Tachyon drive

[Ronnie67]

Could we not convert tachyon particles into an engine, if so we could travel at the speed of light, only draw back to this is that the engine or craft to which it would be fitted would disintegrate with the friction, and could they not place a buffer to prevent the craft from burning up, a force field of some kind

[Ronnie67]

Tachyons if they exist have more momentum, in proportion to how much slower they travel. The faster they travel, the less energy they have.

They are also expected to loose gravitational energy as they travel. Thus speeding up. So the object of an tachyon engine would be to fire the particles as slowly as possible. This sounds great you would only need to fire a minor stream of tachyon particles at extremely slow speed to get amazing thrust.

However the problem remaining is no different from trying to fire mass particles at the speed of light. Where do you get the energy to accelerate them? Or in the case of the tachyon, to decelerate them, you must put the energy in. Remember it takes nearly infinite energy to accelerate a particle to the speed of light. The same would hold true for stopping the tachyon.

What you propel with an engine is of minor importance in comparison to what you use to power it in the first place.

[ronin]

Could we not convert tachyon particles into an engine

Tachyons if they exist

Since they are hypothetical particle then the whole question has no relevance.

It is too easy to make up a hypothetical particle then apply hypothetical properties to it, being hypothetical you can apply almost any property to it you want.

Santa Claus sleigh is made of Tachyons and that is why he can deliver presents all over the world in one night.

As a Tachyon is hypothetical the above cannot be disproved.

[Ronnie67]

Over a century ago, Albert Einstein anticipated odd things happening on a spaceship travelling at speeds close to that of light (roughly 300 000 km/s) and impossible things happening when travelling at the speed of light. It is not necessary here and now to go into why this should be, but these predictions are enough to convince much smarter people than me that the speed of light is a fixed, fundamental speed limit in the Universe and that no material objects can ever attain or exceed this crucial speed.

However some theoretical physicists have gone for a walk on the wild side by speculating on the possible existence of particles which always travel faster than light, avoiding the complications of acceleration past the cosmic speed limit. Physicist Gerald Feinberg even gave them a name, tachyons (from the Greek takhus, meaning “fast”, and the English ”-on”meaning “elementary particle” (yes, really)). There is a history of particle physics predicting the existence of theoretical particles needed to fill gaps in our knowledge which are later discovered to be real, neutrons being the classic example. Could this happen with tachyons?

If they existed tachyons would be really, really bizarre things, for example they would always be moving faster than light, dropping to less than 300 000 km/s would be as impossible for them as exceeding this speed is to us. Stranger still, their mass would be imaginary. “Imaginary” is used in its mathematical sense, meaning a multiple of the square of -1, whatever that may mean in the real world. Not only that, adding kinetic energy to a tachyon would make it slow down, but it would take infinite energy to drop its velocity down to the speed of light! Conversely, a tachyon shedding energy would continuously accelerate. This leads to a subtle argument against tachyons existing.