What Is A Tachyon?

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Speaker 1: 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 That was probably a bigger mistake. Do you know 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 the Maybe the Opera experiment, which in two thousand 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 fast in the speed of light, physicist are already set up with an awesome name for them. Oh yeah, they have a good name for this far faster than light particles. They called the garlic kino or the liquor on um linker. That's like a terrible pun like a not safe for work pun him and I'm Daniel and welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio in which we take the universe and explain everything in it to you, including things which might not be possible that's right, thanks 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. To be on the pro graam we're going to talk about take eons. Are they real? What are they? Are they really tacky? What are they on? Who taught them their sense of style exactly? Um Tacons are a fascinating concept because, first of all, theoret from the theoretical physics point of view, they're interesting, like the idea for a tachion 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 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, could you do that? Would that be possible? And sat down and sort of worked out the mathematics of it, and then gave it a name, called it attack eon Um. 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 and science fiction and we heard attack eons 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, because it 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 fics is like that. You read one chapter, you know the whole story. You know the whole story. Yeah. Did this writer come up with the name for the tacon or was it the physicists who read this story? No, it was the physicist. Um. So the story was 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, um, because parts of the message traveled fast in the speed of light. And so then the physicists read the story and came up with it in a n paper of this physicist named Gerald Feinberg, and so he coined the name. Take on as far as I eroners did. But you know now it's everywhere. It's in the pop culture, everywhere you turn. Yeah, he should have named after the author The Blisson, I think catch on quite as much or the Beeps. No, but you know, I read about the tacons because they're part of the integral part of the plot of one of my favorite comic books and in fact, one of the most famous comic books of all time. What is Jorge's favorite comic book? I'm dying to know. One of my favorites. Is it you can throw banana peels from the tips of his fingers and make anybody slip. It's a liquorice lady, lady. Wow, there's so many not safer work jokes that can make about the curse lady. Yeah, they'll they'll need to be peeped out. Um exactly. Um, So tell me what is your favorite comic book. One of my favorite comic books, and that, uh is one of the most famous comic books of all time is Watchman? 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, all the slow emotion scenes that Zack Snyder added. Yeah, yeah, no, I love Mr Tomic who can basically do anything at the end of the movie, so all plots can just be resolved by Mr Atomic if necessary, Mr Dr Manhattan with his name document professor at I like your version better, Mr Atomic. That sounds that sounds better. Now it's a Doctor Manhattan or Mr Manhattan. I think Dr Manhattan And um, yeah, so he can see Tacon, 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. Um. And so that's how the villain in the comic book I'm not going to spoil it kind of gets around is he confuses Dr Manhattan by adding a lot of take on interference and so he can't take the future and he doesn't know what's going to happen. M Very clever, Yes, very clever. Um. You also see taggons a lot in Star Trek. I noticed as like take on I pulses, tactionic fields and all sorts of stuff. Anytime they need to go back in time or send messages back in time or whatever they're They're always using tacons, 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 takions, a lot of things would break about modern physics. Um, you know, I had a bit of a tachyonic 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 he 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 looked 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. It's in the basement, it's in the basement, but his thesis was not on take on. So, but actually we don't know if they're real or not, right like we do. 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 a very with absolute certainty, something cannot exist. But you can say, and we'll get into this more more deeply, that would be pretty hard to full take eons into our modern understanding of physics, right, maybe harder than choking down a whole scoop of licorice ice cream more impleasant than you really wish you would you could go back in time, you know. The The joke is, my wife actually loves licorice ice cream, and one time we went to an ice cream place and she ordered to scoop to the licorice 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 impulsive. Wow, ejected itself from my mouth. That's like your your kryptonite or your taon interference. Yeah, it turns out, actually there's lots of things can defeat me. But one of them on the long list is a licorice ice cream. Yes, one of them upsets your stomach, yeah, or my tongue. Well, attacks is. It's kind of a cool name. First of all, take eons and 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 U c ir on campus and I accosted random students and said, hey, would you answer a random zience question? And all of them said yes, And so I asked them about take eons and here's what they had to say. Have you ever heard of attack on? You know what attack on is? What's your best guess it's a particle which gets admitted from a backle is that it I would assume it has something to do with uh space, 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. That sounds cool? Sound cool? No, I have no idea, okay, oh, no, attack 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. 