Phonons: The New Negative Gravity

According to a paper released July 23 with arXiv a group of scientists have now considered sound to have negative mass, and constantly drifting in all directions. This new concept has shattered the conventional way of thinking about sound as a wave. This new paper argues the fact that instead of sound acting like a wave rippling through matter it is matter.

A phonon — a particle-like unit of vibration that can describe sound at very small scales — has a very slight negative mass, and that means sound waves travel upward ever so slightly, said Rafael Krichevsky, a graduate student in physics at Columbia University. Just as light waves are described as photons, phonons are a way to describe sound waves. Although there is no physical particle emerging, researchers can use mathematics of particles to describe it.