Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseAre Tachyons real or just the stuff of science fiction? Thanks to Prof. Flip Tanedo (UC Riverside) for scientific review.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield savings account through Apple Card, apply for Applecard in the wallet app subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit us Dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
Here's a little secret. Most smartphone deals aren't that exciting. To be honest, they're barely worth mentioning. But then there's AT and T and their best deals. Those are quite exciting.
They're the kind of deals that are really worth talking about, like their deal in the new Samsung Galaxy Z flip six. With this deal, you can trade in your eligible smartphone, any year, any condition for a new Samsung Galaxy Z flip six.
It's so good, in fact, it will have.
You shouting from the rooftops. So get yourself down a street level and learn how to snag the new Samsung Galaxy Z flip six on AT and T and maybe grab a ladder on the way home. AT and T connecting changes everything requires trade in a Galaxy s Note or Z series smartphone, limited time offer two hundred and fifty six gigabytes for zero dollars. Additional fees, terms and restrictions apply. See att dot com, slash Samsung, or visit an AT and T store for details.
Hey Daniel, do particle physicists ever make mistakes?
Oh?
Yeah, all the time. One time I ordered licorice ice cream, big mistake.
I once had garlic ice cream. That was probably a bigger mistake. Do you know't they make garlic ice cream?
Yeah? They have pretty experimental flavors, sometimes with ice creams.
What I mean is, have physicists ever written papers that, like scientific papers, that turn out to be wrong?
You know, it does happen. The most famous example comes from maybe the Opera experiment, which in twenty eleven claimed to have measured neutrinos going faster than the speed of light.
Wow.
Turns out they just had a cable loose, and when they jiggled it, all the numbers got back into sink and everything was traveling happily less than the speed of light.
Oh man, particles can't travel faster than light.
Probably not. But you know, if particles could travel faster than the speed of light, physicists are already set up with an awesome name for them.
Oh yeah, they have a good name for this far faster than light particle? Is it called the garlic kino.
Or the liquor ons.
Linker on? That's like a terrible pun, like a not safer work pun. Hi am Porge and I'm Daniel, and welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we take the universe and explain everything in it to you, including things which might not be possible.
That's right, things with that are tasteful and nice, and things that are maybe a little.
Tacky, things which stretch the boundaries of understanding, things which might even break the laws of physics themselves.
Today on the program, we're going to talk about tachions. Are they real? What are they? Are they really? Taki?
What are they on?
Who taught them their sense of style?
Exactly? Tachions are a fascinating concept because, first of all, theoret from a theoretical physics point of view, they're interesting. Like the idea for a tachyon is a particle that travels faster than the speed of light, and so that already is like immediately arresting, like is it possible? How would that work? What would it mean? Right? But they also exist in science fiction.
So this is a particle that it exists in the minds of physicists, but we don't know if it exists in the real world.
Yeah, exactly. And it's the really interesting history sort of the idea. There was a short story written by somebody in which they had particles going faster than the speed of light. So it started in science fiction, and then there was a physicist that read that story and thought, hmm, could you do that? Would that be possible? And sat down sort of worked out the mathematics of it, and then gave it a name, called it a tachyon. And then more science fiction writers heard about that and thought, oh, well, this must be a real thing now, And now it's like everywhere in science fiction, and you heard tachions everywhere.
It's like a cosmic bad case of telephone.
Exactly exactly, just sort of an idea of bouncing around. And you know there must be something really to it. If it's really resonating in the minds of physicists and science fiction authors, you know, it's something tantalizing, something exciting, something people want to be true, Right.
Yeah, because it would expand our kind of what's possible in the universe.
Right yeah. Or it would expand the plot options available to science fiction authors.
Right.
If you can send particles fast in the speed of light and backwards in time and all sorts of stuff, then there's lots of things you can do with your plots.
That's right. If you follow the laws of physics, all science fiction would be pretty boring.
Right, that's right. You know everything in the first scene you can predict the whole story, right. Actually, I feel like a lot of science fiction is like that. You read one chapter, you know the whole story.
You know the whole story. Yeah, did this writer come up with a name for the takion or was it the physicists who read the story?
