Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is Anti-Gravity Technology Possible?

Episode Date: February 21, 2019

Is it possible to negate gravity without using energy? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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One in ten kids vape serious, which warrants a serious conversation from a serious parental figure, like yourself. Not the seriously know-it-all sports dad or the seriously smart podcaster. It requires a serious conversation that is best. had by you. No, seriously. The best person to talk to your child about vaping is you. To start the conversation, visit Talk Aboutvaping.org, brought to you by the American Lung Association and the Ad Council. Hey, Daniel, you know I'm a comic person. So I'm curious to know, what would be your superpower, if you were a superhero? What 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 has always seemed to me like a majestic, amazing thing I 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. Does Superman push himself up?

or is he somehow cancelling the force of gravity? Oh, well, we have him scheduled to be a guest on the podcast in a few weeks, so you can ask him directly. Oh, good. Good, I look forward to talking. I thought we also had this interview with this reporter called Clark Kent. Didn't we? Aren't we scheduled at the same time?

Yeah, we had to cancel that one so we could get Superman instead. Oh, okay, all right. That's kind of suspicious, but all right. They said they wouldn't appear together, so what are you going to do? Hi, I'm Jorge, and I'm Daniel. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. In which we take things in the universe, pull 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 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 space. That's right.

Today's topic is anti-gravity. Is it possible? 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 anti-gravity? You know, that it's somehow not affected by gravity. That's the idea, right? Yeah, exactly. that would be the idea. 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 is possible or people think is ridiculous and absurd? Do you think anti-gravity technology will ever work? Here's what people had to say. Yeah, I think that might be possible. Probably not. Okay. Yes. Yes. Why is that? I just think as technology progresses, it's just something that can become possible.

Speaking of really anti-gravity, which, like, we're completely removes gravity, then I don't think that's possible, at least from my imagination, in a really short period of time. Okay. I have no idea. Probably, yeah. Yeah, why do you think so? It's probably too expensive to 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 that with enough effort and people working together that we can figure it out. All right, I love that. Great. So, as usual, I am impressed and slightly scared by the faith people have in scientists to basically accomplish anything technological.

Yeah, a lot of people are saying that, yeah, it's possible that they have high confidence in people like you. Well, yeah, that's because they don't know me very well. But I think there's this general sense that once an idea about something is made, it 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.

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 10 years or in 50 years, technology would 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 the general sense was,

nothing will ever change because the pace of change was so slow was basically invisible. Whereas now, people expect that their kids will 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 great-grandkids up in the cloud somewhere. Yeah, but you're right. I think maybe even just 50 years ago or 70 years ago, this feeling probably wasn't there, you know? Yeah, and it's accurate, right? The pace of change is accelerating. Like, things are changing faster and faster. Somebody said the other day, I thought it was really insightful. They said, nobody lives in the world they grew up in. Whoa. Because the world 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 20th 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. But I think it's after World War II the things really started to get crazy. You know, it's the development of electronics and computers and all that kind of stuff that really accelerated the pace of technological change. 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 surely something as 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 you mean we have them? They're called helicopters or airplanes or drones.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. They haven't really replaced your car yet. I mean, I don't think, do you have a helicopter, Jorge? No. Come on, I have three. Great. I'd like to borrow your helicopter, by the way. Okay, so let's get into it. 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. 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 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 imagining 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 this helicopter blade

then that doesn't really feel like anti-gravity, right? That's right because it costs energy, right? cost time and money and energy to do it. The idea, the whole 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 it's nice and quiet and calm, and you know, you can read your magazine or

whatever. So there's a concept there 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.

Like electromagnetism, for example, that's something you can shield yourself from. You can cancel 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. metal, it's almost 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 artists finding in a case, they're all impervious to electromagnetic radiation. That's right. They can't call their coach and say, what should I do now? Should I kick them in the head? Should I pull out through here? That's why they're not in their phones because they just don't work.

