Particles faster than light: Tachyons and the physics of the impossible?
In the world of physics as we know it today, the speed of light is the ultimate limit. According to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, no object in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light (c).
But the idea of particles traveling faster than light fascinates me. What do you think of this theory?
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this is only a mathematical artifact that originates from the positive or negative solution of a square. If there are tachyons, they can only be faster than light, not slower and not interact with normal matter.
But then it would be possible that tachyons move back in time.
in what time? You can't compare them to any watch we can read.
Yes
Interesting thanks for your answer
time dilation can never be measured because tachyons do not interact with our measuring instruments. They belong, so to speak, to a completely different universe or to the kingdom of legends.
I know what you mean there is time, but because the particles would have to go back faster than light then the particles would have to go back in the relative time. Since time dilation, a concept of relativity theory, states that for accelerated bodies time is slower, it could be concluded
Hello EinSteinimWald,
However, the general theory of relativity relativizes this statement again: space can spread so quickly that it can remove things in it overwhelmingly from one another.
In addition, the speed of light depends on the gravity potential. In the vicinity of heavy masses – from the perspective of a distant observer – it is significantly smaller than c.
Where a local observer would still measure c because his clocks ran correspondingly slower, all of them. For him, instead, the light would be a bit faster far away, and so far away objects could be faster than light moves near him.
The mathematics of the SRT actually allows particles that only can move faster than with speed of light, and the faster they are. If they exist, however, they could not have anything like an internal temporal order, because there is always a coordinate system in which a tachyon flew infinitely fast, and then there is also one in which it moved backwards or in the opposite direction.
FIG. 1: The same scenario in two different coordinate systems Σ and Σ′, which are defined by two bodies B and B′ moved relative to one another. The Green Line represents the path of a tachyon through the time of space.