No, it was the physicist. So the story was a written by a guy named Blish and the story is called beep involves like messages from aliens that come in. At the end of every message, there's a beep and it turns out of the beep and codes like all future messages or whatever. Oops, I just spoiled the story for everybody anyway, because parts of the message travel fast than the speed of light. And so then the physicists read the story and came up with it in a nineteen sixty seven paper. This physicist named Gerald Feinberg, and so he coined the name takeion as far as I unders did. But you know now it's everywhere. It's in nim pop culture, everywhere you turn.
Yeah, he should have named after the author the bleishy on.
I think catch on quite as much, or the beepies.
No, but you know, I read about tacons because they're part of the integral part of the plot of one of my favorite coming books and in fact, one of the most fast comic books of all time.
Oh wait, what is Jorge's favorite comic book? I'm dying to know.
It's one of my favorites, is it? Man?
It's you can throw banana peels from the tips of his fingers and make anybody slip.
It's a liquorice lady, liquors lady.
Wow, there's so many not safe for work jokes that can make about the liquorse lady.
Yeah, they'll need to be beeped out.
Exactly. So tell me what is your favorite comic book?
One of my favorite comic books, and that is one of the most famous comic books of all time is Watchmen? Have have you seen the comic book or the graphic novel or the movie.
I have read the graphic novel, and I have seen all eleven hours of the movie.
All different versions except all the slow motion scenes that Zack Snyder added.
Yeah, yeah, no, I love what is it? Mister Atomic who can basically do anything at the end of the movie, so all plots can just be resolved by mister Atomic if necessary. Doctor Manhattan, What's his name document Professor Atomic.
I like your version better, mister Atomic. That sounds that sounds better. No, it's a doctor Manhattan or mister Manhattan. I think doctor Manhatten. And yeah, so he can see tachyons, so that that's kind of how he can and he sort of exists in this kind of quantum you know, uncertainty space time kind of mindset, so he can see the future, see the past, he sees it all sort of at the same time. And so that's how the villain in the comic book I'm not going to spoil it, kind of gets around this. He confuses doctor Manhattan by adding a lot of tachyon interference, and so he can't predict the future and he doesn't know what's going to happen.
M very clever, Yes, yeah, very clever. You also see tacions a lot in Star Trek. I noticed It's like tachyonic pulses and tactyonic fields and all sorts of stuff. Anytime they need to go back in time or send messages back in time or whatever, they're always using tachions, right.
They just always sort of forget to say that these things are not real.
Well, you know, they're real. In the Star Trek universe. I suppose they don't really play with all the consequences. You know, if you really did have tachyons, a lot of things would break about modern physics, right, you know. I had a bit of a tachionic experience today. Actually, that just reminds me. I went to file some paperwork for my student who just defended his PhD, and he wasn't in town, so we couldn't file it himself. So I went to this office in the basement and turned in these forms, and the woman at the desk must have thought that it was my PhD, because when I turned the forum, she reached out she said congratulations, as if I was getting my PhD. At this moment, I thought, wow, all right, maybe I went back in time and now I look like I'm twenty seven again.
Or maybe she wasn't wearing her glasses.
That's another It was a pretty dark basement, so I can excuse her.
Yeah, always in the basement.
It's in the basement. But his thesis was not on tachions though.
But actually we don't know if they're real or not, right, Like, it's a theoretical possibility, but we have no confirmation. Do we have confirmation that they can exist.
We do not know that they cannot exist. Right, But that's a pretty broad caveat because in general, it's really hard to prove the non existence of something. And you can always say with an asterisk, like if all we know about physics turns out to be wrong or a special case of the unit part of the universe we're living in, than anything could happen. Right, So, in general, it's pretty hard to say with absolute certainty something cannot exist. But you can say, and we'll get into this more more deeply, that it'd be pretty hard to fulld tachions into our modern understanding of physics, right, maybe harder than choking down a whole scoop of liquorice ice.
Cream more impleasant. Then you really wish you would you could go back in time.
You know. The joke is, my wife actually loves liquorice ice cream, and one time we went to an ice cream place and she ordered two scoops of liquorice ice cream, and I saw her eating her deliciously. She didn't tell me what it was, and I tried to take a bite out of it, and it literally like jumped out of my mouth, it was still impulsive. Wow, ejected itself from my mouth.
That's like your your your kryptonite or your tachion interference.
