How feasible is this gravity-altering exotic matter I've conceived? Would it have any unforseen consequences?
Ok so I was thinking about a way to hypothetically have undiscovered elements with bizarre properties (for unobtainium purposes). And an idea hit me: replace nucleons with heavier but stable counterparts to replace the strong nuclear force with gravity. Let's consider the makeup of an atom of what I'm gonna call Heavy Matter:
Heavy Protons, which have the same charge and properties of ordinary matter, but are about ten orders of magnitude heavier (the needed mass to make gravity as powerful as the strong nuclear force).
Heavy neutrons, ditto.
Heavy electrons - not muons for reasons that will become clear in a moment.
What this would mean is the strong nuclear force would be matched and equaled by gravity in overpowering the Coulombic repulsion between the nuclei. This would have a strange effect; in the inverse to ordinary matter, heavier nuclei are more stable. For a light nucleus (like the elements we encounter in everyday life), the strong nuclear force is more than enough to overcome Coulombic repulsion - so all that "˜excess' gravity would just crush the nuclei together, turning it into a miniature black hole that would vanish into Hawking radiation so quickly that it would barely have even existed. For a heavy nucleus (like the elements that are extremely unstable or non existent in real life) the remaining slack of the Coulombic repulsion that the range-limited strong nuclear force can't meet is matched and equalled by gravity. This means you could have a stable element with an atomic number of say, 500.
Everything I've written so far is kinda in the realm of plausibility, I think (that's why I'm verifying it here). And now the ubontanium part comes in. The heavy particles also have the ability to nullify or weaken gravity, but only under very specific circumstances. This ability is related to charge; charge is directly proportional to nullification ability. What this means is the heavy electrons strengthen gravity and the heavy protons weaken it, so in a normal atom they just cancel out. However, ionise it and interesting stuff happens.
Negative ions of material greatly increase gravity in a given area, although you can't have that effect be too strong because the nucleus collapses in on itself and becomes a black hole, which makes that kind less useful.
Positive ions of material reduce gravity in a given area. Since gravity is the attractive force in these nuclei, reducing it puts more bulk on the strong nuclear force and means you can't really do that with the bigger Heavy elements because they just radioactively decay very rapidly. The lighter ones, however, can reduce, remove, and even reverse gravity. And that means you effectively have negative mass if you pick just the right Heavy element and heat it to an incredibly high temperature to ionise it. Which is the condition for the Alcubierre Drive, i.e one of the main feasible forms of FTL travel.
How feasible is all this, ignoring the gravity alteration, which is what TvTropes would call my One Big Lie? Are there any affects of the heavier atomic particles, gravity stabilised nuclei, and ionisation = gravity alteration phenomenon that I haven't anticipated?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/147005. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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