Tachyon is the name for a particle that travels faster than the speed of light. Normal particles travel less than the speed of light if they have any mass at all. Massless particles like the photon travel exactly at the speed of light. A tachyon is a theoretical particle that travels faster than the speed of light. They are used in science fiction (like Star Trek) in connection with time travel, but as of right now, no one has detected them, and even if they exist they are probably too unstable to call a "particle."
Studying Particles Moving Faster Than Light
Wait a minute, you say. Nothing moves faster than light, that's a physical limit, right?
Yes and no. What's true is that nothing moves faster than light in a vacuum. But light slows down in other substances, such as air. It is thus possible for particles with extraordinarily high energy to move faster than light through the Earth's atmosphere, for example – a phenomenon with some interesting consequences.
Particles that travel faster than light through the atmosphere produce radiation that scientists liken to the sonic boom produced by faster-than-sound travel. This effect, called Cerenkov Radiation, can provide some clues about the composition of the original particles. That's proved to be particularly interesting to scientists studying cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays are particles from outer space, often protons or complete atomic nuclei, that frequently strike the Earth's atmosphere with enough energy to fall into this faster-than-light category, emitting Cerenkov radiation.
Scientists are still unsure about the origin of most cosmic rays. One recent study tracked a small percentage back to the centers of distant galaxies. But most are believed to originate inside the Milky Way, possibly thrown off by exploding stars.
A number of different methods of observing these rays' Cerenkov signatures have been devised, ranging from very precise balloon-based detectors to large ground-based facilities. Now researchers at the University of Chicago are using a National Science Foundation grant to build a new kind of detector that combines the advantages of both methods, with an eye towards detecting the presence of iron atomic nuclei – ideally gaining enough data to help shed new light on the exploding-star theory.
"They're raining down on the atmosphere of the Earth, tens of thousands of particles per second per square meter," said University of Chicago assistant professor Scott Wakely, who will be running the experiment, in a statement. "(From) where exactly, we don't know."
Tachyons and Time Travel
Special Relativity states that nothing that is moving initially slower than the speed of light can be accelerated to exceed the speed of light. This is not strictly speaking the same as the statement that nothing can travel faster than light. It is in principle possible that particles exist which move faster than light from the moment they are created. If such particles did exist, however, Special Relativity implies that they could never be slowed down to velocities below the speed of light. The existence of such particles, called tachyons, has not been totally ruled out, but several experiments have tried, without luck to detect them. If they did exist, and they interacted with ordinary matter, it would give us the means to communicate with the past. Tachyons could literally be sent outwards, bounce off a tachyonic mirror, and return before they were sent. This in turn would give rise to a great many logical problems. For example, if you sent a message back in time that caused your grandfather to be killed before your father was conceived, then you would not be around to send the message that prevented your birth, so that you would be around to send the message, so that you wouldn't be around....etc.
Large Hadron Collider "Actually Worked" – Tachyon Collider/Collector ?
The world's largest atom smasher's first experiment went off today without a hitch, paving the way toward the recreation of post-big bang conditions.
The Large Hadron Collider fired a beam of protons inside a circular, 17-mile (27-kilometer) long tunnel underneath villages and cow pastures at the French-Swiss border.
Inside the control room, physicists and engineers cautiously shot the beam down part of the tunnel, stopping it before it went all the way around.
"Oh, we made it through!" one person cried as the beam made it through a further section of the tunnel.
One hour after starting up, on the first attempt to send the beam circling all the way around the tunnel, it completed the trip successfully—bringing raucous applause.
"First of all, I didn't believe it," said Verena Kain, a European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) engineer.
"I had to see it a second time, and I thought, Oh, wow, it actually worked!"
"Things can go wrong at any time, but luckily this morning everything went smoothly," said Lyn Evans of CERN, who oversaw the building of the accelerator.
The collider "was first proposed more than 20 years ago," said Django Manglunki, an accelerator physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), on Tuesday. "We've been preparing that beam for more than ten years."
Creating Time Gates
A time gate, or a dimensional portal through the sixth dimension, allows travel between two analogous temporal cycles in different timelines.
In order to create a stable time gate, the following procedures must be followed: First, the time gate must be located in a geologically stable region surrounded by dense solid matter -- e.g., deep inside a cave with solid stone walls. The solid matter surrounding the time gate apparatus must be old enough to have existed in the same position on both sides of the time gate.