Yeah, it turns out actually there's lots of things can defeat me. But one of them on the long list is liquoric ice cream. Yes, one of them upsets your stomach, yeah, or my tongue.
Well, atacons is it's kind of a cool name, first of all, tachions. But and we know that it's in science fiction a lot. It's in comic books and science fictions, in science fiction. But we were wondering how many people out there knew what it means and what it refers to it.
So I went around the uc her on campus and I costed random students and said, hey, would you answer a random science question? And all of them said yes, And so I asked them about tachions. And here's what they had to say. Heard of a tachyon? Do you know what a tachyon is? What's your best guess? It's a particle which gets admitted from a black hole.
Is that it?
No best guess? I would assume it has something to do with space.
I'm space, okay.
I have no idea Okay, not yet.
I haven't heard of it. Okay, I've also heard it in a TV show. I think it's in The Flash. I think they talk about that, but I don't know what it is. This sounds cool, they sounds cool. No, I have no idea okay.
No a tak on.
I don't know what it is, but it sounds like.
Something chemical, something from Star Trek.
That's literally as far as my knowledge goes.
But I'm not actually sure if it's.
Even real or not. It could be entirely from science fiction as far as i'm more.
All right, not a single positive answer, Not a.
Single positive answer. A lot of people had heard of it, right, Some people had never heard of it, but some people heard of it in content the science fiction or Star Trek or this kind of stuff.
Oh, in the Flash, right, I think they have it in the TV show of the Flash.
Yeah, the Flash must have it, right, because he breaks all sorts of laws of physics. It's basically the laws of physics, break particle. Right, anytime you need to break physics, just insert some tachions.
That's what she just called. The plot holyons, the plots right, the plot eons. It's like, yeah, it's like filling a pothole right with fill potholes with tachyons, fill plot holes with tachyons. Yeah, so it's done. Not not a common name that people are familiar with. So let's break it down, Daniel. But first let's take a quick break.
With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price you thought you were paying magically skyrockets. With mint Mobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When Mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So ditch your overpriced wireless with Mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bills to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash Universe, forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only. Speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxi speeds and restrictions apply. See mint mobile for details.
AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested, so buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power, So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control. It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and of course nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Data Bricks Mosaic. Take a free test drive of OCI at Oracle dot com slash strategic. That's Oracle dot com slash Strategic. Oracle dot com slash Strategic.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield savings account through Applecard, apply for card in the wallet app, subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch Member, FDIC, terms and more at applecard dot com.
Let's start with this. What is a tacon all right?
So tachion is a theoretical particle. Right, It's an idea. It's idea for a particle that can travel faster than the speed of light. Right. And remember, in relativity we say nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. We say things that have mass can travel less than the speed of light. Thing and approach it, things with no mass. Like photons, they travel always at the speed of light, right, so there's this speed limit to the universe, the speed of light in a vacuum. Tachions are like, what if something could break that? What if something could move faster than the speed of light? How would that work? And what should we call it? So that's attacking on is I like?
How that's the second most important question about it? Not how will disrevolutionize our understanding on our ability to travel? The costumes? It's like, what are we going to call it?
Oh?
Yeah, there's big fights over the names of stuff, right. You know, if you come up with a cool idea, you got to name it so it sticks, right, and you get the credit for it. You know. This is that famous case in particle physics where two groups discovered the same particle on the same day and gave it different names, right the same day, the same day. Yeah, oh, there's a whole lot of fun whisper stories about how maybe grad students in one group tipped off grad students in the other group. Anyway, they named it on the same day, and they gave it two different names. So now we call that particle the j SI particle. We use both names because nobody can agree.
Right, Really, you guys have fights about this, like I want it to be called J. No, I want it to be called SI, Like it's not it's not even personal to them.
Well, I think it is personal. The guy who called it J He's Chinese, and I think j is looks like the Chinese character for his name, So I think it was basically naming it after himself. But no, these are like the kids of divorced parents, you know, end up with the long, complicated names. Anyway, Yes, so naming things very important, and as you and I have discussed many times in this podcast, physicists don't always do a great job of naming things. Like sometimes they don't even come up with a new name. They're just like, use a word that already exists in English that means something else to describe some physics thing, right, Like we have particles that have flavor and color, and like particles don't have actual flavor and color, so we should have come up with different words. So in this case, I think it's awesome that they actually came up with a new, cool sounding word.
