February 21, 2019 • 37 mins
Is it possible to negate gravity without using energy?
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hey, Daniel, you know I'm a comic person, so I'm
curious to know what would be your superpower if you're
a superhero. It would be what superpower would you pick?
I might have to decide between laser beams from the eyes,
which seems very useful for like cracking safes and when
you lose your keys and stuff, or flying. Flying is
always seemed to me like a majestic, amazing thing I
(00:29):
wish we could do. Yeah, that's my favorite one too, flying.
I would love to fly. The problem is gravity, that's right.
It's all about conquering gravity, being anti gravity, that's right.
I always wonder how Superman does it, you know, the
Superman push himself up or a c somehow canceling the
force of gravity. Oh well, we have him scheduled to
(00:50):
be a guest on the podcast in a few weeks,
so you can ask him directly. Good good, I look
forward to talking. I thought. We also had this interview
with this reporter called can't didn't we al scheduled with you?
We have to cancel that one because we can get
Superman instead. Okay, all right, that's kind of suspicious, but
all right. They said they wouldn't appear together. So what
(01:11):
are you gonna do? Hi, I'm and I'm Daniel. Welcome
(01:31):
to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe, in
which we take things in the universe, pulled them apart,
and explain them to you, including how you might be
able to cancel some of them. Yeah, we are pro
universe and also anti universe in this podcast. Yeah, exactly.
Today we want to talk about the concept of getting
rid of gravity. Is it possible to escape the shackles
(01:54):
of the Earth not just by pushing up against it,
by climbing out of that gravity well, but by actually
negating it, by turning off Earth's gravity somehow, so we
could float through the atmosphere and even escape into into space.
That's right. Today's topic is anti gravity? Is it possible?
(02:16):
What is it? Will anti gravity technology ever work? Will
you or your children or your children's children ever get
that flying skateboard so you can just float around and
avoid traffic and get wherever you want? Is that actually
something that's going to happen or is it always going
to be in the realms of science fiction? Yeah? Do
you think it's possible to make something that somehow is
(02:38):
anti gravity? You know? That it's somehow not affected by gravity.
That's the idea, right, yeah, exactly, that would be the idea. Um.
So that's the question of today's podcast, and as usual,
before we dig into it, we thought, let's go out
and see what people think. Is this something people imagine
it's possible or people think is ridiculous and absurd? Do
you think anti gravity technology will ever work? Here's what
(03:01):
people had to say. Yeah, I think that might be possible.
Probably not, okay, yes, yes, what is that? Um? I
just think as technology progresses, it's just something that can
become possible. Speaking of really anti gravity, which like we're
completely removed gravity, and I don't think that's possible at
least from my imagination in the really short period of time. Okay,
(03:24):
I have no idea. Probably yeah, why do you think so?
Mean it's probably too expensively build, but we know that
it's theoretically possible. Okay, yeah, yeah, what gives you so
much faith? I don't know. I just have a lot
of faith, um that with enough effort and people working together,
that we can figure it out. All right. So, as usual,
(03:47):
I am impressed and slightly scared by the faith people
have in scientists to basically accomplish anything technological. Yeah, but
a lot of people are saying that, yeah, it's possible
that that they have high confident ends in people like you. Well, yeah,
that's because they don't know me very well. But I
think this is general sense that once an idea about
(04:09):
something is made, comes up in science fiction or somewhere else,
that eventually will figure it out. That it's just sort
of like on the queue of stuff scientists got to
get done, and maybe not this week or next week,
but eventually technology always achieves these things. That seems to
be the sense people have. Yeah, it seems that they
have the impression that it's just a hard technical problem,
(04:30):
you know, like it's possible, they just have to figure
out how. Yeah, and I think this must be a
new sensation, you know, the feeling that the world is
constantly changing, that in a year or ten years or
in fifty years, technology will be available that makes the
everyday experience really different. Whereas you know, if you think
about like a thousand years ago, everybody's life was basically
like their grandparents life and their great grandparents life, and
(04:52):
the general sense was nothing will ever change because the
pace of change was so slow. Is basically invisible, whereas
now people expect that their kids grow up in a
different world and their grandkids wouldn't even recognize their world.
So that's kind of amazing. Yeah, I guess people expect
their grandkids to be floating around flying, that's right. They
have to visit their their great grandkids up in the
(05:14):
clouds somewhere. Yeah, but you're right. I think maybe even
just fifty years ago or seventy years ago, this feeling
probably wasn't there, you know. Yeah, and us accurate. Right,
the pace of change is accelerating, like things are changing
faster and faster. Uh. Somebody said the other day I
thought was really insightful. They said, Um, nobody lives in
the world they grew up in. Whoa, because the world
(05:36):
you get used to when you're a kid is not
the world anymore when you're an adult, Right, so you're
always prepared to live in an older, more antique world
than you grew up in. Interesting. When do you think
that started? I mean even at the turn of the
twentieth century. I mean people were going through these huge changes, right,
cars and radio and television. Yeah, I think around then,
you know, industrial revolution is when things started to pick up.
(05:59):
But I've gets after World War Two the things really
started to get crazy, you know, as the development of
electronics and computers and and all that kind of stuff
that really accelerated the pace of technological change. Um, now
we're on this like very steeply moving curve that's accelerating
to who knows where. Right, it's so difficult to predict
what technology will have in just a few years. So
(06:20):
surely something's easy as anti gravity should be done in
a couple of years, right, Well, that's the thing. It's
just because it's on people's wish list doesn't mean that
it's possible, right, And it doesn't mean that it's easy,
and it doesn't mean that it's imminent. People have been
waiting for flying cars for a while now, and I
don't see any, you know, on the street. What do
(06:40):
you we have them? They're called helicopters or airplanes or drones. Yeah,
that's true, that's true. Yeah, Um if they haven't really
replaced your your car yet. I mean, I don't think
do you have a helicopter warhead? No? Old, come on,
I have three? Great, Um, I'd like to sorrow your
(07:00):
helicopter by the way. Okay, So let's get into it. Um,
So what do you think it means for something to
be anti gravity or for to achieve anti gravity, or
to make something that allows you to be anti gravity?
So in my mind, there's something of an important distinction here.
(07:22):
There's a difference between opposing gravity, Like what does a
rocket do. A rocket pushes back against gravity. Gravity is
pulling you down. The rocket is pushing up so you
can overcome gravity. You can oppose gravity. That we can
do for sure. Everybody here can jump, right, you're defeating
the gravity of the Earth every time you take a leap.
But that's not what we're talking about. I think we're
(07:42):
talking about effortless floating. We're talking about negating gravity. We're
talking about turning it off or something like shielding ourselves
from the Earth's gravitational field. Right. I think people imagine
it to be that you're floating, but you're not really
doing much, right, Like if you're floating but you're burning
explosive rocket fuel, or you're floating but you're whipping around
(08:04):
this helicopter blade. But then that's that doesn't really feel
like anti gravity, right, that's right because it cost energy, right,
costum time and money and energy to do with the
idea of the whole content effort. Yeah, the whole concept
of anti gravity is effortless floating, effortless flying, So it
doesn't take a huge amount of energy, right, And also
(08:25):
it's nice and quiet and calm, and you know, you
can you can read your magazine or whatever. So there's
a concept there of of avoiding the cost of climbing
out of the gravity. Well, right, it's not pushing against gravity.
It's like the idea is canceling gravity somehow, Yeah, exactly,
shielding yourself somehow. And the amazing thing is that this
is possible for the other forces, right, like electromagnetism, for example,
(08:50):
that's something you can shield yourself from. You can cancel
um the influence of electric and magnetic fields. What do
you mean, like a shield? Exactly like a shield. And if,
for example, you've ever heard of a Faraday cage, a
Faraday cage is just a box made out of metal.
It doesn't even have to be complete, The sides don't
even have to be complete. It can be like chain
link fence, a box made out of metal. It's almost
(09:13):
impossible to make a cell phone call from right, like
you're in an elevator, you lose coverage. Why because the
elevator is a box made of metal, and a box
made of metal will shield you from electromagnetic fields. So
all those mixed martial arts art is fighting in a cage,
they're all imprevious to electromagnetic radiation. That's right. They can't
(09:35):
call their coach and say what should I do? Now?