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. Alright, not a single positive answer, Not a single positive answer. A lot of people have heard of it, right, Some well, I've never heard of it, but some people heard of it in the context of science fiction or Star Trek or this kind of stuff. Oh, in the Flash, right, I think they have it in the TV show with 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 and start some taions. She just called the plot hole on the plot. It's like, yeah, it's like filling a pothole, right with phil potholes with take eons, filled plot holes with takes. Yeah, so it's done. Not not a common name that people are familiar with. Um, So let's break it down, Daniel. But first let's take a quick break. Let's start with this. What is a tacon alright? So takeon 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, this, so there's the speed limit to the universe, the speed of light in a vacuum. Tachons 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 what a tachian is. I like, how that's the second most important question about it, not how dis revolutionize our understanding on our ability to travel the costumers, 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 gotta 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, 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. As so now we call that particle the j sside particle. We use both names because nobody can agree, right, really, people, you guys have fights about this, Like I wanted to be called J No, I wanted to be called side. Like, well, I think it is personal with the guy who called it j. He's Chinese, and I think jay Is looks like the Chinese character for his name, so I think he's basically naming it after himself. But now 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 part 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 a quark, Daniel, you should call it a new flavor licorate, the disgusting quirks, the revolting quirks, the vomit quirks. It turns out vomit is made a little vomit on particles. Technically, that's true, Yeah, if you write it in a physics paper, right, So um, 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 try 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 like, 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 one so that in the end it's not broken, right, Like, sometimes you have to break one law of physics and that has 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 can reveal that there were two mistakes to misunderstandings we had about the universe. That would be like two Nobel Prizes in one afternoon, two wrongs making it right. Yeah, And so that's actually sort of happens here. Um. And so as you folks listening might know. The interesting idea and relativity. One of the core ideas and relativity is that you can have infinite amount of energy. There's no limit on the energy of particle can have or you can keep pouring energy into a particle, but there is a limit on speed. Right. So for example 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 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 they're directly connected. Right. Um, 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 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 and you can look at it on Wikipedia. Um, you know, 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. 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 um 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 physicist due 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 um it gets the number inside the square root goes negative. Right, so you have like the 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 multiplied by itself, gives you negative two? Right, Well, there's no real number. You have to go to imaginary numbers, 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 the velocity term goes, it 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 physicist thought, okay, well what if we make the top part of the equation also in imaginary. So we make the mass imaginary. Then you have velocity grid in 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 loss of 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 will 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 like infinite speed and imaginary mass but no energy. Right, it's pretty weird thing. 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, before you think this is a waste of time, remember this is how progress is made. You know. This is how, for example, antiparticles were discovered. People were looking at the equations and they were like, what if you flip the sign of this and flip the sign of that. Look looks like this equation would also hold for opposite charge particles. I wonder if they exist. Let's go look, and they did exist and they do exist. Yeah, this is a rich source of searching around for the corners of the equations and seeing 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 it's it's you sort of saying that anything that can exist mathematically so far we think has existed, right Like, if the equations say that this is possible and doesn't break everything else, then 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, were 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? Are we just sort of like enforcing our um 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're saying, sometimes you have to be kind of open minded and say, hey, what if mass 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 um have our eyes closed because of the biases and the way we have lived and grown up, right, So we want to keep our eyes open, and sometimes the math is a very helpful guide. We'll have a great money making scheme for you, Daniel. It's called the takeon diet makes your math imaginary. Gee, I imagined you were fat, but I guess that was wrong. You just had the wrong perspective in physics. Yeah, well, what what's the diet? Run fast in the speed of light and you'll lose weight. I think it's 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. Liquor liquorice pie. That sounds even more gross than the gurors ice cream, if that's even possible. Here, let's go back in time using tacons and start over and 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 will be like ala mode. Yeah, they go well together. So um, so let's get into what they actually might look like. But first let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel. So that's attack on. It's a theoretical particle with imaginary mass that can go faster on the speed of light. So what what does that even look like? What would the attack on look like, what could we interact with it? Yeah, here's where it gets really fun is you start to think, how could we see take eons? What experiments could you build to detect them? Right? And um, we think take eons. You know they have mass though it's imaginary, um, 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 tack eon. This already gets really tricky because the tagions 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 gonna hear it coming because the sound it's making is trailing behind it, so you it would just magically appear to you. Yeah. So it's the same thing for attacking on. Right, If attack 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, it would It would just appear to you. That's just bad manners. I mean, that's just tacky. You know, it's tacky and it's on you. That must have been how they got the name attacking 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 tacky on But even weirder than it just appearing all of a sudden, is it would look like it's going away from you. What. 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 a Right, 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 brains gonna be like, oh, there's attacking on moving away from you, right, So attacking on. If you see attacking on moving away from you, it means you just got hit by attacking on. But you would see it, so you would see it. You you almost see it moving backwards and in time, right, like, yeah, exactly, you see it moving the reverse direction. It's actually going mm. 