Negative Energy: Negative Dimensions of Space
Are there Negative dimensions of space? Yes.
- Antispace is intertwined with Space.
- Antispace interacts with Space.
- Negative dimensions are intertwined with Positive dimensions of space.
- Negative dimensions interact with Positive dimensions of Space.
- AntiNegative dimensions of space interact with AntiSpace and Negative dimensions of space and normative space.
- AntiNegative dimensions of space are intertwined with AntiSpace, Negtive space and Positive Spatial dimensions.
In the following article is from New Scientist, Negative energy is discussed:
My attempts to find out what have led me to ask whether gravity itself has a mass. Physicists have argued about this for decades. Now my colleagues and I have stumbled on an intriguing answer that may lead us to a clearer picture of gravity. If we are right, then this most enigmatic of forces not only does have a mass, but the evidence that proves it is painted across the cosmos.
One of the most remarkable things about gravity is that, in contrast to other forces like electromagnetism, its effects are universal. It was Galileo who first grasped this in about 1590. Whether he really dropped objects with different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa or not, he had the beautiful insight that Earth’s gravity is felt the same way by everyone and everything. Indeed, if it weren’t for air resistance, a hammer and a feather dropped simultaneously would hit the ground at the same time. We have tried this experiment on the moon where there is no air resistance and shown that Galileo was right.
A century later, this ubiquity was at the centre of Isaac Newton’s formulation of the laws of universal gravitation. It is essentially these laws that enable us to predict the motion of the moon and the planets with such incredible accuracy. Newton’s laws get the moon’s orbit right to within 10 centimetres, and corrections introduced by Einstein make it better still.
But there is one conceptual aspect behind Newton’s laws that is a source of deep concern. It is the instantaneous way in which Newton assumed that gravity acts. To see why it is so troubling, imagine that the sun disappears. According to Newton, we would feel the lack of the sun’s gravitational tug instantly, so that even as Earth careered off its usual orbit, we would see our now-vanished star shining benignly above us for 8 minutes and 20 seconds or so. The result of this thought experiment offends our understanding that nothing can travel faster than light, not even gravity.
This maxim originated with Einstein. He showed that Newton’s laws explain gravity only when the motion of objects is slow compared with that of light. He then formulated general relativity as a more complete picture of gravity. It remains our best effort to this day.
So how does gravity work? While Newton’s theory barely engaged with this question, Einstein gave us an answer that transformed how we think about reality. General relativity paints space and time as a unified entity called space-time that flexes and adapts to everything within it. The reason that objects move as they do in response to gravity can be explained by the bulges in this flexible canvas of reality.
If that is tricky to visualise, here is an analogy. If you have ever flown long-distance, you might have looked at the maps of your flight path that are sometimes displayed on the entertainment screens. It always looks like an arc on the map, not a straight line, say from east to west if you are crossing from Europe to the US. But that is an illusion. The pilot will fly as straight as an arrow; it is only because Earth’s surface itself is curved that the flight path looks that way too when displayed in two dimensions. General relativity explains the dance of the planets in a similar way. They seem to follow elliptical orbits, but are actually moving efficiently in straight lines through curved space-time.
This strikingly strange theory was the first of two 20th century revolutions in physics. The second, quantum theory, was, if anything, even more profound. Quantum theory deals with the smallest aspects of nature and shows us that this world is nothing like the one in which we spend our days. Down there, it doesn’t make sense to speak of particles occupying particular places, they exist only as a nebulous cloud of probabilities. It sounds odd, but we know this idea to be as right as anything in science can be.
“These ‘ghost’ particles would wreak havoc, quickly erasing all order in the universe”
For that reason, it is worth taking seriously what quantum theory says about forces. At its heart are quantum fields that can form waves and propagate through space. It turns out that it is equally valid to think of these waves as particles. This applies to light itself. When physicists talk about light, they sometimes talk about waves in the electromagnetic field and at other times they talk about photons, the particle, or boson, that carries the electromagnetic force.
Quantum theory in fact says that each fundamental force has its quantum field and one or more bosons (see “Boson bonanza”). It also says that the mass of a boson is inversely proportional to the range of the force. This is why light, carried by photons that we believe to be massless, has an infinite range. That’s why we can see stars on the other side of the universe. If a force has heftier bosons, its reach is more limited.
There isn’t yet a complete quantum theory of gravity, but we do have strong evidence that this force must ultimately fit into the quantum mould. That means space-time is a quantum field and that waves in it can also be thought of as a boson. We call this particle the graviton.
We don’t know for sure that gravitons exist, but all the signs point that way. Take the discovery of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) collaboration in 2015. This showed that the gravitational field can vibrate just like the electromagnetic field. As yet, these waves show no trace of quantum behaviour, so they aren’t direct evidence for gravitons. But they are a highly suggestive hint that they are out there.
We have some knowledge about what gravitons ought to be like. Gravity exerts its influence across cosmic scales just like light, so the graviton must be either massless or very light. But which is it? This seemingly innocent question matters because the answer will reveal how gravity behaves over the largest of distances and how fast gravitational waves move. If gravitons have no mass, then we know from the mathematics that they must travel at the speed of light. However, if they have mass, they can travel at different speeds.
Physicists have jousted over this question for decades, but the argument was silenced when we realised that there was a problem with the very idea of a massive graviton. It turns out that if gravitons have mass, they instantly acquire the ability to come in different varieties, each with different quantum properties. As physicists have tried to describe these various types of gravitons, they have found they couldn’t avoid one of them coming out as a “ghost”: a particle with negative energy.
These ghosts would wreak havoc. There would be nothing to stop them interacting with regular particles in a chain reaction that would quickly erase all order in the universe. The fact that this hasn’t happened means ghosts can’t exist, and so gravitons can’t have mass.