Should I kick them in the head? And that's why
that's right, That's why they're not on their phones because
they just don't work. Um. And the reason that's possible
is because there's two kinds of electromagnetic charges, right, this
positive in this negative. So electrons are negative and protons
are positive, for example. And what happens when you put
(09:56):
a metal box inside an electromagnetic field is that it
pulls the the positive negative charges apart in just such
a way that it cancels itself inside the box. What
do you mean, it pulls him apart in the box.
It's material like in the metal, Yeah, yeah, in metal.
Metal is that is a conductor, which means that there's
negative charges all around um which can be moved, right.
(10:19):
And what happens is that you have the electromagnetic field
and that moves the charges around. It responds to the
electromagnetic field and just the right way to produce the
opposing electromagnetic field, which essentially cancels it. Right. It sort
of absorbs the forces of from electromagnetic magnetism. Yeah, it
or it makes a shield. Right, It's like having the
opposite field at the same time, so the two things
(10:43):
really are canceled, kind of like soundproofing a little bit,
like it absorbs the impacts, you know, like it absorbs
the energy. I think it's a better analogy is more
like noise canceling headphones. Right. Noise canceling headphones don't just
block the sound, They produce sound which distr recatively interferes
with the sound waves to cancel them out. So that
(11:05):
would be cool if you can somehow get into a
box that somehow shields you from the force of gravity.
You would basically be inside and you would float, right.
That would be cool. That would be pretty cool. It
would be pretty cool. I would like that. But I mean,
that's the idea, right, get into it? Is it? We're
looking for a way to cancel out the forces of
gravity that would normally get to you and pull you.
(11:26):
That's right, And You can do that for electromagnetism because
there's a positive and negative charge. The thing with gravity
is that there's only positive charges, right. Gravity is a
force that acts between any objects that have mass, and
as far as we know, there's only positive mass, which
means it's only attractive gravity. So there's no way to
build something that cancels the gravity or you know, no,
(11:48):
there's no way for a box to arrange itself in
such a way that it negates gravity because there is
no other kind of charge. There's no other kind of mass,
is no negative mass you can use to newgate gravity.
That's why anti gravity is much trickier than anti electromagnetism.
So in a metal box, there are positive and negative
particles that cancel out the fours that normally would go through.
(12:15):
But you're saying that with gravity, we can't do that
because there's only one kind of gravity charge. Yeah, exactly,
And that's why it has to be a metal box.
So the metal box has those charges that can move around.
If you're in a wooden box, then it doesn't have
extra electrons which can be rearranged to cancel out the
electromagnetic field that's coming from the outside. That's why a
Faraday cage has to be made out of metal. So
(12:37):
if you don't want the government to snoop on you,
or you don't want able to listen to your cell phone,
then you can just get into a chain link box, right,
make yourself offense, or find your dog kennel or something
right where you keep your dog at night and crawl
into there and nobody can snoop on your cell phone.
You can't get any cell phone calls right, right. Well,
when you have to ground, you have to ground it, right,
like you have to connected to electrical round. Yeah, it
(12:59):
has to be ounded you all right, Well, let's think
about what are other ways that you could make anti gravity? Right? So,
how could anti gravity actually work? Let's talk about that,
but first let's take a break. Okay, So anti gravity
(13:24):
the idea of making something that is not affected by gravity,
or creating a space that is not affected by gravity
where gravitational forces can get to you. That's right, you
have to come up with some way to negate gravity.
And um, you know it sounds pretty difficult, and what
I said earlier about not having any negative mass make
(13:46):
this sound pretty hard. Um, but you know there are
some possibilities. There are some things people are working on,
something ways people think about that one day might eventually
lead to anti gravity. Okay, so what are what are
these possibilities? Well, one of them has to do with antimatter.
We talked about antimatter in another podcast and for those
of you who haven't listened to it yet, antimatter is
a form of matter where most of the things are flipped. So,
(14:09):
for example, the opposite of an electron is a positron.
Instead of having a negative charge, it has a positive charge.
So the positron is the antimatter version of the electron.
And we don't understand a lot of things about antimatter,
like why it exists at all, but why there's very
little of it, why the universe is matter of matter
or not antimatter. But antimatter is a real thing, and
(14:30):
we can create in the laboratory. We do it as
certain all the time, and we can play with it.
And one of the interesting things about antimatter is that
we don't know what kind of gravity it feels like.
We know that antimatter has the opposite electric charge of matter,
so it feels electromagnetism the opposite way. What does it
feel about gravity. We know it has positive mass, but
(14:52):
there's some theories of physics that say it could have
negative gravity, negative meaning it responds to gravity in the
opposite way. Exactly. There could just be a minus sign there,
because antimatter has a lot of minus signs where normal
matter has positive signs. And so it's entirely possible that
antimatter feels um gravity the other way that it's a
(15:14):
for antimatter, gravity is not an attractive force, but a
repulsive force against everything else, that's right, Yeah, against everything
that has mass. And so, for example, if you brought
matter and antimatter together, if they were electrically neutral, so
there are no other forces, then um, you know, one
would be the matter would be attracted to the antimatter,
but the antimatter would be repulsed from the matter. What,
(15:37):
so they would be continually chasing each other. Yeah, exactly,
that would be pretty crazy, right, Well, what, yeah, it's
it's it sounds ridiculous. It sounds like I'm making this up.
It sounds like I've been smoking too many of ann appeals.
But it's honestly a real possibility. Now, in order to
investigate this, we've been studying it. We've been trying to
(15:57):
make antimatter and we have. We've made peak grams of
antimatter in the lab in order to study it and see, like,
is antimatter the same as matter except for having these
flipped charges. And we've answered all those questions. But the
problem is that we haven't made enough anti matter. It's
pretty tricky to make anti matter to hold it and
to do experiments with it, and you need a lot
of antimatter to test these theories just because gravity is
(16:19):
so weak. Right. Remember gravity is the weakest force in
the universe by a huge amount. So to test the
theory of gravity, you need like a chunk of the stuff.
And we've made pico grams of it. Wow. So I'm
just I'm still trying to wrap my my head around
this idea of something having anti gravity instead of having
positive gravity. I know now you're excited, right you started
(16:40):
off this podcast You're like this is crazy, and then
you're like, wait, this is a great idea. So, like
a little ball of this antimatter would just not it
wouldn't fall down to the Earth. It would try to
leave the Earth as quickly as possible. Yeah, it would
feel the Earth's gravitational field the opposite way, right, Yeah,
would it would would stay together, Like would an antimatter
(17:02):
particle be attracted to another antibioto particle through gravity? Well,
that's a great question. If they both have negative gravity,
then if they then two negative charges would probably attract
each other and a positive negative would repel each other.
So you could have a whole planet of anti gravity stuff,
but it would just being It would just constantly be
(17:23):
trying to be as far away from everything else as possible. Yeah, exactly.
And you know, there's another really tricky question there, which
is about the kind of about what we mean by mass,
right with it's actually two definitions of mass. What is
gravitational mass, which means how are you affected by gravity? Right,
you are pulled down by the Earth because you have mass.
(17:45):
That's the gravitational mass. But there's a whole other concept
of mass called inertial mass, and this has to do
with F equals m. A force is mass times acceleration.
It says how much do you move when you're pushed?
So if you get a big push, you move more.
