Historical research guide · 0641 · 1975
Quarks, magnetic monopoles and negative mass
F. Winterberg
In one minute
Friedwardt Winterberg takes two of the missing objects of 1970s physics and proposes that they are one object. Quarks had never been seen free; magnetic monopoles — the isolated north or south pole Dirac’s theory allows — had never been seen at all. Winterberg’s hypothesis is that quarks are magnetic monopoles, and that they carry negative mass. His route to it is gravity read as a nonlinear theory, in which the gravitational field carries negative mass density and a monopole’s mass therefore comes out negative. The positive mass we weigh in a proton is then the binding energy of the negative-mass quarks inside it — so negative mass is not absent from ordinary matter, it is bound inside it, which is also why setting a quark free would take, and release, energy far above the rest mass of the hadron it came from. In the companion paper he published the same year, Winterberg adds the payoff: matter doped with negative-mass quarks would be superstrong, and could approach zero rest mass.
Connection
This is the earliest of Winterberg’s negative-mass papers on the site, and it states in 1975 the argument the Defense Intelligence Agency’s own negative-mass propulsion report at /library/stm-bba4f83ea0 rebuilds thirty-six years later: negative mass is already here, hidden because it is bound to positive mass, and the prize is not a stronger engine but matter of almost zero rest mass. That is chapter 3’s reading of mass as an effect of a structured vacuum, and chapter 8’s reading of propulsion as mass reduction rather than mass ejection.
From the source
Nonlinear gravitational effects require magnetic monopoles to have negative mass, and Winterberg therefore proposes the hypothesis that quarks are magnetic monopoles of negative mass.Companion abstract, Atomkernenergie 26, 43-47 (1975), first two sentences
The positive mass of hadrons is explained as a result of the positive binding energy from the interaction of negative mass quarks — so on this reading negative mass is present inside ordinary matter rather than absent from it.Companion abstract, third sentence
The production of free quarks would be accompanied by the delivery of a very large amount of energy in excess of the hadronic rest mass energy, and the negative mass hypothesis may therefore explain the difficulty of producing free quarks.Companion abstract, fourth sentence, read with the closing sentence on free-quark production
Consistently with the smallness of CP violation, the interaction between these objects is assumed to be a Heisenberg-type magnetic charge exchange force.Companion abstract, fifth sentence
Free quarks could be produced in very strong magnetic fields of the order of 10 to the seventeenth gauss, which may occur in the focus of short-wave X-ray laser beams and in the gravitational collapse of massive astronomical objects — which Winterberg offers as an explanation of the large energy output believed to be associated with quasars.Companion abstract, sixth sentence
By doping solid material with negative mass quarks one could obtain superstrong materials, and macroscopic bodies approaching arbitrarily close to a state of zero rest mass; the most profound consequence of such a state of matter would be the attainability of relativistic velocities for macroscopic bodies.Companion abstract, final two sentences
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02745856How to cite it
F. Winterberg (1975) Quarks, magnetic monopoles and negative mass doi:10.1007/BF02745856