Are they real? Can you prove it? What's with the german physicist who does the experiment where the electronic signal is detected before it is sent thus proving the existence of a super-luminal particle . I saw this on Television a few years ago and forgot. He is either very smart or very crazy.......
Please dont tell me what tachyon paticles are.
2006-12-26 19:35:57 · 2 answers · asked by Anonymous in Science & Mathematics ➔ Astronomy & Space
scared to think on your own without copying your
2006-12-26 19:51:23 · update #1
from a book......go back and engineer some more bolts.
2006-12-26 19:52:06 · update #2
Tachyons, if they were to exist, would by definition always travel faster than the speed of light. But there's no observational evidence that tachyons exist. The only reason why some people have proposed that such a particle might exist is because "faster-than-light" particles would satisfy all the relativity equations.
I may be using the word "satisfy" a bit loosely however. Tachyons would have to either have a mass or an energy which is an imaginary number. One could argue that this is a pretty nonphysical idea. They'd also have the bizarre property that if you give a tachyon more energy, it would slow down (but never move as "slow" as the speed of light).
Tachyons do serve one useful purpose though. They're frequently invoked in discussions of time travel in science fiction. :)
2006-12-26 22:56:04 · answer #1 · answered by Sporadic 3 · 2⤊ 0⤋
it does seem quite bizzare that the measurement of one photon's polariziation can determine another's instantly .I think this is the expeiment that you may have heard of, or it could have been the one where you measure the particle's spin, they are basically the same idea though. The idea of a tachyon going back through time to 'tell' the other photon what it's polarisation should be is quite hard to grasp but it seems that this 'action at a distance' may be unavoidable. No-one knows if they are actually real because no one has ever detected one. this idea also proves useful to the problem of interia - how does a particle 'know' how to react when we push it? particles appear to move with respect to their average position in the universe, so using the tachyon theory, all particles in the universe are connected by a web of forward and backward in time signals.
2006-12-27 07:38:11 · answer #2 · answered by william k 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