Tachyon

A tachyon is a particle that is moving faster than the speed of light. Tachyons are currently only theoretical, and many scientists believe that they could not exist based on our understanding of the physics in this universe. Tachyons were first proposed by Gerald Feinberg in a paper he wrote in 1967 which coined the term tachyon and outlined a baseline for some of the theoretical physics surrounding them.

The Main Idea

Tachyons always move faster than the speed of light, while its complements, luxons, always move at the speed of light (ex. photon), and bradyons, which always are moving slower than light. Both of these complements exist, while tachyons are still only hypothetical. Most physicists believe that tachyons could not exist because their existence would break the barrier of the speed of light and therefor disrupt causality. For example, if tachyons did exist, Einstein postulated that it would be possible to build a device known as a tachyonic antitelephone, which would allow the transmission of messages faster than the speed of light, and therefor into the past. This would allow someone to answer a question before it was even asked, breaking the relationship of cause and effect we know as causality.

In Feinberg's paper which coined the term, the author proposed that tachyonic particles had a mass that was negative when squared, making it imaginary. This was later disproven, however theoretical object with imaginary mass are often still called tachyons. The instability represented by imaginary mass is known as tachyon condensation, and is still studied heavily in modern physics.

Research continues in an attempt to find the theoretical tachyon, however there has been no recorded success.

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A Mathematical Model

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