Researchers break Newton’s third law — with lasers

image courtesy of ExtremeTech.com                                                         

Researchers have apparently managed to break Newton's third Law; by cleverly causing photons to interfere with each other just right, they have managed to get the massless photons to behave as though they did have mass, and even to behave as though they had negative mass. Negative mass is something that would generate the opposite of gravity, a repulsion of matter. Such a material would have strange properties, as it would repel matter, yet itself be attracted to the repelled matter (google "negative mass" and/or visit this site to see the funkadelic math this entails). If we used a block of this material, we could effectively accelerate without any energy input (which would also violate Newton's Third Law). And that is just what happens in this article!

 

 

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