Yeah, I think if you discover quirk Daniel, you should call it a new flavor.
Licorice, the disgusting quarks, the revolting quarks, the vomit quarks. It turns out vomit is made out of little vomiton particles.
Technically that's true, yeah, if you write it in a physics paper.
Right, So, but it's always fun theoretically to think about, like, how could this work? What would it mean if we took the laws of special relativity and tried to use them to describe something going faster than the speed of light? What would happen? What exactly would break? How could we tested? That's sort of the point of attacking.
So it starts with a hypothesis like what if one of these particles could go faster than light? What would it look like?
Yes, exactly exactly what would it look like? How do we see it? Could you like break two things at once so that in the end it's not broken, right, Like, sometimes you have to break one law of physics and that as a consequence somewhere else and you're like, okay, well maybe I'll just break that one also, and then things will be honky dory. Right, So, sometimes you can make big discoveries by breaking two things at once. Right, You could reveal that there were two mistakes, two misunderstandings we had about the universe. That'd be like two Nobel Prizes in one afternoon.
Whoa, two wrongs making it right?
Yeah, And so that actually sort of happens here, and so as you folks listening might know. The interesting idea relativity. One of the core ideas in relativity is that you can have infinite amount of energy. There's no limit on the energy a particle can have, right, You can keep pouring energy into a particle, but there is a limit on speed. Right. So for example, at the Large Hadron Collider, we push particles using little waves, so they surf and they get more and more energy, but then they approach the speed of light and they never really get faster. That doesn't limit us from adding more energy to the particles, right.
It's kind of like an infinite bucket almost, like you can keep pouring energy into it, but the speed just won't go over the speed of light.
Yeah. And if you're a visual person, you can think of sort of a graph. Right. Our basic idea of the relationship between speed and energy is that they're directly connected. Right, as you go faster, you get more energy and that's true. But then as you approach the speed of light, it sort of bends over and it asymptotically approaches the speed of light. So you can keep pouring energy in, but the speed never goes higher. And there's this mathematical relationship. You can write it down, you can look at it on Wikipedia. You know, it involves this complicated expression. It's like energy is mass squared over the square root of one minus v squared over C squared. And that's mathematically how you get that expression. But the cool thing is you can say, all right, well, what happens if you just plug in velocity is twice the speed of light? What happens mathematically? What does that mean? Oh?
I see, like, what have you cross over that line? What have you assume that you filled the bucket and went over?
Yeah, exactly. And you know it's just playing around. This is what theoretical physicists do for fun. They're like, let's poke these equations and see what happens. And so it does get interesting because on the bottom of the equation it gets the number inside the square root goes negative, right, so you have like square root of a negative number, and you're probably thinking, what you can't have the square rod of a negative number, right, Like, what number when you multiply it by itself gives you negative two? Right, Well, there's no real number. You have to go to imaginary numbers.
Uh huh, which means that this particle is imaginary or it has imaginary mass.
Well, it means it has imaginary energy, right, because the expression is energy is basically mass over this crazy velocity term. If that velocity term goes goes imaginary, then the energy goes imaginary, And you're like, what what does that mean? So this is what I mean by breaking two things. So then physicists thought, okay, well what if we make the top part of the equation also imaginary. So we make the mass imaginary. Then you have velocity greater than the speed of light, imaginary mass, but real energy like actual energy.
So if you just say that this particle has imaginary mass, and let's get into what that means. But if you say that it has imaginary mass, then the laws of physics technically don't break. If this particle goes faster than might.
Well, if I don't know that, the laws physics don't break, we can talk about that a little later. It turns out they break other things also, But this one equation does hold, right, This equation for the relationship essentially between energy and speed does hold. But yeah, it requires you to have imaginary mass, and it also means for other really weird things. For normal particles, as the velocity increases, the energy increases, right right In this case, if you look at the equation, as the speed goes up, the energy actually goes to zero. So the faster it goes the less energy it has. That's pretty weird.
Yeah, because everything in nature wants to have low energy. So that means this particle would just keep going faster and faster and faster to infinity exactly.
