journal club on aspects of information, quantum theory, and gravity
01 Apr 2022
It is no secret that quantum mechanics often produces weirdness. While some of its unexpected predictions are seemingly inconsequential, sidestepping confrontation with experiments, others could, in principle, be game-changers. Or couldn’t they? In this talk, we focus on quantum mechanical violations of the classical energy conditions, i.e., reasonable expectations on the classical matter that, for example, prevent one from building a time machine to meet oneself in the past. Without compliance with energy conditions, it may seem intriguing why there aren’t negative masses roaming around us. Based on the Casimir effect, we argue that it may be fundamentally impossible to observe an object with a negative mass, despite the presence of static negative energy densities. We identify the specific elements that outweigh the Casimir energies, making the entire apparatus yield an attractive gravitational force on distant bodies.