07-03-2016, 07:15 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-03-2016, 07:17 AM by stevebowers.)
We call negative mass exotic energy or more technically averaged null energy condition (ANEC)-violating negative energy, sometimes known as phantom energy. Because of the mass-energy equivalence principle, negative energy of this kind is equivalent to mass, and probably you couldn't actually have baryonic matter with negative mass as such since it would fly apart.
A balloon inflated with negative energy is an intriguing concept; after all wormholes are inflated with negative energy, so it should be possible. An interesting possibility is a matter balloon with a wormhole at its centre - this is an idea I came up with for my novel Betrayals, and which occurs in a quite different form in Iain Bank's The Algebraist. But (ANEC)-violating negative energy is a very tricky thing to make, something that only transapients and above can produce- so I wouldn't expect there to be many negative-energy balloons in the Terragen sphere.
A balloon inflated with negative energy is an intriguing concept; after all wormholes are inflated with negative energy, so it should be possible. An interesting possibility is a matter balloon with a wormhole at its centre - this is an idea I came up with for my novel Betrayals, and which occurs in a quite different form in Iain Bank's The Algebraist. But (ANEC)-violating negative energy is a very tricky thing to make, something that only transapients and above can produce- so I wouldn't expect there to be many negative-energy balloons in the Terragen sphere.