I certainly don’t have a degree in physics. But I do still try to remain informed. And one of the many things I wonder about, is the Tachyon.
I realize it only exists on paper, apparently as a thoughtful mental exercise, of a physicist. But how likely is it, really?
Because I for one believe anything that can be conceived now, will in fact be discovered some day. Tachyons travel faster than the speed of light. So therefore they go **back ** in time. Why the heck not?
Also, I know this is not the best of cites. But I recently saw a show on the Science Channel, where they did an experiment that proves sometimes information does go back in time. It involved quantum physics. That is all I remember.
Purely theoretical, no evidence so far. Some philosophical reasons for them not to exist, time-travel being high on that list.
It actually is fairly astonishing how many theoretically-predicted particles and forces and things have been discovered. Yukawa’s prediction of the pion is a really great story in science history, and the Higg’s boson is another.
And String Theory is so darn pretty, it certainly should be true! But, alas, the universe doesn’t always adhere to our preferences.
Both pi mesons and the Higgs boson were predicted as elements of the standard model to explain observations that had already been made. (The strong force in the case of pi mesons, and symmetry breaking in the case of the Higgs boson.)
There is no observed phenomenon that requires tachyons to explain it.
Yes, there are theories that posit the existence of tachyons. But all of the theories that posit their existence also posit that they’d be completely incapable of interacting with tardyons in any way. At this point it starts getting philosophical: What is “existence”, and can an object be said to truly exist if it can never, even in principle, interact with us?
I recall Isaac Asimov musing that if there was a tachyon universe and we did manage to get into it we’d find find the Ts zipping around at FTL speeds, taking energy to slow down, more and more energy to approach light speed, with C as an inpenetrable barrier.
My understanding of the matter is that tachyonic quantum fields can exist, but that the interpretation of these fields as generating actual tachyon particles the same way ordinary quantum fields generate ordinary particles is incorrect. Tachyonic fields are unstable, and any perturbation of a tachyonic field induces the field to condense into a non-tachyonic one.
Maybe it’s not the object alone that causes a tachyon. Think about space, there is no friction in space, therefore it is a good place for solving the tachyon theory. If we could find a medium that allows objects to not only breeze through, but also speed up once within an area, we could be closer to producing the first tachyon and making it a law;).
The field that the tachyon produces is too unstable for a natural medium. However, certain mediums not only lack friction, but they also speed up objects that enter. I believe that the medium and the object must be precisely coordinated in order to create a tachyon.
And how do you get around relativity? Besides there’s plenty of friction in space, especially at relativistic speeds. It’s a vacuum that’s frictionless.
Clearly, at relativistic velocities, tacos are observed to become nachos.
Sounds like you think there’s some kind of tachyoniferous ether. No “medium” is required for EM transmission, and there’s no reason to suppose tachyons, should they even exist, automatically require one either.
Is there a reason you believe this to be the case? Because it’s sounding a bit like a word salad, otherwise.
This post reminds me of a science fiction short story I read as a kid in which a scientist invented a device he could use to view any historical event-- it used tachyons to do this.
When I started watching ‘Devs’ on Hulu:
It was revealed early on, episode 2 or 3, that the Devs division in the Tech company Amaya was developing a device that could view events that happened in the past, demonstrated by a grainy test viewing of Christ on the cross. I wondered if they were using tachyons to do this, like the story I read as a kid, but it’s gradually revealed that it’s done through supercomputer-processed backwards extrapolation of causation chains, or something.