You get a little push, you move less. Right, But
it's also this question of mass that's the M and
F equals m A. If you push something really small
(18:07):
like a ping pong ball, it goes pretty far. If
you push something really heavy, like a boulder, it doesn't
go as far right, so the mass affects it. And
for most things in the universe that we've ever studied,
those two things are exactly the same. They're different concepts,
but they're identical when we measure them. Right, everything we've
ever seen has the same gravitational and inertial mass. But
(18:28):
it would be really weird if antimatter had the opposite
gravitational mass but like the same inertial mass, or even
weirder would be have opposite inertial mass, which would mean,
like you push it left and it goes right. What, Yeah,
if you had opposite if you had negative inertial mass,
it seems impossible. Well, that's just because it's unfamiliar. Right now,
(18:50):
this is the kind of thing we've actually tested. So
we've done experiments with antimatter. We know that they have
positive inertial mass because we can manipulate it, right. We've
even built accelerators like the a Tron collider at Fermilab
used anti protons, and so we know what happens when
you push a piece of anti matter. We know it
has positive inertial mass. You can't tell if it's falling
down to the Earth, like you can't tell if you
(19:12):
need to hold it up for it to be there. Yeah,
because what is the gravitational force on a proton? It's
so tiny, because the massive proton is so tiny, all
the other forces are thousands and millions and billions of
times stronger. So it's almost impossible to measure the gravitational
force on a proton because it's so close to zero. Right,
But if you just left it alone, wouldn't it fall
up or fall down? Yeah? But if you have an
(19:33):
anti proton and you just leave it alone, it's going
to interact with everything around it. Right. It's it's almost
impossible to have an anti proton and have it be
nowhere near any other matter and have no electric magnetic
fields at all, so that you cancel everything else out.
That's a pretty difficult experiment to do. And so I
mean they're trying to do that kind of thing, and
they've they've built blobs of matter to play with them
(19:55):
at cern, but they don't have enough where they can
register the gravitational force on an antiparticle. That's just not
something we know yet. And it's amazing when such a
basic question about antimatter, like which way does it feel gravity,
we just don't know the answer because we don't have
enough of it. We haven't been able to do the
experiment yet. We haven't been able to ask the universe
that question, so that answer is out there waiting for us.
(20:17):
So you're saying that we as humans can make stuff
that might possibly be anti gravity. We can make antimatter
which might be anti gravity, might float naturally. That's right. Yeah. Um,
The problem, of course is that we can't make a
lot of it. It's pretty difficult, which makes it pretty
which means you know, making your hoverboard is gonna be
pretty far down the list. And the other problem is
(20:39):
if you make an anti matter hoverboard, like, you're not
gonna want to stand on it unless you're made of
anti person, unless you're an anti person made of antimatter,
because if normal matter stands on anti matter hoverboard, kaboom, Right,
that's the trope from science fiction, which is actually true
matter meeting anti matter big explosions. So anti matter would
be even if it was anti gravity, it would be
(21:01):
a bad idea to make stuff out of it. Yeah,
I wouldn't recommend it. And I also wouldn't recommend investing
in your friends venture capital firm which is investing in
an anti gravity technology based on anti matter not likely
to succeed. Not for your safety, just for your bank account.
That's right. Free financial advice from a physicist who knows
(21:22):
nothing about finance, that's right. Don't invest in things that
might explode or destroy the universe unless they're designed to explode,
in which case, invest away, right, right, But then you
have blood in your hands, that's right. You know that
brings us to another way to think about gravity, because
(21:43):
you know, we've been talking about gravity sort of in
the context of Newton's ideas about gravity, where you have
two blobs and you think of gravity is like a
force between those blobs, right, negative mass, positive mass, negative
forces whatever. But you know, we have a more modern
way of thinking about gravity, and that's as a bending
of space, meaning that when something is attracted to you
(22:05):
by gravity, it's not that there's a fourth between you.
It's just that the shape of space time between the
two of you is bending to bring you together. That's right. Exactly,
So you can ask like, why does the Earth go
around the Sun? Well, Newton would say there's a force
of gravity, but Einstein would say, no, the Sun has
bent space in such a way that moving in a
(22:25):
circle seems to be going in a straight line. That's
the simplest path, the path of least resistance, is just
moving in a straight line around the Sun. So from
that point of view, right, gravity is the bending of space.
And a common way to think about this is, you know,
imagine a rubber sheet and a bowling ball bend space,
and you have a marble that goes around in that
inside that depression the gravity. Well, right, So from that
(22:47):
point of view, it's much trickier to imagine how you
could avoid gravity, right, because to avoid gravity, shield yourself
from gravity, to negate gravity would mean sort of unbending
the space only in your local area, right, how you
have to like cancel out the bending of space. But wait,
what do you need to unbend, for example, to space
(23:08):
around Earth? You know, like that's would be huge, Like
the Earth I'm sure is bending space a lot, right, Absolutely,
you can feel it, right, you can feel because it's
pulling you down, You're sliding down that gravity. Well in
bent space towards the center of the Earth to you
on the Earth just around me. Correct that little bending
of space. Yeah exactly. I like how you say correct,
(23:29):
like it's the natural way of things. Would be for you,
for Jorge to float above the ground like the Buddha
or something. Um, that's a nice image. Um, yeah exactly.
So from the general relativistic point of view, the way
to do would be to somehow make space flat or
only around you, right, And that's pretty hard to imagine. Yeah, unbended, right,
(23:49):
And that's pretty hard to imagine because you'd have to
have something which bends space. The other way that that
Earth does, right, Earth is bending space, and one way
you have to sort of oppose that, not climb up
the gravity. Well, but like unbend space. Oh, I see
you're saying. To to achieve anti gravity, I don't have
to myself become anti gravity, I just have to affect
(24:10):
the space time around me, exactly like unbended from distortion
of the planet Earth. Yeah, exactly. Imagine you're imagine the
earth gravitational field as like a bowl, right, and you're
on the slippery side of it. Okay, so Earth is
pulling you down and then imagine instead, you can create
a ledge. You can flatten it so you have a
place to stand, so that no longer is the Earth
(24:32):
pulling on you. Right, that's that's the idea, is to
create a flat spot in space all around you so
that you're not sliding down towards the center of the
Earth anymore. I see. So that's kind of a roundabout way, right,
because you're not you're not trying to cancel gravity. You're
just trying to reshape spacetime. Yeah, but remember Einstein says
that the shape of spacetime is gravity. That's what gravity is.
(24:53):
Gravity is just us feeling the shape of spacetime. That
there is no force. Gravity is not a force, It's
just the results of spacetime being bent by various pieces
of matter and energy. Right. But I'm saying, if you
can find a way to bend space time, then you
could technically achieve anti gravity. Yeah, exactly. And so how
do you do that? How is that possible? Right? Well,
(25:14):
you know, according to Einstein's theory, what you would have
to have is something which has in the opposite effect.
And so there is this concept it's called exotic matter.
When we dug into it, a little bit. On another
podcast episode, we were talking about wormholes and the idea
is that you could have matter with negative mass. Right,
(25:35):
So this is not antimatter with positive mass that feels
gravity the opposite way. This is something which actually has
negative mass. That's right, And uh yeah, let's talk about
that a little bit more. But first quick break, So
(26:01):
what's the difference between exotic matter and something like antimatter?
Is an antimatter exotic antimatter? It's pretty weird, but exotic
matter is different. So, first of all, antimatter is real. Okay,
if we've seen it, we've made it, we know it's
their Nobel Prizes have been awarded for it, so it's
a real thing. Nobody's anti antimatter, that's right. I am
(26:21):
pro antimatter um, and which makes me just matter. I guess. Hey,
look finally I matter. Um. Now it's terrible joke, but
exotic matter is not. It's just theoretical. Now. The difference
is antimatter we know has positive mass, okay um, and
but exotic matter we think would have negative mass, right,
which is a really weird concept. What does that even mean? Like,
(26:44):
the more you have of it, the easier it would
be to push, or if you push it it would
come back at you. Yeah, exactly. Um, it has negative mass,
which means if it has negative inertial mass, and we
don't know, but if it had negative inertial mass, it
would mean if you push it, it comes back against
it right. You push it left and it goes right.
So fff equals like minus m a essentially um if
(27:06):
it has negative inertial mass. But the hope is it
has negative gravitational mass, and um, you know this is cool.
Concept was sort of invented in order to stabilize theoretical wormholes.
Nobody's ever seen exotic matter, and nobody even knows if
it exists. It's allowed in the equations, which puts on
a list of like stuff that could exist, but we
(27:27):
don't know if it actually does. And some of that
stuff on that list has turned out to be real,
you know, like black holes was for a long time
theoretically possible but never observed. Now observed definitely exists. So
exotic matter might be real, but we don't know how
to make it. We need that The equations of the
universe say that technically you can't you can't have this
kind of matter. We just never have never seen it.
(27:49):
That's right, we've never seen it before, so we don't.
