Have you ever heard about tachyons?
- Alexa Ines Guido
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Hola! I'm Alexa Guido, a young and curious woman passionate about science. Join me on an exciting journey to explore the wonders of the universe through the lens of physics.
If you ask physicists about tachyons, you'll be told that they belong strictly in the realm of science fiction. But today, let’s talk about these mysterious particles that, at least in theory, could move faster than light.
So, what exactly is a tachyon? Well, it’s not something you can see or touch, at least not yet. Tachyons are hypothetical particles, which means scientists have never actually found one, but the math behind them is so strange that it keeps popping up in conversations about what’s possible in our universe.
The word “tachyon” comes from Greek and basically means “fast.” And fast they are—if they exist, tachyons would always travel faster than light.
Wait a second. Isn’t the speed of light supposed to be the ultimate speed limit? According to Einstein’s special relativity, yes. Nothing with mass can accelerate up to or beyond light speed. But here’s the twist: the equations don’t completely forbid particles that start out already faster than light. So instead of speeding up to break the limit, tachyons would just naturally exist on the other side of that barrier.
And here’s where it gets really mind-bending: as a tachyon loses energy, it would actually go faster. Imagine pushing the brakes on your car and watching it speed up instead; that’s the kind of backwards logic we’re dealing with.
The idea first showed up in scientific papers in the 1960s, when a physicist named Gerald Feinberg wrote about the “possibility of faster-than-light particles.” He argued that they could come from a quantum field with something called “imaginary mass.” Sounds made up, right? But in physics, “imaginary” doesn’t mean fake; it’s just a mathematical term. This unusual twist lets tachyons slip through the usual speed rules.
Of course, most physicists still roll their eyes at tachyons. And for good reason: every experiment that’s looked for them has come up empty. Plus, if they really exist, they could mess with causality, meaning they could, in theory, send messages backward in time.
Early versions of tachyon theory had other problems, too. For example, they suggested that the fields tachyons come from might be unstable, or that the energy could dip into negative values, basically breaking the math.
But later twists to the theory tried to fix some of these issues by taking into account not just where a particle starts, but where it ends up too. With that extra information, the math becomes more stable, though we still haven’t seen any real-world evidence.
So, could we ever detect a tachyon? Not directly. Because they’d always be outrunning light, we’d never see them in the normal way. Some theories say you’d see them as a weird split image appearing and disappearing at the same time.
But maybe we could catch their footprints in other ways. If tachyons have what’s called “anti-mass” or a strange version of mass energy, they might still pull on gravity in tiny ways that our most sensitive detectors could pick up. Or if they’re electrically charged, they might give off something called Cherenkov radiation, kind of like the blue glow you see in nuclear reactors when particles zoom faster than light does in water.
I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn!
Sources:
Images:
Comments