does not care how you compose the metric. If you do it perturbatively, the leading term could be Minkowski or Gödel for all it cares, as long as the sub-leading terms then present a useful background for small perturbations that remain small (or better, vanish) rather than explode into large perturbations. Inside the solar system, Schwarzschild gets that right, and nobody has shown you need to correct for the global behaviour of the cosmic expansion.

> ... if we move the cosmological constant factor to the right handside ..

Before the 1920s (!) there was a discussion about where to put an everywhere isotropic tension in the EFEs. https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.6338

In section 3, the author quotes Einstein's response about how to determine the density. The part after, "Later, he finishes with..." seems especially germane, and cf. section 4 especially its last sentence (wherein "dark energy" in that context means a source field with a potential and dynamics and a coupling to the other source fields and a set of initial values).

[Heh, typo in the second sentence of the last paragraph of §3, "vale" instead of "value".]

> (matter forces) contribute to the stress-energy tensor

Ok, but if you hold that the CC acts isotropically everywhere you can think about decomposing the curvature tensor into its Ricci (and Weyl) components. Weyl tensor encodes the stretch-squash astigmatism: a spherical volume in the presence of a nonvanishing Weyl start to look more like a U.S. football. Ricci scalar encodes the isotropic change in volume. For a volume, nonvanishing Weyl with a vanishing Ricci is volume-preserving; a vanishing Weyl and a nonvanishing Ricci is a contraction or expansion.

The cosmological expansion at cosmological scales clearly is Ricci scalar rather than Weyl, since matter in the large remains isotropic and homogeneous.

Shuffling \Lambda over to the source side does not change that observation: we don't see broken cosmological-scale isotropy, so we must still have a vanishing Weyl and a nonvanishing Ricci scalar on the LHS. How does that happen? Presumably in the metric, since it's the obvious choice of dynamic field (although of course you could insist on making the RHS as complicated as you like, and there have been cases where having the metric maximally static with gravitational dynamics shuffled into "fake" matter is useful -- the original Hawking Radiation paper did just that, for instance; and of course you might want a quintessence-style field instead of a CC, and bite the bullet on recovering observations through that field's behaviour).

Ultimately what we care about is that we have the correct EOMs, and for test particles the EOMs in our labs and in our experimental platforms elsewhere in the solar system, and observed for astrophysical objects throughout our galaxy and the cluster it's in, are nowhere near the EOMs of FLRW. They are much nearer to Schwarzschild.

Re: 'Dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After reading the Karen Masters link and your first response a few times, I think I am starting to understand what you want to point out. If the universe were empty and expanding, then some light non-interacting test dust would indeed get pulled apart everywhere and at all length scales. But when we add matter and let it collapse, the collapsing matter kind of pulls spacetime with it as it collapses and may eventuall…

Yes, good, you've saved me some typing along these lines. (Well, in retrospect, maybe not that much :D ) In typical vacuum solutions of the Einstein Field Equations the metric is what determines the available geodesics[0]. Putting an isolated object into a vacuum solution causes it to "select" an appropriate geodesic from the ones available, and if left alone, that object will at every time be somewhere on that geode…

I'm afraid I'm gonna have to drop the ball on discussion of extended objects. I can't shake the seeming-realization that restorative forces within the extended object must generate a gravitational backreaction, and down that path lies too much math to write down first (in order to summarize later), and I don't trust that starting with an English description avoids a gross mis-characterization.

However, I made a point about the expansion being in the curvature scalar, and Carroll has a lecture which supports this view for lambdavacuum (eqn 15 at https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Carroll2/Carroll1_3.html ), which convinces me that I am not too addle-brained.

(The curvature scalar is the Ricci scalar, g^{\alpha\beta}R_{\alpha\beta}, written as R in the Carroll reference in the previous paragraph. Since the metric is Lorentzian a positive scalar curvature still leads to diverging parallel geodesics. Consequently we can say things about the positive energy theorem, and we don't have to introduce things like negative mass (and specify active, passive, or inertial mass when we do). By comparison, if we have a positive definite metric (+,+,+,+ signature) parallel geodesics converge in the presence of a positive scalar curvature. The sign difference for the timelike coordinate in our Lorentzian spacetime makes all the difference!)

Why does this matter? Because, at the Carroll reference, we can add terms for matter to the action integral, and following the logic in Carroll's subsequent paragraph, the scalar curvature is influenced by the matter. But note that by adding matter to eqn 15 we are making R even more positive. But in our universe with known matter, we can't make R go below zero. That's the conceptual keystone for me: quantum foobar doesn't lead to any energy state lower than that of vacuum any more than classical dynamics can, so there doesn't seem to be any room for expansion in local quantum systems or extended classical objects. (I guess the Newtonian-limit argument then goes that in vacuum if \nabla^{2}\Phi = 0 then you can't get an expansion force by adding matter.)