This is because the dimension of time is independent of the dimensions of space. For example, say New Jersey is located somewhere between Venus and Mars on a certain date. If a time traveller stepped through a time gate located in New Jersey that led ten years into the past, would he emerge in New Jersey ten years earlier, or would he appear at a point in space somewhere between Venus and Mars, or would he appear in that part of the Universe where the constantly moving Solar system was located ten years ago? All points in space are relative to one another and are constantly changing over time, so a time gate cannot be built in just any empty space; it must be linked to specific protons and atoms, which have their own mass, gravity, and space that they occupy. The properties of a proton do not change over time, so space at the subatomic level is constant and stable over long periods of time. (This is the protonic continuity principle, first postulated by Dr. Walter Reffick in the late Twenty-first Century.)
Construction and Operation of a Time Gate
Once a suitably stable environment has been located, the time gate may be constructed as follows: A tachyon accelerator is positioned so that it can emit a steady tachyon stream onto a super-dense gravitic lens, which will focus the tachyon field into a single plane within stable protonic matter. (Tachyons are three-dimensional particles that occupy the second, fourth, and sixth dimensions, out of phase with normal space-time; while first proposed theoretically in the mid-Twentieth Century, they were not actually discovered until a century later due to their unique dimensional phase properties.)
The gravitic lens is composed of a super-dense artificial material that is bombarded by a graviton stream from a graviton accelerator, which is placed at a ninety-degree angle from the tachyon accelerator, so that the tachyon and graviton streams intersect at the center of the gravitic lens. (Gravitons are three-dimensional particles that occupy the fifth, seventh, and ninth dimensions, sharing many properties with photons, but in a different dimensional phase; so, unlike photons, gravitons can pass through solid matter.) The gravitic lens must remain supercooled close to absolute zero, so that atomic motion is at a minimum, which is necessary to maintain a stable tachyon stream.
The gravitic lens is used to refract the tachyon stream along the sixth-dimensional axis; the degree of refraction determines through how many temporal cycles the time gate will extend into the past. Thus, going farther back in time requires a greater degree of refraction of the tachyon stream, which means a greater graviton density in the gravitic lens.
The intensity, or frequency, of the tachyon stream determines the diameter of the time gate. A time gate aperture that is several meters across would require millions of times more tachyon energy to keep open than would a time gate open at only the atomic level.
Once created, the time gate will appear as a distortion around the matter onto which it is projected, in roughly a two-dimensional circular plane. The gravitational and dimensional stresses may create an optical refractory effect, creating a swirling rainbow pattern around the perimeter of the gateway. The center of the aperture will appear to recede inward, an optical illusion created by the sixth-dimensional refraction of the tachyon stream.
After the time gate is created, and the diameter and degree of sixth-dimensional displacement are selected, the time traveller may enter the aperture through the side opposite the tachyon accelerator (i.e., the tachyon accelerator and gravitic lens would be located behind the time gate).
In the past timeline, the time traveller would emerge on the opposite side of the plane of the time gate, where the gravitic lens is located in his future.
Time travel, however, is not as simple as stepping through a doorway. The gateway aperture must be projected onto a plane of solid protonic matter, and it would be extremely unlikely to find a natural arrangement of stable protonic matter in a two-dimensional plane thin enough to step through. It is thus necessary for the time travellers to use cutting machinery to bore through the solid matter inside of which the time gateway has already been opened.
Since the trans-dimensional time gate effect encompasses a thickness of about ten atomic diameters in both timelines, a hole can be cut through the matter on one side of the time gate in the future timeline, and straight through the matter on the other side of the time gate in the past timeline, but the plane of continuous protonic matter onto which the time gate is projected will have contiguous matter supporting it in both timelines, albeit from opposite sides of the sixth-dimensional gateway (see illustration below).
Suffice to say, building a stable sixth-dimensional time gate requires years of geological surveying and excavation.
Constructing a Time Gate:
A cross section of a geologically stable natural cavern as it originally looks in all timelines. A solid wall with open spaces on both sides is ideal for constructing a time gate.
In the future timeline, a tachyon accelerator (left) and gravitic lens are constructed behind the wall. The gravitic lens focuses the tachyon stream onto a plane deep inside the solid cavern wall to open a time gate.
The time travellers excavate the other side of the wall until the sixth-dimensional gateway is exposed. In the past timeline, the time travellers continue digging through the gateway until they break through the other side of the wall. The time gate is still within a plane of solid matter in both timelines.
Using Time Gates
Once the tachyon/graviton apparatus is constructed and a working time gate is created, the operator may use it to traverse the sixth dimension into a past temporal cycle. (The time gate cannot be opened into the future, for reasons discussed in Navigating Parallel Timelines; however, once a time gate has been opened into the past, traffic may flow in either direction through the gate as long as it is open.)