It's called exotic because because it's a crazy idea. It
should have been called crazy loony tunes matter because it's
it's just a suit. It's this silly idea. Um. But
you know, it's like, let's invent It's sort of like
the argument is like this, what would you need to
solve this problem of wormholes and anti gravity? Okay, well
you need something like this, Well, could that possibly exist?
(28:11):
Let's check the math. The math, sois that could exist?
All right, go out and find it. So it's a
reasonable way to proceed. Yeah, we're just we're just stuck
on that. Go out and find it. Point. Okay, So
this exotic matter might have negative mass, which what you
could use potentially to reshape space time around you so
that you don't feel graphic exactly. And there's there's one
(28:34):
more way to use general relativity to maybe reshape space.
And this is both more plausible and less plausible at
the same time if you believe that it's a short
angers matter exactly, and that's to use something called inflationary matter.
So if you ask, like, can gravity ever be repulsive
and we said earlier that in order for gravity to
(28:55):
be repulsive, you need to have negative mass of some sort.
That's not exactly true, because general relativity tells us that
it's not just mass that bends space, it's energy, and
it doesn't in a really complex way. It's a combination
of mass and energy. And it turns out there are
ways to arrange matter and energy so that you get
negative pressure, because general relativity is really mathematically complicated, and
(29:19):
there are some fancy ways to arrange stuff so that
gravity becomes repulsive. What do you mean arrange? What does
that mean, like put it in a certain configuration or
do weird things to it? I don't know what. I
don't know what kind of weird things you want to
do to your matter? Boy, I'm glad that this is
a podcast. It's audio only at this point. Um. But yeah,
(29:40):
there's certain arrangements. And so for those of you are
very technically minded, you can google this and read all
about the mass energy tensor, which is used to calculate
gravitational forces in general relativity, and there are ways to
to arrange that in such a way to get negative pressure.
And you might think, what this sounds cookie It sounds crazy. Well,
the reason it's called inflationary math or is that we
(30:01):
think it might have existed in the very first few
moments of the universe and it's responsible for inflation. You know,
Inflation is the super huge, rapid stretching of space in
the first bill a second of the universe that made
the universe as big as it is. And so it's
less plausible because like, wow, how would you ever do that?
(30:21):
But it's more plausible because we think it might have
happened already. But wait, how is it different than exotic
matter or antimatter? Well, inflationary matter, what we don't know?
I mean this is we're like way out on the
edges of theoretical um speculation here. Um. There's lots of
different theories about how inflation happened. Um. Some of some
theories require some super kind of weird particle called an inflaton, right,
(30:46):
an infloton inflaton, I know is another craziest It causes inflation, like,
oh my god, my money is getting weaker. Somebody's been
shooting inflotons at me. Um. So that's one idea is
it's a special kind of matter which causes it. Um.
So that that would basically be in the same categories exotically,
I see, it's like it's like a weird kind of
matter that feels gravity, has inertial regular inertial mass, but
(31:10):
somehow in its inner configuration it kind of ben space
the other way, inflate space instead of causing divid's for
you to fall into exactly right. And you know, we
are again we are way on the limb here of speculation.
And there's a lot of varieties of theories of inflotons.
It's not like one idea, it's like a whole family
(31:32):
of crazy ideas um And you know, some people think
about making inflationary matter out of weird configurations of normal matter,
and so you get pretty far out there. But again,
we think it might have existed. We use it as
a way to explain the way the universe inflated early on,
but we don't know how to make it. It's not
like we can create inflationary matter, we know anything else
(31:53):
about it. It's just it's another one of these sort
of empty boxes in the theory. We say, if this
kind of thing isisted, it would help solve this problem.
So let's check it out and see if we can
make it. We're nowhere close to even determining that it's
that it can exist in the universe, that it does exist,
not to mention being able to create it or use
it for something like consumer technologies. All right, Well, so
(32:15):
you're saying it may not be possible to with technology
or materials that we have now to somehow figure out
how to create some kind of field that that negates gravity.
That doesn't seem very likely. I would not bet on
that happening in the next few years. I would say theoretically,
there are some avenues you might be able to go
down to make it work. So I would not say
(32:37):
it's totally impossible, but I would say it's also very impractical.
But you know, there are people working on it. Really,
there are anti gravity researchers, that's right, or maybe gravity
anti researchers, based on how well respected they are. Even
there's a prize if you can demonstrate anti gravity you
can win a one million euro prize from this European
(32:57):
foundation that's seeking to stimulate research. And there are people
out there working on it. There are even people out
there who have claimed to invented anti gravity devices. Well,
I think there are people out there who claimed to
make zero gravity armchairs. That's right, That doesn't mean that
they are anti zero gravity. Yeah, if you want to
win the prize, just by one of those zero gravity
massage chairs, put some stamps on it and send it in.
(33:18):
Nobody's thought of that. There's a there's a sort of
famous or infamous guy named Pod Clifton Off, and he's
claimed to have developed anti gravity technology, and nobody has
been able to reproduce his results. I meaning he claimed
he made something that was antimatter, or he claimed to
have fun a way to you know, cancel out the
gravitational field of a planet. Right. He claims to have
(33:39):
made a device which can reduce the gravitational field of
the planet, and nobody knows how it works because it
doesn't um, And nobody's been able to reproduce his results.
And he always claims, oh, you haven't actually retried it
the way I did it, or you did it wrong
or whatever, but he's never let people like explore his
lab um and so it's a bit shape. Nobody really nobody,
(34:01):
no mainstream scientist takes these results seriously at all. But
people are out there working on it, and sometimes great
results come from the extremes right from the fringes. And
so I'm glad that people are out there tinkering and
maybe someday somebody will make it work, yeah, and win
a million euros just somehow doesn't seem like enough reward
or creating anti gravity. No. I think it probably costs
(34:22):
a lot more than a million euros to make anti gravity, right,
so it's not really a big enough prize. Plus if
you make anti gravity, oh my god, that technological applications
are huge, right, so you could be it's a bazillion
dollar invention. There is no way you're turning it over
to some foundation for a million euros. Well, let's talk
(34:43):
about that. I mean, how would the world change if
we somehow invented anti gravity? Like things would be pretty different, right, Yeah,
everything would be a lot lighter, right, Um, yeah you could.
I mean, transportation would would cost almost no energy. Right. Um,
we could all take the skies almost for free. You
could go to space for free, right, So we could
(35:04):
very rapidly build up a space based industry, right, lifting
heavy industry into space. You like, build a factory on
Earth and you just lift it up into space and
then you have factories in space. Pumping out spaceships or
habitats or something, right, So that would be amazing. That's
basically what's preventing us from going out into space and
colonizing other planets and solar systems. It's it's the gravity
(35:26):
of planet Earth that's holding us down, that's right. And
the gravity of yourself. Like, say you want to accelerate
to the speed of light or your spaceship to go
really fast, one of the things that slows you down
is is the gravity of things around you, right, And
so if you could reduce that, then you can go
a lot faster, you can accelerate more quickly. Yeah. I
was just in Alabama at the Space Center there they
(35:49):
have in Huntsville, Alabama, and they have this huge saturny
five rocket on display. And the way they talk about
it is that they say that to leave the planet Earth,
to go into orbit around the Earth, your vehicle, your
rocket has to be fuel. So most of it, like
if you see a giant rocket taken off into space,
(36:12):
of that rocket is just basically gasoline. It's it's rocket
fuel that you need to burn just to get the
little tip of the rocket out into space, that's right.
And most of your fuel is spent lifting the rest
of the fuel, right, Because the more fuel you carry,
the heavier you are, the more fuel you need, and
so it gets expensive pretty fast. Right. But if you
(36:32):
can somehow make anti gravity, you would just not need
so much fuel. You can just float above all of
the earthly problems. So if you have a great idea
for anti gravity, hey, get to work on it, or
send it to us at feedback at Daniel and Jorge
dot com. Send it to us a zero gravity armchairs
at that we'll cut you in part of the million
(36:53):
dollar prize, we promise, all right, we'll help you, all
of you out there feel just a little bit lighter
having listened to this podcast. All right, thanks everyone for listening,
See you next time. If you still have a question
after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line.
(37:15):
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's
one word, or email us at feedback at Daniel and
Orge dot com.
