In this post I explain two more mistakes in physics. The first is 55 years old, and should have been caught long ago.

Bondi, in his 1957 paper “Negative mass in General Relativity”, had suggested that mass could be negative and there are surprising results from this possibility. I quote,

“… the positive body will attract the negative one (since all bodies are attracted by it), while the negative body will repel the positive body (since all bodies are repelled by it). If the motion is confined to the line of centers, then one would expect the pair to move off with uniform acceleration …”

As a theoretician Bondi required that the motion be “confined to the line of centers” or be confined to a straight line. However, as experimental physicist we would take a quantity of negative mass and another quantity of positive mass and place them in special containers attached two spokes. These spokes form a small arc at one end and fixed to the axis of a generator at the other end. Let go, and watch Bondi’s uniform straight line acceleration be translated into circular motion driving a generator. Low and behold, we have a perpetual motion machine generating free electricity!

Wow! A perpetual motion machine hiding in plain sight in the respectable physics literature, and nobody caught it. What is really bad about this is that Einstein’s General Relativity allows for this type of physics, and therefore in General Relativity this is real. So was Bondi wrong or does General Relativity permit perpetual motion physics? If Bondi is wrong then could Alcubierre too be wrong as his metrics requires negative mass?

Perpetual motion is sacrilege in contemporary physics, and therefore negative mass could not exist. Therefore negative mass is in the realm of mathematical conjecture. What really surprised me was the General Relativity allows for negative mass, at least Bondi’s treatment of General Relativity.

This raises the question, what other problems in contemporary physics do we have hiding in plain sight?

There are two types of exotic matter, that I know of, the first is negative mass per Bondi (above) and the second is imaginary (square root of −1) mass.  The recent flurry of activity of the possibility that some European physicists had observed FTL (faster than light) neutrinos, should also teach us some lessons.

If a particle is traveling faster than light its mass becomes imaginary. This means that these particles could not be detected by ordinary, plain and simple mass based instruments. So what were these physicists thinking? That somehow Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformations were no longer valid? That mass would not convert into imaginary matter at FTL? It turned out that their measurements were incorrect. Just goes to show how difficult experimental physics can get, and these experimental physicists are not given the recognition due to them for the degree of difficulty of their work.

So what type of exotic matter was Dr. Harold White of NASA’s In-Space Propulsion program proposing in his presentation at the 2012 100-Year Starship Symposium? Both Alcubierre and White require exotic matter. Specifically, Bondi’s negative mass. But I’ve shown that negative mass cannot exist as it results in perpetual motion machines. Inference? We know that this is not technologically feasible.

That is, any hypothesis that requires exotic negative mass cannot be correct. This includes time travel.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.