What exactly causes the tides? That question was something humanity wondered on and off for quite some time, though people did notice that it had something to do with the moon. In fact, Johannes Kepler was the first to suggest that an attractive pull from the moon caused Earth's tides (by observation and analysis of recorded data). However, it wasn't until about eighty years later that Newton pinned down what exactly was going on (with an actual physical theory of tides). Having described the mathematics of gravity and how it relates both to our attraction to the Earth and the movement of the planets, he tackled how the pull of the moon should create differing levels of water on the Earth. What he described was the Tidal Force, which is a force that results from gravitational attraction from a secondary body (the moon) on another body (the Earth) being unequal on all sides...

So in my post from the other week I alluded to the idea that negative mass is absurdly awesome, and that I may talk about it in the future. Well, folks, the future is now. So let's get to talking about negative mass.

First of all, negative mass falls under the category of exotic matter, which is pretty much filled with stuff, that, while not mathematically impossible, is unlikely to exist and has never been observed anywhere in the universe. This does not stop exotic matter from being the most interesting kind of matter (it may actually be part of the reason it is so cool). So, as we know, all matter seems to have mass, a property intrinsic to matter, and, according to the Standard Model, imparted upon the matter via interaction with the Higgs Field (that's what all the Higgs Boson hullabaloo was about a while back—that was the boson which would act as the "force carrier" for the Higgs Field, and give objects mass (and, by extension, gravity))...