Hey, Daniel, you know I'm a comic person, so I'm
curious to know what would be your superpower if you're
a superhero. It would be what superpower would you pick?
I might have to decide between laser beams from the eyes,
which seems very useful for like cracking safes and when
you lose your keys and stuff, or flying. Flying is
always seemed to me like a majestic, amazing thing I
(00:29):
wish we could do. Yeah, that's my favorite one too, flying.
I would love to fly. The problem is gravity, that's right.
It's all about conquering gravity, being anti gravity, that's right.
I always wonder how Superman does it, you know, the
Superman push himself up or a c somehow canceling the
force of gravity. Oh well, we have him scheduled to
(00:50):
be a guest on the podcast in a few weeks,
so you can ask him directly. Good good, I look
forward to talking. I thought. We also had this interview
with this reporter called can't didn't we al scheduled with you?
We have to cancel that one because we can get
Superman instead. Okay, all right, that's kind of suspicious, but
all right. They said they wouldn't appear together. So what
(01:11):
are you gonna do? Hi, I'm and I'm Daniel. Welcome
(01:31):
to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe, in
which we take things in the universe, pulled them apart,
and explain them to you, including how you might be
able to cancel some of them. Yeah, we are pro
universe and also anti universe in this podcast. Yeah, exactly.
Today we want to talk about the concept of getting
rid of gravity. Is it possible to escape the shackles
(01:54):
of the Earth not just by pushing up against it,
by climbing out of that gravity well, but by actually
negating it, by turning off Earth's gravity somehow, so we
could float through the atmosphere and even escape into into space.
That's right. Today's topic is anti gravity? Is it possible?
(02:16):
What is it? Will anti gravity technology ever work? Will
you or your children or your children's children ever get
that flying skateboard so you can just float around and
avoid traffic and get wherever you want? Is that actually
something that's going to happen or is it always going
to be in the realms of science fiction? Yeah? Do
you think it's possible to make something that somehow is
(02:38):
anti gravity? You know? That it's somehow not affected by gravity.
That's the idea, right, yeah, exactly, that would be the idea. Um.
So that's the question of today's podcast, and as usual,
before we dig into it, we thought, let's go out
and see what people think. Is this something people imagine
it's possible or people think is ridiculous and absurd? Do
you think anti gravity technology will ever work? Here's what
(03:01):
people had to say. Yeah, I think that might be possible.
Probably not, okay, yes, yes, what is that? Um? I
just think as technology progresses, it's just something that can
become possible. Speaking of really anti gravity, which like we're
completely removed gravity, and I don't think that's possible at
least from my imagination in the really short period of time. Okay,
(03:24):
I have no idea. Probably yeah, why do you think so?
Mean it's probably too expensively build, but we know that
it's theoretically possible. Okay, yeah, yeah, what gives you so
much faith? I don't know. I just have a lot
of faith, um that with enough effort and people working together,
that we can figure it out. All right. So, as usual,
(03:47):
I am impressed and slightly scared by the faith people
have in scientists to basically accomplish anything technological. Yeah, but
a lot of people are saying that, yeah, it's possible
that that they have high confident ends in people like you. Well, yeah,
that's because they don't know me very well. But I
think this is general sense that once an idea about
(04:09):
something is made, comes up in science fiction or somewhere else,
that eventually will figure it out. That it's just sort
of like on the queue of stuff scientists got to
get done, and maybe not this week or next week,
but eventually technology always achieves these things. That seems to
be the sense people have. Yeah, it seems that they
have the impression that it's just a hard technical problem,
(04:30):
you know, like it's possible, they just have to figure
out how. Yeah, and I think this must be a
new sensation, you know, the feeling that the world is
constantly changing, that in a year or ten years or
in fifty years, technology will be available that makes the
everyday experience really different. Whereas you know, if you think
about like a thousand years ago, everybody's life was basically
like their grandparents life and their great grandparents life, and
(04:52):
the general sense was nothing will ever change because the
pace of change was so slow. Is basically invisible, whereas
now people expect that their kids grow up in a
different world and their grandkids wouldn't even recognize their world.
So that's kind of amazing. Yeah, I guess people expect
their grandkids to be floating around flying, that's right. They
have to visit their their great grandkids up in the
(05:14):
clouds somewhere. Yeah, but you're right. I think maybe even
just fifty years ago or seventy years ago, this feeling
probably wasn't there, you know. Yeah, and us accurate. Right,
the pace of change is accelerating, like things are changing
faster and faster. Uh. Somebody said the other day I
thought was really insightful. They said, Um, nobody lives in
the world they grew up in. Whoa, because the world
(05:36):
you get used to when you're a kid is not
the world anymore when you're an adult, Right, so you're
always prepared to live in an older, more antique world
than you grew up in. Interesting. When do you think
that started? I mean even at the turn of the
twentieth century. I mean people were going through these huge changes, right,
cars and radio and television. Yeah, I think around then,
you know, industrial revolution is when things started to pick up.
(05:59):
But I've gets after World War Two the things really
started to get crazy, you know, as the development of
electronics and computers and and all that kind of stuff
that really accelerated the pace of technological change. Um, now
we're on this like very steeply moving curve that's accelerating
to who knows where. Right, it's so difficult to predict
what technology will have in just a few years. So
(06:20):
surely something's easy as anti gravity should be done in
a couple of years, right, Well, that's the thing. It's
just because it's on people's wish list doesn't mean that
it's possible, right, And it doesn't mean that it's easy,
and it doesn't mean that it's imminent. People have been
waiting for flying cars for a while now, and I
don't see any, you know, on the street. What do
(06:40):
you we have them? They're called helicopters or airplanes or drones. Yeah,
that's true, that's true. Yeah, Um if they haven't really
replaced your your car yet. I mean, I don't think
do you have a helicopter warhead? No? Old, come on,
I have three? Great, Um, I'd like to sorrow your
(07:00):
helicopter by the way. Okay, So let's get into it. Um,
So what do you think it means for something to
be anti gravity or for to achieve anti gravity, or
to make something that allows you to be anti gravity?
So in my mind, there's something of an important distinction here.
(07:22):
There's a difference between opposing gravity, Like what does a
rocket do. A rocket pushes back against gravity. Gravity is
pulling you down. The rocket is pushing up so you
can overcome gravity. You can oppose gravity. That we can
do for sure. Everybody here can jump, right, you're defeating
the gravity of the Earth every time you take a leap.
But that's not what we're talking about. I think we're
(07:42):
talking about effortless floating. We're talking about negating gravity. We're
talking about turning it off or something like shielding ourselves
from the Earth's gravitational field. Right. I think people imagine
it to be that you're floating, but you're not really
doing much, right, Like if you're floating but you're burning
explosive rocket fuel, or you're floating but you're whipping around
(08:04):
this helicopter blade. But then that's that doesn't really feel
like anti gravity, right, that's right because it cost energy, right,
costum time and money and energy to do with the
idea of the whole content effort. Yeah, the whole concept
of anti gravity is effortless floating, effortless flying, So it
doesn't take a huge amount of energy, right, And also
(08:25):
it's nice and quiet and calm, and you know, you
can you can read your magazine or whatever. So there's
a concept there of of avoiding the cost of climbing
out of the gravity. Well, right, it's not pushing against gravity.
It's like the idea is canceling gravity somehow, Yeah, exactly,
shielding yourself somehow. And the amazing thing is that this
is possible for the other forces, right, like electromagnetism, for example,
(08:50):
that's something you can shield yourself from. You can cancel
um the influence of electric and magnetic fields. What do
you mean, like a shield? Exactly like a shield. And if,
for example, you've ever heard of a Faraday cage, a
Faraday cage is just a box made out of metal.
It doesn't even have to be complete, The sides don't
even have to be complete. It can be like chain
link fence, a box made out of metal. It's almost
(09:13):
impossible to make a cell phone call from right, like
you're in an elevator, you lose coverage. Why because the
elevator is a box made of metal, and a box
made of metal will shield you from electromagnetic fields. So
all those mixed martial arts art is fighting in a cage,
they're all imprevious to electromagnetic radiation. That's right. They can't
(09:35):
call their coach and say what should I do? Now?
