April 23, 2019 • 39 mins
Are Tachyons real or just the stuff of science fiction? Thanks to Prof. Flip Tanedo (UC Riverside) for scientific review.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
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
(00:30):
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,
(00:52):
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
(01:16):
like a not safe for work pun him and I'm
Daniel and welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain
(01:39):
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.
(01:59):
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
(02:22):
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
(02:42):
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
(03:02):
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
(03:23):
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
(03:44):
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.
(04:04):
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
(04:25):
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
(04:45):
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.
(05:08):
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,
(05:28):
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
(05:49):
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,
(06:11):
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,
(06:33):
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,
(06:54):
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
(07:16):
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
(07:38):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:22):
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
(08:44):
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
(09:06):
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,
(09:29):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:10):
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,
(10:31):
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,
(10:56):
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
(11:17):
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.
(11:39):
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
(12:01):
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.
(12:22):
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,
(12:42):
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
(13:03):
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
(13:24):
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,
(13:45):
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,
(14:05):
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,
(14:29):
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
(14:50):
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
(15:12):
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
(15:34):
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
(15:55):
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
(16:15):
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
(16:39):
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
(17:02):
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
(17:23):
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
(17:44):
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
(18:05):
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.
(18:26):
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,
(18:46):
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
(19:09):
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
(19:32):
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
(19:55):
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,
(20:17):
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
(20:39):
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.
(21:00):
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,
(21:22):
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
(21:43):
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
(22:03):
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
(22:25):
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.
(22:46):
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.
(23:09):
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
(23:30):
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
(23:51):
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
(24:13):
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
(24:34):
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
(24:56):
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,
(25:16):
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.
(25:38):
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
(26:00):
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,
(26:21):
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
(26:41):
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
(27:04):
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
(27:25):
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,
(27:47):
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
(28:09):
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
(28:31):
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,
(28:53):
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
(29:14):
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
(29:35):
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
(29:57):
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
(30:19):
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.
(30:39):
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
(31:01):
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,
(31:22):
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,
(31:44):
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
(32:04):
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
(32:24):
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
(32:46):
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
(33:08):
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,
(33:31):
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
(33:53):
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,
(34:15):
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.
(34:39):
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
(35:01):
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
(35:23):
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
(35:44):
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
(36:08):
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
(36:31):
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,
(36:57):
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
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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
(38:02):
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
(38:23):
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
(38:45):
my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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
(00:30):
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,
(00:52):
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
(01:16):
like a not safe for work pun him and I'm
Daniel and welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain
(01:39):
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.
(01:59):
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
(02:22):
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
(02:42):
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
(03:02):
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
(03:23):
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
(03:44):
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.
(04:04):
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
(04:25):
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
(04:45):
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.
(05:08):
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,
(05:28):
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
(05:49):
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,
(06:11):
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,
(06:33):
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,
(06:54):
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
(07:16):
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
(07:38):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:22):
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
(08:44):
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
(09:06):
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,
(09:29):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:10):
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,
(10:31):
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,
(10:56):
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
(11:17):
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.
(11:39):
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
(12:01):
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.
(12:22):
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,
(12:42):
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
(13:03):
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
(13:24):
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,
(13:45):
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,
(14:05):
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,
(14:29):
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
(14:50):
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
(15:12):
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
(15:34):
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
(15:55):
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
(16:15):
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
(16:39):
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
(17:02):
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
(17:23):
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
(17:44):
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
(18:05):
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.
(18:26):
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,
(18:46):
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
(19:09):
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
(19:32):
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
(19:55):
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,
(20:17):
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
(20:39):
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.
(21:00):
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,
(21:22):
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
(21:43):
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
(22:03):
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
(22:25):
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.
(22:46):
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.
(23:09):
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
(23:30):
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
(23:51):
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
(24:13):
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
(24:34):
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
(24:56):
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,
(25:16):
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.
(25:38):
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
(26:00):
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,
(26:21):
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
(26:41):
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
(27:04):
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
(27:25):
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,
(27:47):
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
(28:09):
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
(28:31):
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,
(28:53):
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
(29:14):
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
(29:35):
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
(29:57):
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
(30:19):
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.
(30:39):
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
(31:01):
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,
(31:22):
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,
(31:44):
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
(32:04):
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
(32:24):
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
(32:46):
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
(33:08):
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,
(33:31):
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
(33:53):
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,
(34:15):
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.
(34:39):
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
(35:01):
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
(35:23):
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
(35:44):
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
(36:08):
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
(36:31):
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,
(36:57):
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
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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
(38:02):
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
(38:23):
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
(38:45):
my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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