Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site pur-phy.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!CS-Mordred!Pucc-H:pur-phy!act From: act@pur-phy.UUCP (Alex C. Tselis) Newsgroups: net.physics Subject: Re: Re: Question on FTL and quantum mechanics Message-ID: <1558@pur-phy.UUCP> Date: Wed, 5-Dec-84 02:45:21 EST Article-I.D.: pur-phy.1558 Posted: Wed Dec 5 02:45:21 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 6-Dec-84 03:52:04 EST References: <654@ames.UUCP> <6201@mcvax.UUCP> <274@mhuxm.UUCP> <155@talcott.UUCP> Distribution: net Organization: Purdue Univ. Physics Dept., IN Lines: 29 > > You ought to read up on tachyons which are particles moving faster > > than light. They can't slow down in the same way that we can't speed > > up to c. There is no known evidence of tachyons. > > Tachyons are dead. Some respected physicist published a paper on them > once. There were many replies, to the effect of, "you made a mistake in > your physics." The guy then said, "oops", and that was the end of it. > > Then some non-physicists discovered the original article and published much > literature about it. > > Sorry that I don't remember any of the names involved. Theoretically speaking, tachyons are not quite dead, but as the second correspondent says, they are dead in practice. Even if they do exist, they interact with matter only very weakly. (Some searches were done for them, but uncovered naught.) The physicist who first talked about them was, I think, Gerald Fineberg, at Columbia University. There's an interesting paper on the violation of causality by tachyons: Thouless, D.J., "Causality and Tachyons", Nature, vol. 244, pg. 506 (1969) There's also a nice discussion in: Harwit, Martin, ASTROPHYSICAL CONCEPTS, John Wiley & Sons, New York (1973) But practically speaking, no physicist takes them all that seriously anymore. The non-physicists also escape me, but I guess there are lots of science fiction writers who use tachyons for their own purposes.