And the reason that's possible is because there's two kinds of electromagnetic charges, right? There's positive and this negative. So electrons are negative and protons are positive, for example. And what happens when you put a metal box inside an electromagnetic field is that it pulls the positive negative charges apart in just such a way that it cancels itself inside the box. What do you mean it pulls them apart? in the box it's material like in the metal yeah yeah in metal metal is a conductor which means that there's negative charges all around which can be moved right and what happens is that you have the electromagnetic field and that moves the charges around it responds to the electromagnetic field

in just the right way to produce the opposing electromagnetic field which essentially cancels it right it sort of absorbs the forces of from electromagnet magnetism yeah it or it makes a shield, right? It's like having the opposite field at the same time, so the two things 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 cancelling headphones don't just block the sound. They produce sound, which destructively interferes with the sound waves to cancel them out. So that 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. Yeah, that would be pretty cool. I would like that. No, but I mean, that's the idea, right? I get into it.

We're looking for a way to cancel out the forces of gravity that would normally get to you and pull you. 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 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 there's no negative mass you can use to negate gravity that's why anti-gravity is much trickier than anti-electromagnetism so in In a metal box, there are positive and negative particles that cancel out the force that normally would go through. 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 if you don't want the government to snoop on you or you don't want anybody to listen to your cell phone,

then you can just get into a chain link box, right? Make yourself a fence or find your dog kennel or something, right? Wherever 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 connect it to electrical ground. Yeah, it has to be grounded, yeah.

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. Hola, it's Honey German.

And my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition.

I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. Wow, that's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start.

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to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford, and in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right?

In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a real. It's how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us.

Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, so anti-gravity is 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, you know, it sounds pretty difficult. And what I said earlier about not having any negative mass, make this sound pretty hard. But, you know, there are some possibility. There are some things people are working on, some ways people think about that one day might eventually lead to anti-gravity. Okay, so 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, 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 anti-matter 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 made out of matter or not antimatter. But antimatter is a real thing, and we can create it in the laboratory. We do it at CERN 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 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 gravity the other way. That it's 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 one would be, the matter would be attracted to the antimatter, but the antimatter would be repulsed from the matter. What? So they would be continually chasing each other. Yeah, exactly.

That would be pretty crazy, right? Whoa. What? Oh. Yeah, it's in. It sounds ridiculous. It sounds like I'm making this up. It sounds like I've been smoking too many banana peels.

But it's honestly a real possibility. Now, in order to investigate this, we've been studying it. We've been trying to make antimatter, and we have. We've made picograms 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 antimatter. It's pretty tricky to make antimatter, to hold it, and to do experiments with it. And you need a lot of antimatter to test these.

theories just because gravity is so weak, right? Remember, gravity is the weakest force in the universe by a huge amount. So to test a theory of gravity, you need, like, a chunk of the stuff, and we've made picograms of it. Wow. So I'm still trying to wrap my head around this idea of something having anti-gravity instead of having positive gravity. I know. Now you're excited, right? You started off this podcast, you're like, this is crazy. And they'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, but would it stay together? Like would an antimatter

particle be attracted to another anti-matter 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 Positive, negative would repel each other. So you could have a whole planet of anti-gravity stuff, but it would just constantly be 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 what we mean by mass, right?

It's actually two definitions of mass. One is gravitational mass, which means how are you affected by gravity? You are pulled down by the Earth, because you have mass, 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 MA. 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. If you get a little push, you move less, right? But it's also this question of mass. That's the M in F equals MA. If you push something really small 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? 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. Everything we've ever seen has the same gravitational and inertial mass. But it would be really weird if antimatter had the opposite gravitational mass, but like the same inertial mass, or even weirder would have opposite inertial mass, which would mean like you push it left and it goes right. What? Yeah.

If you had negative inertial mass... That seems impossible, isn't it? Well, that's just because it's unfamiliar, right? Now, 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 Tevotron Collider at Fermilab used antiprotons.