There are certain limitations that should be observed while using a sixth-dimensional time gate. There is a point in the past at which the matter onto which the time gateway is projected will not have existed in its present state. For example, even the stone walls of the deepest cavern on Earth had to be created at some point in Earth's geologic history, so the practical limitations of any time gate on Earth would be less than a billion years into the past. To go farther back in time, a time gate would have to be constructed within a much more ancient and more geologically stable area, such as the Moon, Mars, or one of the moons of the outer planets of the Solar system.
Also, time travel should be restricted to points in time before the time gate was constructed. Since the time gate will most likely be in the same location for a period of many years, the possibility exists that time travellers from a future timeline could open a temporal gateway into the location of the time gate apparatus in the past, which could lead to an awkward or embarrassing situation if they confronted themselves in a past timeline. It is always preferable to emerge in the past in a private and secluded location with no witnesses to the time travellers' arrival, so that any temporal divergence can be kept to a minimum, and the time travellers will have the most control over their situation.
A time gate alone will most likely not be sufficient for the effective exploration of the past. A temporal gateway deep inside a cavern would deposit the time traveller into a dark empty cavern in the past, hardly an ideal environment in which to conduct historical and temporal studies. Therefore, a useful tool in addition to the time gate apparatus would be an interspatial teleporter, portable and compact enough to be moved through the time gate into the past timeline.
The interspatial teleporter should be located on an extending platform in front of the time gate, so that it can be extended through the open temporal aperture into the past timeline. Once on the other side of the time gate, the time traveller could use the teleporter to travel to any desired location in that past timeline.
In addition to the teleporter, the time traveller may wish to take a more conventional mode of transportation, such as an automobile or a small aircraft, in which to move around in the past. Of course, the more equipment the time traveller takes into the past, the larger the teleporter and the time gate aperture will have to be, which will require more energy to keep open.
For long-term journeys into the past, the time gate aperture can be reduced in diameter after the time travellers are deposited on the other side; when they wish to return through the gate, they would transmit a signal via a tachyon pulse emitter, which could be detected by the time gate operators on the other side of the temporal aperture, and they would open the gateway to allow the time travellers to pass through it. This would save much energy that would be wasted keeping the temporal aperture open to its full diameter.
A final warning: Once a time gate is closed, the link between the two timelines will be lost forever. Every opening of a time gate, even into the same time period, creates a link to an entirely new and distinct timeline. If a time traveller is on the past side of a time gate when it is closed, the time traveller will be trapped in that past timeline forever.
Studying Particles Moving Faster Than Light
Wait a minute, you say. Nothing moves faster than light, that's a physical limit, right?
Yes and no. What's true is that nothing moves faster than light in a vacuum. But light slows down in other substances, such as air. It is thus possible for particles with extraordinarily high energy to move faster than light through the Earth's atmosphere, for example – a phenomenon with some interesting consequences.
Particles that travel faster than light through the atmosphere produce radiation that scientists liken to the sonic boom produced by faster-than-sound travel. This effect, called Cerenkov Radiation, can provide some clues about the composition of the original particles. That's proved to be particularly interesting to scientists studying cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays are particles from outer space, often protons or complete atomic nuclei, that frequently strike the Earth's atmosphere with enough energy to fall into this faster-than-light category, emitting Cerenkov radiation.
Scientists are still unsure about the origin of most cosmic rays. One recent study tracked a small percentage back to the centers of distant galaxies. But most are believed to originate inside the Milky Way, possibly thrown off by exploding stars.
A number of different methods of observing these rays' Cerenkov signatures have been devised, ranging from very precise balloon-based detectors to large ground-based facilities. Now researchers at the University of Chicago are using a National Science Foundation grant to build a new kind of detector that combines the advantages of both methods, with an eye towards detecting the presence of iron atomic nuclei – ideally gaining enough data to help shed new light on the exploding-star theory.
"They're raining down on the atmosphere of the Earth, tens of thousands of particles per second per square meter," said University of Chicago assistant professor Scott Wakely, who will be running the experiment, in a statement. "(From) where exactly, we don't know."
Tachyons and Time Travel
Special Relativity states that nothing that is moving initially slower than the speed of light can be accelerated to exceed the speed of light. This is not strictly speaking the same as the statement that nothing can travel faster than light. It is in principle possible that particles exist which move faster than light from the moment they are created. If such particles did exist, however, Special Relativity implies that they could never be slowed down to velocities below the speed of light. The existence of such particles, called tachyons, has not been totally ruled out, but several experiments have tried, without luck to detect them. If they did exist, and they interacted with ordinary matter, it would give us the means to communicate with the past. Tachyons could literally be sent outwards, bounce off a tachyonic mirror, and return before they were sent. This in turn would give rise to a great many logical problems. For example, if you sent a message back in time that caused your grandfather to be killed before your father was conceived, then you would not be around to send the message that prevented your birth, so that you would be around to send the message, so that you wouldn't be around....etc.
