{"id":244455,"date":"2026-09-24T01:23:43","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T06:23:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/could-negative-mass-exist-and-be-observed"},"modified":"2026-09-24T01:23:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T06:23:43","slug":"could-negative-mass-exist-and-be-observed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/could-negative-mass-exist-and-be-observed","title":{"rendered":"Could negative mass exist and be observed?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/could-negative-mass-exist-and-be-observed.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Unlike electric charge, as far as we know all mass is positive, and positive masses attract one another. Could negative mass exist, and if so, what would be the ramifications?<\/p>\n<p>Antigravity between a positive mass and a hypothetical negative mass has received a fair bit of attention in both physics and science fiction over the years. For example, in 1901\u2019s \u201cFirst Men in the Moon\u201d author H. G. Wells imagines a substance he calls \u201ccavorite\u201d which creates a negative force of gravity and thus acts as a gravity shield. In <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.libretexts.org\/Bookshelves\/College_Physics\/College_Physics_1e_(OpenStax)\/06:_Uniform_Circular_Motion_and_Gravitation\/6.05:_Newtons_Universal_Law_of_Gravitation\" target=\"_blank\">Newton\u2019s theory of gravity<\/a>, negative mass would effectively appear as his same equation but with the gravitational constant G replaced by-G. But Einstein\u2019s version of gravity, general relativity, is not so kind, and does not seem to consistently allow anti-gravity.<\/p>\n<p>In a <a href=\"https:\/\/linkinghub.elsevier.com\/retrieve\/pii\/S2212686426001536\" target=\"_blank\">new paper<\/a> in <i>Physics of the Dark Universe<\/i>, Shin\u2019ichi Nojiri from Japan and S.D. Odintsovc from Spain dig deeper into the possibility of negative mass objects (NMOs) and conclude that the idea may not be as exotic as is thought. Using theoretical tools, they show that negative mass \u201cdoes not always lead to any inconsistency.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unlike electric charge, as far as we know all mass is positive, and positive masses attract one another. Could negative mass exist, and if so, what would be the ramifications? Antigravity between a positive mass and a hypothetical negative mass has received a fair bit of attention in both physics and science fiction over the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-science","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}