[mklauber1]

I'm curious about the idea of "allow[ing] negative masses to not only exist, but to be created continuously." Given the law (in the scientific sense) that matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed, on a scale of 1 to FTL travel, how crazy is this idea?

[SolarNet]

He points out that it's a mathematical tool and may not result in particles, e.g. matter or energy, as we currently think of it.

It could be a property of space-time, as space is always expanding everywhere, space it self could have a negative mass.

This could even be some sort of weird energy-neutral balancing mechanism (e.g. some sort of energy - my bet is on potential energy, like how gravity causes things to accelerate through the potential energy of the arrangement - is lost that accounts for the creation of negative mass particles or whatever; conservation is observational, but we don't really know what 95% of the stuff being conserved is in the first place).

Hence it can be consistent with the conservation of mass and energy.

[pavel_lishin]

I thought it was less a law and more of an observation.

[Retra]

Scientific laws are just quantified observations.

[gus_massa]

Probably more close to 1 to than FTL travel.

This is very new research without a deep check by other groups and without experimental support, so wait 5-10 years before getting too attached to this result. Anyway, there are weird somewhat similar things that are cannon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_expectation_value

The technical details and the experimental support are very very very important to distinguish between weird things that are true and weird things that are false.

[daxfohl]

Yup, that part seemed like a stretch to me too. Besides which, it doesn't seem to address any of the conflicts between QM and GR, so I'm not seeing it as a terribly interesting path. Not saying it's wrong, but it's not where I'd put my money.

[marcosdumay]

This is at the "would lead to FTL" level.