Should I kick them in the head? And that's why
that's right, That's why they're not on their phones because
they just don't work. Um. And the reason that's possible
is because there's two kinds of electromagnetic charges, right, this
positive in this negative. So electrons are negative and protons
are positive, for example. And what happens when you put
(09:56):
a metal box inside an electromagnetic field is that it
pulls the the positive negative charges apart in just such
a way that it cancels itself inside the box. What
do you mean, it pulls him apart in the box.
It's material like in the metal, Yeah, yeah, in metal.
Metal is that is a conductor, which means that there's
negative charges all around um which can be moved, right.
(10:19):
And what happens is that you have the electromagnetic field
and that moves the charges around. It responds to the
electromagnetic field and just the right way to produce the
opposing electromagnetic field, which essentially cancels it. Right. It sort
of absorbs the forces of from electromagnetic magnetism. Yeah, it
or it makes a shield. Right, It's like having the
opposite field at the same time, so the two things
(10:43):
really are canceled, kind of like soundproofing a little bit,
like it absorbs the impacts, you know, like it absorbs
the energy. I think it's a better analogy is more
like noise canceling headphones. Right. Noise canceling headphones don't just
block the sound, They produce sound which distr recatively interferes
with the sound waves to cancel them out. So that
(11:05):
would be cool if you can somehow get into a
box that somehow shields you from the force of gravity.
You would basically be inside and you would float, right.
That would be cool. That would be pretty cool. It
would be pretty cool. I would like that. But I mean,
that's the idea, right, get into it? Is it? We're
looking for a way to cancel out the forces of
gravity that would normally get to you and pull you.
(11:26):
That's right, And You can do that for electromagnetism because
there's a positive and negative charge. The thing with gravity
is that there's only positive charges, right. Gravity is a
force that acts between any objects that have mass, and
as far as we know, there's only positive mass, which
means it's only attractive gravity. So there's no way to
build something that cancels the gravity or you know, no,
(11:48):
there's no way for a box to arrange itself in
such a way that it negates gravity because there is
no other kind of charge. There's no other kind of mass,
is no negative mass you can use to newgate gravity.
That's why anti gravity is much trickier than anti electromagnetism.
So in a metal box, there are positive and negative
particles that cancel out the fours that normally would go through.
(12:15):
But you're saying that with gravity, we can't do that
because there's only one kind of gravity charge. Yeah, exactly,
And that's why it has to be a metal box.
So the metal box has those charges that can move around.
If you're in a wooden box, then it doesn't have
extra electrons which can be rearranged to cancel out the
electromagnetic field that's coming from the outside. That's why a
Faraday cage has to be made out of metal. So
(12:37):
if you don't want the government to snoop on you,
or you don't want able to listen to your cell phone,
then you can just get into a chain link box, right,
make yourself offense, or find your dog kennel or something
right where you keep your dog at night and crawl
into there and nobody can snoop on your cell phone.
You can't get any cell phone calls right, right. Well,
when you have to ground, you have to ground it, right,
like you have to connected to electrical round. Yeah, it
(12:59):
has to be ounded you all right, Well, let's think
about what are other ways that you could make anti gravity? Right? So,
how could anti gravity actually work? Let's talk about that,
but first let's take a break. Okay, So anti gravity
(13:24):
the idea of making something that is not affected by gravity,
or creating a space that is not affected by gravity
where gravitational forces can get to you. That's right, you
have to come up with some way to negate gravity.
And um, you know it sounds pretty difficult, and what
I said earlier about not having any negative mass make
(13:46):
this sound pretty hard. Um, but you know there are
some possibilities. There are some things people are working on,
something ways people think about that one day might eventually
lead to anti gravity. Okay, so what are what are
these possibilities? Well, one of them has to do with antimatter.
We talked about antimatter in another podcast and for those
of you who haven't listened to it yet, antimatter is
a form of matter where most of the things are flipped. So,
(14:09):
for example, the opposite of an electron is a positron.
Instead of having a negative charge, it has a positive charge.
So the positron is the antimatter version of the electron.
And we don't understand a lot of things about antimatter,
like why it exists at all, but why there's very
little of it, why the universe is matter of matter
or not antimatter. But antimatter is a real thing, and
(14:30):
we can create in the laboratory. We do it as
certain all the time, and we can play with it.
And one of the interesting things about antimatter is that
we don't know what kind of gravity it feels like.
We know that antimatter has the opposite electric charge of matter,
so it feels electromagnetism the opposite way. What does it
feel about gravity. We know it has positive mass, but
(14:52):
there's some theories of physics that say it could have
negative gravity, negative meaning it responds to gravity in the
opposite way. Exactly. There could just be a minus sign there,
because antimatter has a lot of minus signs where normal
matter has positive signs. And so it's entirely possible that
antimatter feels um gravity the other way that it's a
(15:14):
for antimatter, gravity is not an attractive force, but a
repulsive force against everything else, that's right, Yeah, against everything
that has mass. And so, for example, if you brought
matter and antimatter together, if they were electrically neutral, so
there are no other forces, then um, you know, one
would be the matter would be attracted to the antimatter,
but the antimatter would be repulsed from the matter. What,
(15:37):
so they would be continually chasing each other. Yeah, exactly,
that would be pretty crazy, right, Well, what, yeah, it's
it's it sounds ridiculous. It sounds like I'm making this up.
It sounds like I've been smoking too many of ann appeals.
But it's honestly a real possibility. Now, in order to
investigate this, we've been studying it. We've been trying to
(15:57):
make antimatter and we have. We've made peak grams of
antimatter in the lab in order to study it and see, like,
is antimatter the same as matter except for having these
flipped charges. And we've answered all those questions. But the
problem is that we haven't made enough anti matter. It's
pretty tricky to make anti matter to hold it and
to do experiments with it, and you need a lot
of antimatter to test these theories just because gravity is
(16:19):
so weak. Right. Remember gravity is the weakest force in
the universe by a huge amount. So to test the
theory of gravity, you need like a chunk of the stuff.
And we've made pico grams of it. Wow. So I'm
just I'm still trying to wrap my my head around
this idea of something having anti gravity instead of having
positive gravity. I know now you're excited, right you started
(16:40):
off this podcast You're like this is crazy, and then
you're like, wait, this is a great idea. So, like
a little ball of this antimatter would just not it
wouldn't fall down to the Earth. It would try to
leave the Earth as quickly as possible. Yeah, it would
feel the Earth's gravitational field the opposite way, right, Yeah,
would it would would stay together, Like would an antimatter
(17:02):
particle be attracted to another antibioto particle through gravity? Well,
that's a great question. If they both have negative gravity,
then if they then two negative charges would probably attract
each other and a positive negative would repel each other.
So you could have a whole planet of anti gravity stuff,
but it would just being It would just constantly be
(17:23):
trying to be as far away from everything else as possible. Yeah, exactly.
And you know, there's another really tricky question there, which
is about the kind of about what we mean by mass,
right with it's actually two definitions of mass. What is
gravitational mass, which means how are you affected by gravity? Right,
you are pulled down by the Earth because you have mass.
(17:45):
That's the gravitational mass. But there's a whole other concept
of mass called inertial mass, and this has to do
with F equals m. A force is mass times acceleration.
It says how much do you move when you're pushed?
So if you get a big push, you move more.
You get a little push, you move less. Right, But
it's also this question of mass that's the M and
F equals m A. If you push something really small
(18:07):
like a ping pong ball, it goes pretty far. If
you push something really heavy, like a boulder, it doesn't
go as far right, so the mass affects it. And
for most things in the universe that we've ever studied,
those two things are exactly the same. They're different concepts,
but they're identical when we measure them. Right, everything we've
ever seen has the same gravitational and inertial mass. But
(18:28):
it would be really weird if antimatter had the opposite
gravitational mass but like the same inertial mass, or even
weirder would be have opposite inertial mass, which would mean,
like you push it left and it goes right. What, Yeah,
if you had opposite if you had negative inertial mass,
it seems impossible. Well, that's just because it's unfamiliar. Right now,
(18:50):
this is the kind of thing we've actually tested. So
we've done experiments with antimatter. We know that they have
positive inertial mass because we can manipulate it, right. We've
even built accelerators like the a Tron collider at Fermilab
used anti protons, and so we know what happens when
you push a piece of anti matter. We know it
has positive inertial mass. You can't tell if it's falling
down to the Earth, like you can't tell if you
(19:12):
need to hold it up for it to be there. Yeah,
because what is the gravitational force on a proton? It's
so tiny, because the massive proton is so tiny, all
the other forces are thousands and millions and billions of
times stronger. So it's almost impossible to measure the gravitational
force on a proton because it's so close to zero. Right,
But if you just left it alone, wouldn't it fall
up or fall down? Yeah? But if you have an
(19:33):
anti proton and you just leave it alone, it's going
to interact with everything around it. Right. It's it's almost
impossible to have an anti proton and have it be
nowhere near any other matter and have no electric magnetic
fields at all, so that you cancel everything else out.