Large Hadron Collider "Actually Worked" – Tachyon Collider/Collector ?
The world's largest atom smasher's first experiment went off today without a hitch, paving the way toward the recreation of post-big bang conditions.
The Large Hadron Collider fired a beam of protons inside a circular, 17-mile (27-kilometer) long tunnel underneath villages and cow pastures at the French-Swiss border.
Inside the control room, physicists and engineers cautiously shot the beam down part of the tunnel, stopping it before it went all the way around.
"Oh, we made it through!" one person cried as the beam made it through a further section of the tunnel.
One hour after starting up, on the first attempt to send the beam circling all the way around the tunnel, it completed the trip successfully—bringing raucous applause.
"First of all, I didn't believe it," said Verena Kain, a European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) engineer.
"I had to see it a second time, and I thought, Oh, wow, it actually worked!"
"Things can go wrong at any time, but luckily this morning everything went smoothly," said Lyn Evans of CERN, who oversaw the building of the accelerator.
The collider "was first proposed more than 20 years ago," said Django Manglunki, an accelerator physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), on Tuesday. "We've been preparing that beam for more than ten years."
Creating Time Gates
A time gate, or a dimensional portal through the sixth dimension, allows travel between two analogous temporal cycles in different timelines.
In order to create a stable time gate, the following procedures must be followed: First, the time gate must be located in a geologically stable region surrounded by dense solid matter -- e.g., deep inside a cave with solid stone walls. The solid matter surrounding the time gate apparatus must be old enough to have existed in the same position on both sides of the time gate.
This is because the dimension of time is independent of the dimensions of space. For example, say New Jersey is located somewhere between Venus and Mars on a certain date. If a time traveller stepped through a time gate located in New Jersey that led ten years into the past, would he emerge in New Jersey ten years earlier, or would he appear at a point in space somewhere between Venus and Mars, or would he appear in that part of the Universe where the constantly moving Solar system was located ten years ago? All points in space are relative to one another and are constantly changing over time, so a time gate cannot be built in just any empty space; it must be linked to specific protons and atoms, which have their own mass, gravity, and space that they occupy. The properties of a proton do not change over time, so space at the subatomic level is constant and stable over long periods of time. (This is the protonic continuity principle, first postulated by Dr. Walter Reffick in the late Twenty-first Century.)
Construction and Operation of a Time Gate
Once a suitably stable environment has been located, the time gate may be constructed as follows: A tachyon accelerator is positioned so that it can emit a steady tachyon stream onto a super-dense gravitic lens, which will focus the tachyon field into a single plane within stable protonic matter. (Tachyons are three-dimensional particles that occupy the second, fourth, and sixth dimensions, out of phase with normal space-time; while first proposed theoretically in the mid-Twentieth Century, they were not actually discovered until a century later due to their unique dimensional phase properties.)
The gravitic lens is composed of a super-dense artificial material that is bombarded by a graviton stream from a graviton accelerator, which is placed at a ninety-degree angle from the tachyon accelerator, so that the tachyon and graviton streams intersect at the center of the gravitic lens. (Gravitons are three-dimensional particles that occupy the fifth, seventh, and ninth dimensions, sharing many properties with photons, but in a different dimensional phase; so, unlike photons, gravitons can pass through solid matter.) The gravitic lens must remain supercooled close to absolute zero, so that atomic motion is at a minimum, which is necessary to maintain a stable tachyon stream.
The gravitic lens is used to refract the tachyon stream along the sixth-dimensional axis; the degree of refraction determines through how many temporal cycles the time gate will extend into the past. Thus, going farther back in time requires a greater degree of refraction of the tachyon stream, which means a greater graviton density in the gravitic lens.
The intensity, or frequency, of the tachyon stream determines the diameter of the time gate. A time gate aperture that is several meters across would require millions of times more tachyon energy to keep open than would a time gate open at only the atomic level.
Once created, the time gate will appear as a distortion around the matter onto which it is projected, in roughly a two-dimensional circular plane. The gravitational and dimensional stresses may create an optical refractory effect, creating a swirling rainbow pattern around the perimeter of the gateway. The center of the aperture will appear to recede inward, an optical illusion created by the sixth-dimensional refraction of the tachyon stream.