So as it goes to zero energy, it has infinite speed. Like what does that even mean? You know, now you have a particle with like infinite speed and imaginary mass but no energy. Right, it's pretty weird thing.
Uh huh. But technically maybe could exist.
Technically maybe could exist. Right, There's some causality issues we'll talk about a little later, but that's sort of the concept. Like, that's the idea of attacking on and it's a fun thing to play with theoretically, and you know this is before you think this is a waste of time. Remember, this is how progress is made, you know. This is how, for example, anti particles were discovered. People were looking at the equations and they were like, hmm, what if you flip the sign of this and flip the sign of that. Oh, look, looks like this equation would also hold for opposite charge particles. I wonder if they exist.
Let's go look, I see and they did exist.
And they do exist. Yeah, there's a rich source of searching around for the corners of the equations and seeing if they describe some actual physics that might be real that we just hadn't imagined, because there's a lot of crazy stuff out there in the universe that we haven't conceived of.
Well, it's kind of a philosophical thing because you're sort of saying that anything that can exist mathematically so far, we think has existed. Right, Like, if if the equations say that this is possible and doesn't break everything else, then if you keep searching, you sort of so far you sort of you found it.
Yeah, it's a subtle point, right. Sometimes we have mathematical descriptions of things and then we look at the mathematics we're like, well, the math says that, but physics says no, right, Like, sometimes a mathematical equation will have two solutions and one of them will be nonsense, and you say, well, that's not physical, so we'll ignore it. But yeah, then you have to wonder is it really is that? Are we doing science there or are we just sort of like enforcing our prejudices? Right? Should we be more open minded and explore all the possibilities of the math. And sometimes the math is all we have, Like, look at quantum mechanics. You can't even apply your intuition. You just have to blindly follow the math and say, well, quantum mechanics says a particle can appear on one side of the barrier and then appear on the other side of the barrier without passing through it. So and then we do the experiments and it happens, right, So sometimes you just have to follow the math.
Yeah, you say, sometimes you have to be kind of open minded and say, hey, what if maths could be imaginary and let's see what happens.
Then yes, that's exactly that's the whole point, right, That's why you poke these equations because it could just be our prejudice. It could be that the way we're thinking about the universe is determined by the way we have experienced it, which is, we know, not typical and not fundamental. Right, So we don't want to be have our eyes closed because of the biases of the way we have lived and grown up, Right, So we want to keep our own eyes open, and sometimes the math is a very helpful guide.
Well, I have a great money making scheme for you, Daniel. It's called the Tachyon diet makes your mass imaginary.
Gee, I imagined you were fat, but I guess that was wrong.
Yeah, you just had the wrong perspective in physics.
Yeah, well, what's the diet? Run fast in the speed of light and you'll lose weight.
I think it's go back in time and stop yourself from eating all that liquors ice cream is.
You know, we're recording this podcast on pie day, so we should have done all these examples with pie instead of ice cream. Hi, Lior, liquorice pie. That sounds even more gross than liquors ice cream, if that's even possible.
Here, let's go back in time using tachions and start over.
In a replace search and replace ice cream with pie. But hey, pie and ice cream go well together. So we'll start with ice cream and we'll switch over to pie, and then the episode would be like alla mode.
Yeah, they go well together. So let's get into what they actually might look like. But first, let's take a quick break.
When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of greeky yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn them thing from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone. Know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient intents dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit us dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
Have you boosted your business with Lenovo Pro yet? Become a Lenovo Pro member for free today and unlock access to Lenovo's exclusive business store for technology expert advisors and essential products and services designed just for you. Visit Lenovo dot com slash Lenovo Pro to sign up for free. That's Lenovo dot com slash Lenovo Pro. Lenovo unlock new AI experiences with Lenovo's think Pad x one carbon powered by Intel Core ultraprocessors.
There are chiltern friends and families walking, riding on passing the roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to.
Get home safely.
Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they are people too.
Go safely.
California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans.
All right, Daniel, So that's a tachyon. It's a theoretical particle with imaginary mass that can go faster on the speed of light. So what does that even look like? What would the tachyon look like? What could we interact with it?
