This might sound strange… BahadirTanriover/Getty
Heavy聽metal music isn鈥檛 heavy after all聽鈥 it is actually the opposite. Sound waves have mass and can interact via gravity, but that mass is negative. In other words, sound floats upwards.
Angelo Esposito at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues calculated the relationship between sound and gravity, taking into account complicated particle interactions that had previously been ignored. They found that, although the effect is small, sound waves should have negative gravitational mass.
鈥淚t鈥檚 almost like antigravity,鈥 says Ira Rothstein at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. 鈥淭he atoms that are…