And so we know what happens when you push a piece of antimatter. 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 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 mass of a 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 antiproton and you just leave it alone, it's going to interact with everything around it, right? It's almost impossible to have an antiproton 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 built blobs of matter to play with them at CERN, but they don't have enough where they can register the gravitational force on an end of particle. It'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. 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. The problem, of course, is that we can't make a lot of it. It's pretty difficult, which means making your hoverboard is going to be pretty far down the list. And the other problem is if you make an antimatter hoverboard, like you're not going to want to stand on. it unless you're made of anti-person, unless you're an anti-person made of anti-matter because if normal matter stands on an anti-matter hoverboard,

kabum, right? That's the trope from science fiction, which is actually true. Matter meaning antimatter, big explosions. So antimatter would be, even if it was anti-gravity, it would be a bad idea to make stuff out of it. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it. And I also

wouldn't recommend investing in your friend's venture capital firm, which is investing in an anti-gravity technology based on antimatter, yeah, not likely to succeed. Oh, I see. Not for your safety, just for your bank account. That's right. Free financial advice from a physicist who knows 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'd have blood in your hands.

That's right. You know, that brings us to another way to think about graph. Because, 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 as 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 by gravity, it's not that there is a force 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 circle seems to be going in a straight line. It's the simplest path, the path of least resistance, is moving in a straight line around the sun. So from that point of view, right, gravity is a bending of space. And a common way to think about this is, you know, imagine a rubber sheet and a bowling ball bends space. And you have a marble. that goes around inside that depression, the gravity well, right? So from that 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 cancel out the bending of space. But wait, wouldn't you need to unbend, for example, the space around the earth? you know like that's that'd be huge like the earth i'm sure is bending space a lot right absolutely you can feel it right you can feel it because it's pulling you down you're sliding down that gravity well in bent space towards the center of the earth oh you're saying to keep you on the earth just around me correct that little bending of space yeah exactly i like how you say correct

like it's uh the natural way of things would be for you for horhe 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 it would be to somehow make space flat or only around you, right? And that's pretty hard to imagine. Yeah, to unbend it, right? And that's pretty hard to imagine because you'd have to have something which bends space the other way that Earth does, right?

Earth is bending space in one way. You'd have to sort of oppose that, not climb up the gravity well, but like unbend space. Oh, I see. You're saying to achieve anti-gravity, I don't have to myself become anti-gravity. I just have to affect the space time around me. Exactly. Like unbended from distortion of the planet Earth. Yeah, exactly.

Imagine the Earth's 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 that you have a place to stand so that no longer is the Earth pulling on you, right? 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 trying to cancel gravity. You're just trying to reshape space time. Yeah, but remember, Einstein says that the shape of space time is gravity. That's what gravity is. Gravity is just us feeling the shape of space time. There is no force.

Gravity is not a force. It's just the result of space time 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? Is that possible, right?

Well, you know, according to Einstein's theory, what you'd have to have is something which has the opposite effect. And so there is this concept. It's called exotic matter. We dug into it a little bit on another podcast episode when we were talking about wormholes and the idea is that you could have matter

with negative mass. So this is not anti-matter with positive mass that feels gravity the opposite way. This is something which actually has negative mass. That's right. And yeah, let's talk about that a little bit more. But first, a quick break. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it.

They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases. But everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it.

He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman, and my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities.

You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters,

sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And, of course, we'll explore deeper times, topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community.

You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Afea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right?

In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community,

the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcast. So what's the difference between exotic matter and something like antimatter? Is it anti-matter exotic? Antimatter is pretty weird, but exotic matter is different. So first of all, anti-matter is real. Okay, we've seen it, we made it, we know it's there. Noble prizes have been awarded for it, so it's a real thing. Nobody's anti-antimatter.

That's right. I am pro-antimatter, which makes me just matter, I guess. Hey, look, finally, I matter. That's a terrible joke. But exotic matter is not. It's just theoretical. Now, the difference is anthematter we know has positive mass, okay? But exotic matter, we think, would have negative mass, right? Which is a really weird concept.

What does that even mean? Like, 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. 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 you, right? You push it left, and it goes right. So F equals minus MA, essentially, if it has negative inertial mass.

But the hope is it has negative gravitational mass. And, you know, this whole concept was sort of invented in order to stabilize theoretical wormholes. Nobody's ever seen exotic matter. Nobody even knows if it exists. It's allowed in the equations, which puts on the list of, like, stuff. that could exist, but we 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. Meaning that the equations of the universe say that technically you can't have this kind of matter. We just have never seen it. That's right. We've never seen it before. So we don't know. And it's called exotic because...