Yeah, here's where it gets really fun as you start to think, how could we see tachyons? What experiments could you build to detect them? Right? And we think tachyons, you know, they have masks though it's imaginary, and we think we could interact with them. We don't know what kind of interactions they might have, but imagine that they're visible, right, that they interact with light, Then you can think about like doing an experiment to look at a tachyon. This already gets really tricky because the tacions are moving faster than the light they might be emitting. So you know how like an airplane moving through the air creates a sonic boom because it's moving faster than the sound it makes right, Right, That means that you can't hear the airplane coming. Right, one of those airplanes is coming at you, then you're not going to hear it coming because the sound it's making it is trailing behind it.
So you it would just magically appear to you.
Yeah, so it's the same thing for a take on. Right, If a taky on is moving and it's moving faster than the speed of light, and it's coming right at you, you wouldn't see it until it's on top of you. Right, Wow, it would just appear to you.
That's just bad manners. I mean, that's just taky.
You know, it's tacky and it's Anya. That must have been how they got the name, right, Yeah, and I spilled my liquorice pie all over my suit.
Let's just show up at this guy's house and be like, is this why you came up with the name have some Pie?
Yeah? In fact, in fact, you would see the tachyon. But even weirder than it just appearing all of a sudden, is it would look like it's going away from you. Yeah. When you see something moving away from you, what you're really seeing are a bunch of time slices. Right. You see it's closer to you now, it's a little further away from you. A moment later, it's a little further away from you a moment after that. Right. Oh, that's the order of arrival of images from tachyons.
You would first see the photons that are that it admitted when it was close to you before you saw the photons that it admitted when it was far from you.
Exactly exactly. So if you play that movie, your brain's gonna be like, oh, there's a taking on moving away from you, right, so attacking on. If you see a tachyon moving away from you, it means you just got hit by a tacky on.
But you would see it. Oh, so you would see it.
Hmm.
You almost see it moving backwards in time.
Right, like, yeah, exactly, you see it moving the reverse direction it's actually going.
So that's weird.
That's pretty weird, right. It's weird for particles to look like they're going different speeds if they're coming towards you or going away from you.
Right.
We're just not used to that, and that's because of this weird feature that they travel faster than the information that they're sending. Right.
Well, that's kind of one of the reasons why physicists don't think you can even go faster than the speed of flight, because it would just be so weird.
Yeah, exactly, would break a lot of rules. But you know, sometimes things are weird, and being weird doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong, you know. I think one of the really fascinating things. Is this question of imaginary mass that we mentioned earlier.
Like, yeah, I'm still hung up in that. What does that mean?
Yeah? Well what does it mean? Right? And you have to think for a moment about what we mean by a particle's mass. When we say, you know, electron has a certain mass, what we mean is that the particles is stable, like exists, it can hang out for a little while. And we just did that episode about what particles are, and turns out particles are not like the building block of the universe at all. They are just excited states of quantum fields. Right, So what is a particle of a certain mass. It's a stable excitation of a quantum field, Meaning there's this weird jelly out there that knows how to wiggle, and it can wiggle in a certain way that sticks around for a while.
Mass is kind of a marker of how stable the wiggles are.
Yeah, exactly. So if you talk about a particle with imaginary mass, you're talking about strange wiggles going through this these quantum fields, right, these jellies wiggling in a weird way, and not in a way that's stable. Right. Imaginary mass does not mean it's a stable particle. It means it's something else, and you're trying to describe it in terms of a particle, and so you get a weird answer.
You know.
It's like, oh, I see, It's.
Like if you use the language of one thing to try to describe something else, it doesn't really make sense, you know.
So it's almost like we get we have to stop using the word particle and just say wiggles in a quantum field. And if you just stop calling it a particle and just call everything wiggles in a quantum field, then you could technically have a wiggle that has imaginary mass.
Yeah, exactly right, And it breaks your idea of what a particle is. But anyway, what your idea of a particle is is probably wrong anyway, So feel free to break it all, smash it all ahead, you know, just yeah, yeah, well it's true. You know, particles are not fundamental, right, They are an emergent phenomena. They come from how quantum fields wiggle. And we don't know quantum fields are fundamental either or there's something else that makes them. But we do know the particles themselves we're not fundamental because you know, they can be created and disappear. So tachyons are like a weird different way for quantum fields to wiggle. And that's what imaginary mass is. It's this. It's a sort of a breakdown of trying to describe quantum fields in terms of particles. Right, it's saying you should look at this in a different way.
