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RobinHanson's avatar

I accept your claim that this tension exists. Yes, any theory must deal with many difficulties.

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Gordan Krnjaic's avatar

The point of my comment was not to present an impossibility theorem, but to suggest that there are several highly nontrivial challenges that any theory of negative mass particles must confront and I know of no plausible solution to any of these, but maybe someone will find a way around them.

You're right that there are many known examples of forces getting stronger or weaker as the universe evolves (both the strong and the weak forces did this in opposite ways in the early universe). However, with regard to negative mass particles, there is generic tension between having a sufficiently large coupling to populate them after inflation while keeping this coupling sufficiently small to avoid all the problems associated with radiating extremely large numbers of conventional particles (and other tachyons) in a runaway process that endlessly fills the universe with more stuff.

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