After the time gate is created, and the diameter and degree of sixth-dimensional displacement are selected, the time traveller may enter the aperture through the side opposite the tachyon accelerator (i.e., the tachyon accelerator and gravitic lens would be located behind the time gate).
In the past timeline, the time traveller would emerge on the opposite side of the plane of the time gate, where the gravitic lens is located in his future.
Time travel, however, is not as simple as stepping through a doorway. The gateway aperture must be projected onto a plane of solid protonic matter, and it would be extremely unlikely to find a natural arrangement of stable protonic matter in a two-dimensional plane thin enough to step through. It is thus necessary for the time travellers to use cutting machinery to bore through the solid matter inside of which the time gateway has already been opened.
Since the trans-dimensional time gate effect encompasses a thickness of about ten atomic diameters in both timelines, a hole can be cut through the matter on one side of the time gate in the future timeline, and straight through the matter on the other side of the time gate in the past timeline, but the plane of continuous protonic matter onto which the time gate is projected will have contiguous matter supporting it in both timelines, albeit from opposite sides of the sixth-dimensional gateway (see illustration below).
Suffice to say, building a stable sixth-dimensional time gate requires years of geological surveying and excavation.
Constructing a Time Gate:
A cross section of a geologically stable natural cavern as it originally looks in all timelines. A solid wall with open spaces on both sides is ideal for constructing a time gate.
In the future timeline, a tachyon accelerator (left) and gravitic lens are constructed behind the wall. The gravitic lens focuses the tachyon stream onto a plane deep inside the solid cavern wall to open a time gate.
The time travellers excavate the other side of the wall until the sixth-dimensional gateway is exposed. In the past timeline, the time travellers continue digging through the gateway until they break through the other side of the wall. The time gate is still within a plane of solid matter in both timelines.
Using Time Gates
Once the tachyon/graviton apparatus is constructed and a working time gate is created, the operator may use it to traverse the sixth dimension into a past temporal cycle. (The time gate cannot be opened into the future, for reasons discussed in Navigating Parallel Timelines; however, once a time gate has been opened into the past, traffic may flow in either direction through the gate as long as it is open.)
There are certain limitations that should be observed while using a sixth-dimensional time gate. There is a point in the past at which the matter onto which the time gateway is projected will not have existed in its present state. For example, even the stone walls of the deepest cavern on Earth had to be created at some point in Earth's geologic history, so the practical limitations of any time gate on Earth would be less than a billion years into the past. To go farther back in time, a time gate would have to be constructed within a much more ancient and more geologically stable area, such as the Moon, Mars, or one of the moons of the outer planets of the Solar system.
Also, time travel should be restricted to points in time before the time gate was constructed. Since the time gate will most likely be in the same location for a period of many years, the possibility exists that time travellers from a future timeline could open a temporal gateway into the location of the time gate apparatus in the past, which could lead to an awkward or embarrassing situation if they confronted themselves in a past timeline. It is always preferable to emerge in the past in a private and secluded location with no witnesses to the time travellers' arrival, so that any temporal divergence can be kept to a minimum, and the time travellers will have the most control over their situation.
A time gate alone will most likely not be sufficient for the effective exploration of the past. A temporal gateway deep inside a cavern would deposit the time traveller into a dark empty cavern in the past, hardly an ideal environment in which to conduct historical and temporal studies. Therefore, a useful tool in addition to the time gate apparatus would be an interspatial teleporter, portable and compact enough to be moved through the time gate into the past timeline.
The interspatial teleporter should be located on an extending platform in front of the time gate, so that it can be extended through the open temporal aperture into the past timeline. Once on the other side of the time gate, the time traveller could use the teleporter to travel to any desired location in that past timeline.
In addition to the teleporter, the time traveller may wish to take a more conventional mode of transportation, such as an automobile or a small aircraft, in which to move around in the past. Of course, the more equipment the time traveller takes into the past, the larger the teleporter and the time gate aperture will have to be, which will require more energy to keep open.
For long-term journeys into the past, the time gate aperture can be reduced in diameter after the time travellers are deposited on the other side; when they wish to return through the gate, they would transmit a signal via a tachyon pulse emitter, which could be detected by the time gate operators on the other side of the temporal aperture, and they would open the gateway to allow the time travellers to pass through it. This would save much energy that would be wasted keeping the temporal aperture open to its full diameter.
A final warning: Once a time gate is closed, the link between the two timelines will be lost forever. Every opening of a time gate, even into the same time period, creates a link to an entirely new and distinct timeline. If a time traveller is on the past side of a time gate when it is closed, the time traveller will be trapped in that past timeline forever.
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