Because it's a crazy idea. It should have been called crazy Looney Tunes Matter because it's just a silly idea. 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'd need something like this.

Well, could that possibly exist? Let's check the math. Right. Math says it could exist. All right, go out and find it. So it's a reasonable way to proceed. Yeah, we're just stuck on that go-out and find it point. Okay, so this exotic matter might have negative,

mass, which you could use potentially to reshape space time around you so that you don't feel gravity. Exactly. And there's one 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 Schrodinger's 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 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 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 and do exotic things to it boy i'm glad this is a podcast it's audio only at this point but yeah there's certain arrangements and so for those you are very technically minded you can google this and read all about the mass energy tensor which is used to calculate uh gravitational forces in general relativity and there are ways to arrange that in such a way to get negative pressure. And you might think, well, this sounds kooky. It sounds crazy. Well, the reason

it's called inflationary matter is that we 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 did you ever do that? But it's more plausible because we think it might have happened already. But wait, how is it different than exotic matter or anti-matter? Well, inflationary matter,

well, we don't know. I mean, this is, we're like way out on the edges of theoretical speculation here. There's lots of different theories about how inflation happened. Some theories require some super kind of weird particle called an inflaton, right?

An inflaton. Infloton. I know, isn't it the craziest? It causes inflation. Like, oh my God, my money's getting weaker. Somebody's been shooting inflatans at me. So that's one idea is it's a special kind of matter which causes it. So that would basically be in the same category as exotic

matter. Oh, I see. It's like a weird kind of matter that feels gravity, has inertial, regular inertial mass, but somehow in its inner configuration, it kind of bends space the other way. Yeah, it's

inflate space instead of causing dividends 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 inflatons. It's not like one idea. It's like a whole family of crazy ideas. 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 inflation. inflationary matter. We know anything else 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 existed, 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 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 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 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. There's a prize. If you can demonstrate anti-gravity, you can win a one million euro prize from this European 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 claim to make zero-gravity armchairs. That doesn't mean that they are anti-zero-gravity. Yeah, if you want to win the prize, just buy one of those zero-gravity massage chairs, has put some stamps on it and send it in. I'm sure nobody's thought of that.

No, there's a sort of famous or infamous guy named Podklitnov, and he's claimed to have developed anti-gravity technology, and nobody's been able to reproduce his results. Meaning he claimed he made something that was antimatter, or he claimed to find a way to cancel out the gravitational field of a planet? Right. He claims to have made a device which can reduce the gravitational field of the planet, and nobody knows how it works.

works because it doesn't. 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 explore his lab. And so it's a bit shady. Nobody really, 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. that just somehow doesn't seem like enough reward for creating anti-gravity. No, I think it probably costs 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, the technological applications are huge, right? So you could be, it's a bazillion dollar invention. There's no way you're turning it over to some foundation for a million euros. Right.

Well, let's talk 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? Yeah, you could, I mean, transportation would cost almost no energy, right?

We could all take to the skies almost for free. You could go to space for free, right? So we could very rapidly build up a space-based industry, right, lifting heavy industry into space. You'd, like, build a factory on Earth, and you just lift it up into space. And then you have factories in space, pumping out spaceship.

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 the gravity 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 the gravity of things around you, right? And so if you could reduce that, then you could go a lot faster. You could accelerate more quickly. Yeah, I was just in Alabama at the space center there they have in Huntsville, Alabama, and they have this huge Saturn 5 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 Earth, your vehicle, your rocket has to be 95% fuel.

So most of, like, if you see a giant rocket taken off into space, 95% of that rocket is just basically gasoline. It's rocket fuel that you need to burn just to get that 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? Yeah. 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 could somehow make anti-gravity, you would just not need so much fuel. You could just float above all of the earthly problems. Yeah. 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. com. Send it to us

at zero gravity armchairs and Daniel Porkade. We'll cut you in part of the million dollar prize, we

promise. All right, I'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. 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 Danielandhorpe.com. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story.

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