That's a pretty difficult experiment to do. And so I
mean they're trying to do that kind of thing, and
they've they've built blobs of matter to play with them
(19:55):
at cern, but they don't have enough where they can
register the gravitational force on an antiparticle. That's just not
something we know yet. And it's amazing when such a
basic question about antimatter, like which way does it feel gravity,
we just don't know the answer because we don't have
enough of it. We haven't been able to do the
experiment yet. We haven't been able to ask the universe
that question, so that answer is out there waiting for us.
(20:17):
So you're saying that we as humans can make stuff
that might possibly be anti gravity. We can make antimatter
which might be anti gravity, might float naturally. That's right. Yeah. Um,
The problem, of course is that we can't make a
lot of it. It's pretty difficult, which makes it pretty
which means you know, making your hoverboard is gonna be
pretty far down the list. And the other problem is
(20:39):
if you make an anti matter hoverboard, like, you're not
gonna want to stand on it unless you're made of
anti person, unless you're an anti person made of antimatter,
because if normal matter stands on anti matter hoverboard, kaboom, Right,
that's the trope from science fiction, which is actually true
matter meeting anti matter big explosions. So anti matter would
be even if it was anti gravity, it would be
(21:01):
a bad idea to make stuff out of it. Yeah,
I wouldn't recommend it. And I also wouldn't recommend investing
in your friends venture capital firm which is investing in
an anti gravity technology based on anti matter not likely
to succeed. Not for your safety, just for your bank account.
That's right. Free financial advice from a physicist who knows
(21:22):
nothing about finance, that's right. Don't invest in things that
might explode or destroy the universe unless they're designed to explode,
in which case, invest away, right, right, But then you
have blood in your hands, that's right. You know that
brings us to another way to think about gravity, because
(21:43):
you know, we've been talking about gravity sort of in
the context of Newton's ideas about gravity, where you have
two blobs and you think of gravity is like a
force between those blobs, right, negative mass, positive mass, negative
forces whatever. But you know, we have a more modern
way of thinking about gravity, and that's as a bending
of space, meaning that when something is attracted to you
(22:05):
by gravity, it's not that there's a fourth between you.
It's just that the shape of space time between the
two of you is bending to bring you together. That's right. Exactly,
So you can ask like, why does the Earth go
around the Sun? Well, Newton would say there's a force
of gravity, but Einstein would say, no, the Sun has
bent space in such a way that moving in a
(22:25):
circle seems to be going in a straight line. That's
the simplest path, the path of least resistance, is just
moving in a straight line around the Sun. So from
that point of view, right, gravity is the bending of space.
And a common way to think about this is, you know,
imagine a rubber sheet and a bowling ball bend space,
and you have a marble that goes around in that
inside that depression the gravity. Well, right, So from that
(22:47):
point of view, it's much trickier to imagine how you
could avoid gravity, right, because to avoid gravity, shield yourself
from gravity, to negate gravity would mean sort of unbending
the space only in your local area, right, how you
have to like cancel out the bending of space. But wait,
what do you need to unbend, for example, to space
(23:08):
around Earth? You know, like that's would be huge, Like
the Earth I'm sure is bending space a lot, right, Absolutely,
you can feel it, right, you can feel because it's
pulling you down, You're sliding down that gravity. Well in
bent space towards the center of the Earth to you
on the Earth just around me. Correct that little bending
of space. Yeah exactly. I like how you say correct,
(23:29):
like it's the natural way of things. Would be for you,
for Jorge to float above the ground like the Buddha
or something. Um, that's a nice image. Um, yeah exactly.
So from the general relativistic point of view, the way
to do would be to somehow make space flat or
only around you, right, And that's pretty hard to imagine. Yeah, unbended, right,
(23:49):
And that's pretty hard to imagine because you'd have to
have something which bends space. The other way that that
Earth does, right, Earth is bending space, and one way
you have to sort of oppose that, not climb up
the gravity. Well, but like unbend space. Oh, I see
you're saying. To to achieve anti gravity, I don't have
to myself become anti gravity, I just have to affect
(24:10):
the space time around me, exactly like unbended from distortion
of the planet Earth. Yeah, exactly. Imagine you're imagine the
earth gravitational field as like a bowl, right, and you're
on the slippery side of it. Okay, so Earth is
pulling you down and then imagine instead, you can create
a ledge. You can flatten it so you have a
place to stand, so that no longer is the Earth
(24:32):
pulling on you. Right, that's that's the idea, is to
create a flat spot in space all around you so
that you're not sliding down towards the center of the
Earth anymore. I see. So that's kind of a roundabout way, right,
because you're not you're not trying to cancel gravity. You're
just trying to reshape spacetime. Yeah, but remember Einstein says
that the shape of spacetime is gravity. That's what gravity is.
(24:53):
Gravity is just us feeling the shape of spacetime. That
there is no force. Gravity is not a force, It's
just the results of spacetime being bent by various pieces
of matter and energy. Right. But I'm saying, if you
can find a way to bend space time, then you
could technically achieve anti gravity. Yeah, exactly. And so how
do you do that? How is that possible? Right? Well,
(25:14):
you know, according to Einstein's theory, what you would have
to have is something which has in the opposite effect.
And so there is this concept it's called exotic matter.
When we dug into it, a little bit. On another
podcast episode, we were talking about wormholes and the idea
is that you could have matter with negative mass. Right,
(25:35):
So this is not antimatter with positive mass that feels
gravity the opposite way. This is something which actually has
negative mass. That's right, And uh yeah, let's talk about
that a little bit more. But first quick break, So
(26:01):
what's the difference between exotic matter and something like antimatter?
Is an antimatter exotic antimatter? It's pretty weird, but exotic
matter is different. So, first of all, antimatter is real. Okay,
if we've seen it, we've made it, we know it's
their Nobel Prizes have been awarded for it, so it's
a real thing. Nobody's anti antimatter, that's right. I am
(26:21):
pro antimatter um, and which makes me just matter. I guess. Hey,
look finally I matter. Um. Now it's terrible joke, but
exotic matter is not. It's just theoretical. Now. The difference
is antimatter we know has positive mass, okay um, and
but exotic matter we think would have negative mass, right,
which is a really weird concept. What does that even mean? Like,
(26:44):
the more you have of it, the easier it would
be to push, or if you push it it would
come back at you. Yeah, exactly. Um, it has negative mass,
which means if it has negative inertial mass, and we
don't know, but if it had negative inertial mass, it
would mean if you push it, it comes back against
it right. You push it left and it goes right.
So fff equals like minus m a essentially um if
(27:06):
it has negative inertial mass. But the hope is it
has negative gravitational mass, and um, you know this is cool.
Concept was sort of invented in order to stabilize theoretical wormholes.
Nobody's ever seen exotic matter, and nobody even knows if
it exists. It's allowed in the equations, which puts on
a list of like stuff that could exist, but we
(27:27):
don't know if it actually does. And some of that
stuff on that list has turned out to be real,
you know, like black holes was for a long time
theoretically possible but never observed. Now observed definitely exists. So
exotic matter might be real, but we don't know how
to make it. We need that The equations of the
universe say that technically you can't you can't have this
kind of matter. We just never have never seen it.
(27:49):
That's right, we've never seen it before, so we don't.