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 that's kind of one of the reasons why physicists don't think you can even go faster than the speed 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, I'm still what does that mean? 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 could hang out for a little while. And um, 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're just excited states of quantum fields. Right, So what is a particle of 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 um 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 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 can 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's your idea of a particle is. It's probably wrong anyway, so feel free to break it all, smash it all the heck, you know, just using the word particle. Yeah, well, it's true. You know, particles are not fundamental, right, They are an emergent phenomena. They come from how wantum 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 are not fundamental because you know, they can be created and disappear. So tachons 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 but it could technically exist, like what these fields could wiggle in that way? I don't think so. And and the reason is that if you had take eons, 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 maths is, 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 their 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 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 imply 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 to describe a universe that doesn't have laws? But I don't know how to do that. It's so fundamental to the way we think. It's 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 are that's outside our head. And stories are causal right there, and they're a narrative that I did this, and then this happened. I shot this laser beam and then you know, uh this the wall burned down or whatever, right, the korish 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 that that have tagowns in them. Do you know what I mean? Like, you can if you can imagine it, 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 that. What does it mean? Like, if this particle existed and it 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 relatively down another episode, and something we talked about is how there's no universal description of how things happen. Right If um, for example, if I shoot UM two laser beams, one to the left and one to the right, and I'm just looking at both, I can say, okay, they two laser beams hit the targets at the same time because the target is the same distance away. Somebody else with a different speed might see those events happening at different times. They might say, oh uh, laser beam one hit before laser beam two, and somebody else that a dafferent speed might see laser beam two happened 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, but those things are not causally linked. Right, It doesn't really matter if if laser beam one hits or laser beam two hits. 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 laserbeam hit the target before you prey the button? Those two things are costly linked, right, It seems impossible for it to get there before you press the button. Well, it's constantly linked. If you go backwards in time, do you know what I mean? Like it arrived because in the future I'm going to press the button. Yeah, But what if it arrives and then you change your mind, You're like, you know what, I'm not going to hit that laser beam button right now, but it's already arrived. But if you change your mind, that means you didn't see it do it. I feel like this is a like. You can pick it a different movie to go with your theory. There's the movies that they're not alright, find graphic novels. That's really 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 the relativity covers that. Relativity says that for events that are not causantly 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 the 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 their 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 video TA, if you send a message via taions, Yeah, exactly, Okay, so take eons. 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 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 decided 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 it wouldn't gain those five pounds that would That would be kind of tacky though, if you did that at a restaurant, not if it's liquorice pie, then I totally endorsed just breaking the universe to avoid eating it. So it's almost like an anti telephone like it. It sends you sends your message before you even think about sending the message. Yes, exactly, And that's what it's called. It's called a tachonic anti telephone. Exactly. If you had tacons, 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 want them 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 tacoons are 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 fast in the speed of light. But the math says tachyons 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 up ended our basic understanding of the universe, right, and then 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 maths and it's theoretically possible but not likely. And uh dennity idea of closing this episode with a limerick. Yeah. I was doing some research about tacking once 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, subgenre science fiction. Not many authors specialized 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 hunging up on that first line. Um, her name is Bright. That sounds like a like a plot hole to me. I see, mr. The universe follows the laws of television shows and movies is now criticizing the physics poetry for not being accurate. Yeah, you know how many? How many people do you know are called right? Anyways, I'm actually a member of an organization called the Brights. I don't know what to do with that. I'm not joking. Um alright, So thanks to everyone for listening to this non tacky episode about a tack eons, for bending your mind a little bit. And remember that some of those crazy ideas that are in physics his 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 Takeons, why don't you send a message to yourself backwards of time and let us know such right here, we could do a test right now, right in the future, somebody, somebody discovers take On, send us a message to arrive right now. Wait, hold on, I just got a call. Wait here we go, let me let me pick it up. Hold on, is it from a lady name Bright. She's pissed at you for insulting her name. Ask her? Ask her in the future of our podcast is a huge success. Okay, hold on, let me texting. Oh well, wait, my phone doesn't send things. But wait does send things into the future, So it does send things into the future, just not backwards. All right. Well, well, we hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. Guys. Thanks for tuning in. If 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 Jorge That's one Word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explaining the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.