But it could technically exist, Like would these fields could wiggle in that way?
I don't think so. And and the reason is that if you had tachions, then these fields could wiggle in a way that breaks causality. Right, And so this is physics, right. The math says it's fine. The math says, there's no problem with it. You can incorporate this into special relativity. You get these weird things like zero energy and infinite speed. But you know, the math is happy with it. Physics says no. Physics says, but we have these other rules, these other rules, like causes happen before effects. You know, messages have to arrive after they're scent, not before. Right. You have to be born after your grandfather, not before this kind of stuff. We impose these requirements on the universe and on the laws of physics separately.
Right, But why does the universe have to follow causality? Couldn't we, like you said, be open minded and imagine a universe that is not causal?
Yeah, I suppose we could, But it's sort of hard to logically argue for a non causal universe because logic requires causality. Right.
Well, I feel like you're saying logic requires logic. But what if yes, maybe the universe is not logical.
Yeah, so you're saying, like, could we describe? Could we have laws of physics that describe a universe that doesn't have laws? I don't know how to do that. It's so fundamental to the way we think. It's a fundamental to the way humanity thinks, not even just about physics, you know, I think that we are storytellers. We weave all of our experiences into stories, and that's how we remember things and forget things and communicate to each other. That's how we build models of the world that's outside our head. And stories are causal right there, They're a narrative that I did this, and then this happened. I shot this laser beam and then you know this, the wall burnt down or whatever, right licouriice ice cream? And then I threw up right, this cause and effect.
So you can write stories, I mean science fiction, you can write stories to that have tacons in them. You know what I mean, Like you can you can imagine it break story.
Breaks the story. Right, it's a huge plot hole. That's why I hate time travel in science fiction because it breaks causality. Right, it doesn't make any sense.
Okay, well let's break it down. What does it mean? Like, if this particle existed, I think can go faster than light. What are some of the things cool things you could do with it?
Right? So, in special relativity, if you have something that goes faster than light, what it means is you can break causality. You can kind of go backwards in time. Now, remember we talked about special relativit on another episode, and something we talked about is how there's no universal description of how things happen. Right. If, for example, if I shoot two laser beams, one to the left and one to the right, and I'm just looking at both, I can say, okay, they the two laser beams hit the targets at the same time. Because the targets is the same distance away. Somebody else with a different speed might see those events happening at different times. They might say, oh, laser beam one hit before laser beam two, and somebody else at a different speed might see laser beam two happen before laser beam one. Right, So if you can change so you can change the order in which you see things happening based on your speed, that just tells you there's no absolute truth to the universe, right right, Okay, so okay, but those things are not causally linked. Right, It doesn't really matter if laser beam one one hits or laser beam two hits. Okay, but what if you just had the one laser beam and you press the button? Right, Can the laser beam arrive before it leaves? Right? Can the laser beam hit the target before you've pressed the button? Those two things are causally linked, right, It seems impossible for it to get there before you press the button.
Well, it's costantly linked. If you go backwards in time. Do you know what I mean? Like it arrived because in the future, I'm gonna press the button.
Yeah, But what if it arrives and then you change your mind, You're like, you know what, I'm not gonna hit that laser beam button? Right, now, but it's already.
Arrived, right, But if you changed your mind, that means you didn't see it. I feel like this is a like you can pick a different movie to go with your theory. Like there's there are the movies that movies.
They are not loss of physics.
All right, fine graphic novels.
That's going coming, No, Like seriously, the laser beam arrives and if later you still have a choice to make about whether to press that button, then you could choose not to fire the laser beam right and then, But the laser beams already arrived, So how does that work? Anyway? The point is multiverse. Point is relativity covers that. Okay, Relativity says that for events that are not causally linked, or one could happen before the other, you can travel fast enough if you want that you could see either one happen first. But for things that are causally connected, where one has to happen before the other, like pressing a button on your laser and then hitting the target, there's no speed you can go to see the laser arrive before you press the button. To do that, you would have to go faster than the speed of light to reverse the order of events, and relativity says you can't. But what if there wasn't a speed limit, right, What if you could shoot particles fasten the speed of light. Well, then you could go fast enough so that messages could arrive before they're scent, right, Laser beams could hit the targets before you press the button if you go fast in the speed of light, so it breaks causality.
