Gravity Sucks

Gravity Sucks

Gravity always sucks, it has sucked since the Big Bang and it will suck until the whole shebang goes away.

This true statement has nothing to do with sex.  It simply means that the force of gravity is unipolar and cumulative.  There is no such thing a negative mass, and apparently no such thing as repulsive gravity.  Electrogravitics is probably not a gravity thing but an electromagnetic thing, if it exists.

Higgs Boson at CERN

Electrons and protons come in positive and negative, so, on the scale of the universe, the plusses cancel out the minuses.  This is a good thing, since the forces between them is much, much stronger than gravity.  

When enough mass gets together, their gravity gangs up on the stronger forces and overwhelms them.  Particles all have mass and therefore they have no choice but to clump up.  The other forces, electromagnetism, the weak and the strong nuclear forces, cancel each other out or cannot work at a distance.  They are handicapped when it comes to cooperation.  Not so with mass and gravity.  That’s how we get neutron stars and black holes.  Gravity wins the contest by sheer numbers.

But what about antimatter?  Exotic particles?  Could they have negative mass? 

There is a recent test, the Alpha Experiment, that has accumulated some antimatter in a “box” of laser beams.  The amount is tiny but enough to weigh.  Damn it, they weigh the same as their normal particles.  Science Fiction does’t get a break there, either.

Standard Model

What about other exotic matter?

We are just about out of exotic particles.  The Standard Model shows everything we should expect to find, even the Higgs boson that gives all the other particles their masses.  Nothing new there.  

What about SUSY, supersymmetric particles?  There’s a whole ‘nother set of particles with weird names like squark, photino, selectron.  Problem is we haven’t seen any of those yet.  We don’t think they will have negative mass either.  Why?  If there was such a thing as negative mass, a particle that loses energy would go faster and faster, until it reached the speed of light.  Everything with negative energy would escape to c, and that is both chaos and the speed of light.   The universe would be a dangerous place for humans and aliens alike.

Supersymmetry Model

With my license to create “science” as an SF writer, I did create exotic particles with a negative mass in my (incomplete) novel, “The Curtain of Heaven”.  An ancient and extremely advanced alien race broadcast a complete description of the physics of this universe.  It went out in all directions from an untraceable source.  In it was the secret of unlimited power from the vacuum.  I called it a “Burgess Generator”.  As it runs and puts out stupendous power it also cooks up a batch of exotic matter.  One of my characters, a thief, accidentally discovers that an old Burgess Generator has negative mass in it.

Never letting such an opportunity go to waste, another character uses this exotic matter in an Alcubierre-Wilson Warp Drive (see last blog) and mankind goes to the stars.  

Otherwise, gravity only sucks.