Finally, in part just because I love the image here, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/n2ext.h... It's related to the first paragraph: if you spin an object this way it will shed gravitational waves (the metric isn't spherically symmetrical at any time) and at some level that must couple to the restorative forces that keep the wrench looking wrench-like rather than deforming during its spin. Turn the metal wrench into plasticine, for example, and it will deform while spinning, and the new shape will generate yet another different metric. If we put a fairly heavy weight on top of the metal wrench when it's on the ground, the metal wrench stays wrench-shaped; but the plasticine wrench would deform (and also heat!). Capturing all of this in general curved spacetime is not so easy, and for just weak Schwarzschild (as in the diagram, presuming the ground is our Earth) or even that and sliced de Sitter I don't trust the results to be general, so I kinda give up the moment. :/

My total guess though was that if the CC acts in the solar system than everything in the solar system, including metal and plasticine wrenches, need a tiny restoration force to avoid deforming. Could the notional equivalent of the spinning plasticine wrench in a comoving Cavendish appratus directly measure an expansion force within the plasticine? Likewise, does the CC affect the temperature of the deforming weighted grounded plasticine wrench? Not sure. I'm attracted by a comparison with a binary NS or BH system, treating BIGns----smallNS : Bigend--handle where the --- has been thinned out to almost nothing. We can extract local expansion from NSNS gravitational wave astronomy in principle. (A test system would probably galaxy-cluster scales in spatial extent or mass, though, see below.)

Undoubtedly these ideas will resurface in some future conversation.

Lastly, Cooperstock et al. https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9803097v1 grinds up some numbers; they take seriously cosmological correction to local EOMs at several sub-cosmological scales, and find out they're extremely extremely small, and compatible with not existing. Note that we've had 20 years of numerical relativity and physical cosmology not reflected in that paper.

Re: 'Dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe

#297
post #293
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Since 2000 many new satellite measurements were done and the values improved." The point is that "suddenly" people started measuring a higher baryon density to make it fit what was required for lambda-CDM model to fit the CMB measurements. Ie, the lambda-CDM model did not pre-dict the spectrum beforehand, they had to tune it to match the data. And see how the squares and triangles start moving upwards once the blue…

> The point is that "suddenly" people started measuring a higher baryon density to make it fit what was required W...what? Do you really believe that different scientific organizations in different countries around the world financed and sent different satellites into space but misrepresented the actually measured values only to "fit" some old theoretical predictions? Really? Then there's really no point discussing a…

There's no point to you discussing science with scientists then. Because that is exactly what scientists are worried about. Why? Because it happens all the time.

Re: 'Dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe

#298
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why match is better for that? To compute prediction, you will need to use computer and compiler, so it better to talk directly in these terms because of (1) (see above).

You should go back to 1910 and tell Einstein he can't start for another 50 years.

Einstein used the best tool he had at hands - math. Now we have mach better tools: computer models, knowledge databases, AI. Math is good because math formulas are very compact, so they are easy to play with, but computer models are much better, because computer can visualize them directly, calculate values correctly, and verify result automatically. Think about Computer Aided Science.

Re: 'Dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe

#299
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should go back to 1910 and tell Einstein he can't start for another 50 years.

Einstein used the best tool he had at hands - math. Now we have mach better tools: computer models, knowledge databases, AI. Math is good because math formulas are very compact, so they are easy to play with, but computer models are much better, because computer can visualize them directly, calculate values correctly, and verify result automatically. Think about Computer Aided Science.

I'm confused - are you trolling us? You do realise that computer science is based on math right? All the calculations that that OpenGL does are mathematical calculations. Even databases are based on relational algebra. AI - linear algebra, probability, multivariate calculus, optimization etc. There would be no computer science without math.

Re: 'Dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe

#300
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is also implying that it spontaneously emerges from space on a continuous basis. If that's the case then it may be possible to setup a harvester of negative mass. The question is how much of it emerges in so many square km of empty space. It could be 1 particle per light year.

I'm not a huge fan of the Fermi paradox but if it has any validity, it would seem to suggest the problem is difficult to say the least.

Or extremely easy if you believe the UFO reports... the only incorrect assumption is that they would initiate contact. Even Dawkings knew that this would be a stupid assumption:

https://www.richarddawkins.net/2017/11/we-just-sent-a-messag...

If they show up every couple thousand years and don't say anything, would we even notice?

Post reply on HN