It's called exotic because because it's a crazy idea. It
should have been called crazy loony tunes matter because it's
it's just a suit. It's this silly idea. Um. But
you know, it's like, let's invent It's sort of like
the argument is like this, what would you need to
solve this problem of wormholes and anti gravity? Okay, well
you need something like this, Well, could that possibly exist?
(28:11):
Let's check the math. The math, sois that could exist?
All right, go out and find it. So it's a
reasonable way to proceed. Yeah, we're just we're just stuck
on that. Go out and find it. Point. Okay, So
this exotic matter might have negative mass, which what you
could use potentially to reshape space time around you so
that you don't feel graphic exactly. And there's there's one
(28:34):
more way to use general relativity to maybe reshape space.
And this is both more plausible and less plausible at
the same time if you believe that it's a short
angers matter exactly, and that's to use something called inflationary matter.
So if you ask, like, can gravity ever be repulsive
and we said earlier that in order for gravity to
(28:55):
be repulsive, you need to have negative mass of some sort.
That's not exactly true, because general relativity tells us that
it's not just mass that bends space, it's energy, and
it doesn't in a really complex way. It's a combination
of mass and energy. And it turns out there are
ways to arrange matter and energy so that you get
negative pressure, because general relativity is really mathematically complicated, and
(29:19):
there are some fancy ways to arrange stuff so that
gravity becomes repulsive. What do you mean arrange? What does
that mean, like put it in a certain configuration or
do weird things to it? I don't know what. I
don't know what kind of weird things you want to
do to your matter? Boy, I'm glad that this is
a podcast. It's audio only at this point. Um. But yeah,
(29:40):
there's certain arrangements. And so for those of you are
very technically minded, you can google this and read all
about the mass energy tensor, which is used to calculate
gravitational forces in general relativity, and there are ways to
to arrange that in such a way to get negative pressure.
And you might think, what this sounds cookie It sounds crazy. Well,
the reason it's called inflationary math or is that we
(30:01):
think it might have existed in the very first few
moments of the universe and it's responsible for inflation. You know,
Inflation is the super huge, rapid stretching of space in
the first bill a second of the universe that made
the universe as big as it is. And so it's
less plausible because like, wow, how would you ever do that?
(30:21):
But it's more plausible because we think it might have
happened already. But wait, how is it different than exotic
matter or antimatter? Well, inflationary matter, what we don't know?
I mean this is we're like way out on the
edges of theoretical um speculation here. Um. There's lots of
different theories about how inflation happened. Um. Some of some
theories require some super kind of weird particle called an inflaton, right,
(30:46):
an infloton inflaton, I know is another craziest It causes inflation, like,
oh my god, my money is getting weaker. Somebody's been
shooting inflotons at me. Um. So that's one idea is
it's a special kind of matter which causes it. Um.
So that that would basically be in the same categories exotically,
I see, it's like it's like a weird kind of
matter that feels gravity, has inertial regular inertial mass, but
(31:10):
somehow in its inner configuration it kind of ben space
the other way, inflate space instead of causing divid's for
you to fall into exactly right. And you know, we
are again we are way on the limb here of speculation.
And there's a lot of varieties of theories of inflotons.
It's not like one idea, it's like a whole family
(31:32):
of crazy ideas um And you know, some people think
about making inflationary matter out of weird configurations of normal matter,
and so you get pretty far out there. But again,
we think it might have existed. We use it as
a way to explain the way the universe inflated early on,
but we don't know how to make it. It's not
like we can create inflationary matter, we know anything else
(31:53):
about it. It's just it's another one of these sort
of empty boxes in the theory. We say, if this
kind of thing isisted, it would help solve this problem.
So let's check it out and see if we can
make it. We're nowhere close to even determining that it's
that it can exist in the universe, that it does exist,
not to mention being able to create it or use
it for something like consumer technologies. All right, Well, so
(32:15):
you're saying it may not be possible to with technology
or materials that we have now to somehow figure out
how to create some kind of field that that negates gravity.
That doesn't seem very likely. I would not bet on
that happening in the next few years. I would say theoretically,
there are some avenues you might be able to go
down to make it work. So I would not say
(32:37):
it's totally impossible, but I would say it's also very impractical.
But you know, there are people working on it. Really,
there are anti gravity researchers, that's right, or maybe gravity
anti researchers, based on how well respected they are. Even
there's a prize if you can demonstrate anti gravity you
can win a one million euro prize from this European
(32:57):
foundation that's seeking to stimulate research. And there are people
out there working on it. There are even people out
there who have claimed to invented anti gravity devices. Well,
I think there are people out there who claimed to
make zero gravity armchairs. That's right, That doesn't mean that
they are anti zero gravity. Yeah, if you want to
win the prize, just by one of those zero gravity
massage chairs, put some stamps on it and send it in.
(33:18):
Nobody's thought of that. There's a there's a sort of
famous or infamous guy named Pod Clifton Off, and he's
claimed to have developed anti gravity technology, and nobody has
been able to reproduce his results. I meaning he claimed
he made something that was antimatter, or he claimed to
have fun a way to you know, cancel out the
gravitational field of a planet. Right. He claims to have
(33:39):
made a device which can reduce the gravitational field of
the planet, and nobody knows how it works because it
doesn't um, And nobody's been able to reproduce his results.
And he always claims, oh, you haven't actually retried it
the way I did it, or you did it wrong
or whatever, but he's never let people like explore his
lab um and so it's a bit shape. Nobody really nobody,
(34:01):
no mainstream scientist takes these results seriously at all. But
people are out there working on it, and sometimes great
results come from the extremes right from the fringes. And
so I'm glad that people are out there tinkering and
maybe someday somebody will make it work, yeah, and win
a million euros just somehow doesn't seem like enough reward
or creating anti gravity. No. I think it probably costs
(34:22):
a lot more than a million euros to make anti gravity, right,
so it's not really a big enough prize. Plus if
you make anti gravity, oh my god, that technological applications
are huge, right, so you could be it's a bazillion
dollar invention. There is no way you're turning it over
to some foundation for a million euros. Well, let's talk
(34:43):
about that. I mean, how would the world change if
we somehow invented anti gravity? Like things would be pretty different, right, Yeah,
everything would be a lot lighter, right, Um, yeah you could.
I mean, transportation would would cost almost no energy. Right. Um,
we could all take the skies almost for free. You
could go to space for free, right, So we could
(35:04):
very rapidly build up a space based industry, right, lifting
heavy industry into space. You like, build a factory on
Earth and you just lift it up into space and
then you have factories in space. Pumping out spaceships or
habitats or something, right, So that would be amazing. That's
basically what's preventing us from going out into space and
colonizing other planets and solar systems. It's it's the gravity
(35:26):
of planet Earth that's holding us down, that's right. And
the gravity of yourself. Like, say you want to accelerate
to the speed of light or your spaceship to go
really fast, one of the things that slows you down
is is the gravity of things around you, right, And
so if you could reduce that, then you can go
a lot faster, you can accelerate more quickly. Yeah. I
was just in Alabama at the Space Center there they
(35:49):
have in Huntsville, Alabama, and they have this huge saturny
five rocket on display. And the way they talk about
it is that they say that to leave the planet Earth,
to go into orbit around the Earth, your vehicle, your
rocket has to be fuel. So most of it, like
if you see a giant rocket taken off into space,
(36:12):
of that rocket is just basically gasoline. It's it's rocket
fuel that you need to burn just to get the
little tip of the rocket out into space, that's right.
And most of your fuel is spent lifting the rest
of the fuel, right, Because the more fuel you carry,
the heavier you are, the more fuel you need, and
so it gets expensive pretty fast. Right. But if you
(36:32):
can somehow make anti gravity, you would just not need
so much fuel. You can just float above all of
the earthly problems. So if you have a great idea
for anti gravity, hey, get to work on it, or
send it to us at feedback at Daniel and Jorge
dot com. Send it to us a zero gravity armchairs
at that we'll cut you in part of the million
(36:53):
dollar prize, we promise, all right, we'll help you, all
of you out there feel just a little bit lighter
having listened to this podcast. All right, thanks everyone for listening,
See you next time. If you still have a question
after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line.
(37:15):
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's
one word, or email us at feedback at Daniel and
Orge dot com.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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