If the light goes faster than the speed of light, or if you send a message via attack.
Count if you send a message via attack. Yeah, exactly, Okay, So tachions, if they can travel fasten the speed of light, can sort of reverse the events, reverse orders of events, so that effects happen before causes, right, which is pretty.
Weird, Which is pretty cool.
It would be pretty cool. Sure, Yeah, you know, like, hey, I already ate that pie. Now I'd like to go back in time and decide not to eat that pie. Then you could have eaten the pie and have decided not to eat the pie, and yeah, it would break the universe, but at least you wouldn't gain those five pounds.
That would be kind of tacky though, if you did that at a restaurant, Not.
If his liquor is pie, then I totally endorse it, just breaking the universe to avoid eating it.
So it's almost like an anti telephone, like it sends sends your message before you even think about sending the message.
Yes, exactly, And that's what it's called. It's called a tachyonic anti telephone. Exactly. If you had tachions, you could use them to build a telephone that sent messages back in time exactly that way.
That's what I should tell my kids. It's not that I don't wanted to play with my phone, it's just that we're an anti telephone.
It's an anti telephone. Don't bring it near a telephone, it'll blow up.
So you're basically saying that taccions are kind of impossible because it would break the logic of the universe.
Yeah, And I mean if you hold causality be a fundamental principle of the universe, which I do, then it's pretty hard to believe that anything could go faster than the speed of light. But the math says tachions could exist, and it's possible that we're wrong about causality. That it's just it's a prejudice that we've imposed on the universe because it's the way we think, and maybe the universe doesn't operate the way we think. Totally possible. Happened lots of times in physics that we've upended our basic understanding of the universe, right, and I've been confronted by reality.
Yeah, all right, Well that was cool to learn what attacking is and how it's an imaginary or it has imaginary mass and it's theoretically possible but not likely. And Dannity had the idea of closing this episode with a limerick.
Yeah. I was doing some research about Tachians and I found this hilarious physics poem. Right, It's not that often that you find physics and humor and poetry altogether, and so I thought, let's jump on the opportunity.
Right, sub subgenre of science fiction.
Yeah, not many authors specialize in this area, but there is one. This is by a gentleman named Reginald Buller, and it goes like this. There was a young lady named Bright whose speed was far faster than light. She went out one day in a relative way and returned the previous night. So there is your physics poetry. I noticed you didn't laugh.
Well, I was just hung up on that first line. Her name is Bright. That sounds like a plot hole to me.
I see, mister, the universe follows the laws of television shows and movies is now cratizing. I think the physics poetry for not being accurate. Nice.
Yeah, you know how many how many people do you know are called pride? Anyways, I'm actually a member of an organization called the Brights. M I don't know what to do with that.
Not joking, all right, So thanks everyone for listening to this non tacky episode about tachyons. For bending your mind a little bit. And remember that's some of those crazy ideas that earned physicists head and science fiction authors are writing about. They could actually be real. And one day we might discover that the universe is far far stranger than we ever imagined.
Yeah, and if one day you do discover tacons, why don't you send a message to yourself backwards of time and let us know that's right?
Hey, we could do a test right now, right in the future, somebody discovers tachons, send us a message to arrive right now.
Wait, hold on, I just got a call. Wait here we go, Let me let you pick it up. Hold on.
Is it from a lady named Bright She's pissed at you for insulting her name. Ask her in the future off. Our podcast is a huge success.
Okay, hold on, let me text Heim. Oh well, wait, my phone doesn't send things. Oh wait does send things into the future.
So it does send things into the future, just not backward.
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. Guys, thanks for tuning in.
Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and jorgey that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
As a United Explorer card member, you can earn fifty thousand bonus miles plus look forward to extraordinary travel rewards, including a free checked bag, two times the miles on United purchases and two times the miles on dining and at hotels. Become an Explorer and seek out unforgettable places while enjoying rewards words Everywhere You Travel. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC subject to credit approval Offer subject to change. Terms apply.
Hear that pumpkin that's fall calling, and the pumpkin Spice Latte is back at Starbucks. From that first sweater to late autumn weather, it's all a fall in just one sip. Order ahead on the Starbucks app
