An Extraordinary Particle Could Travel Back in Time, Scientists Say
The tachyon particle has an intriguing time travel component.
Scientists like Albert Einstein have believed a class of particles could travel faster than light.
If these particles existed, what would it mean for our understanding of time travel?
The tachyon particle has an almost mythical air about it in the scientific community, mostly because we don’t know if it actually exists. But if it does, the tachyon has some tantalizing connections to time travel.
The concept of the speed of light, and a particle that may travel faster than the speed of light, started gaining pace with Albert Einstein in 1905. Physicist Gerald Feinberg termed this potential particles a “tachyon” in 1967. We’ve long been intrigued by the promise of the tachyon and now, thanks to a recent Discover Magazine article, the perplexing particle is once again back in the mainstream.
Here’s the gist: Right now, we don’t know of anything that’s faster than the speed of light. Light has no mass, so it doesn’t gain size as it speeds up. Meanwhile, an object with mass gains mass as it speeds up, which means it doesn’t have enough energy to keep pace with the speed of light. So, with everything in our world traveling slower than the speed of light, every cause that occurs within our known universe happens within the speed of light’s time parameters.
A tachyon, though, is a particle that travels faster than the speed of light—in theory, at least. Somehow, the tachyon has to achieve a constant speed faster than the speed of light, meaning it can never go slower. For now, that’s a pretty tall task.
But here’s where time travel comes in: If you can travel faster than the speed of light, you could hypothetically send messages at speeds exceeding time, which means you can send a message backward. That message can then reach you before you even thought to send the original message. It’s a bit of a mind-bender.
As posited in the Discover story, the big question is if the time travel component of the tachyon is simply an unproven one or an impossible one. Not only do we need to figure out the whole faster-than-the-speed-of-light conundrum, but the other little fact that makes this thorny is that our universe doesn’t offer up a way to travel in any direction other than the future ... yet.
We just need to figure out both of those scenarios to make the hypothetical tachyon not only faster than the speed of light, but capable of traveling back in time. Better get to trying.
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