Telescope Reviews: Full speed ahead, Mr. Sulu!

An egg on my face for engaging with scholastic speculation from the stipulation of the existence of negative matter. Now to take it to some conclusions.

It seems the positive-and-negative mass spaceship can also be explained in Newton's terms: The two masses repel each other (universal law of gravity); this repulsion would accellerate the positive mass away from the negative, but it would also accellerate the negative mass toward the positive mass, because in f=ma, f and a get opposite signs.

This cosmic chase would require no energy, since the kinetic energy of this spaceship is zero. And hardly any force, either, for starting, steering, or stopping someplace to visit.

If you get ahold of a ball of this stuff, how would you handle it? Would it fall, or rise? I think both Einstein and Newton (if they would enter such a discussion at all) would put it on the floor. Again, from f=ma, its repulsion from earth would cause it to fall toward the earth. Or, you could say, the warp of space-time causes negative as well as zero and positive mass objects to accellerate toward the earth, the negative mass requiring a repulsive force to do so.

Once you get this thing onto the floor, to roll the ball north, push it south. To keep it from crashing into the north wall, catch up with it and push it north to stop it. Otherwise, the reaction force of the wall will accellerate it even faster to the north. With every wall it crashes through in your house and your neighborhood, it will pick up speed. Eventually it will plunge into the earth, to emerge somewhere else with seismic repercussions, and hurdle off into space. (It might not emerge intact, but perhaps as a hot gas jet.)

After a few errors like this, you could learn to harness energy out of it, should you not be more than satisified by the energy yielded by production of the stuff. Any effort to move it yields energy, rather than consumes it - once you get that stuff moving, any effort to resist it produces energy, while it acquires negative kinetic energy itself. Total energy is conserved! To stop it, however, requires putting back all the energy it gave while accellerating. That's a waste, unless you let it fly off to space.

Meanwhile, back in reality, it looks like matter, like time, has an "arrow", without which the universe as we know it falls apart into paradox even with the laws of physics in force.