I’m currently reading Max Tegmark’s book Our Mathematical Universe. In talking about the number of space and time dimensions we live in, he briefly mentions tachyons existing in one space dimension and three time dimensions.
I guess my questions are as follows:
What exactly are tachyons and how can they have imaginary mass?
How widely accepted are they in the science world?
What would reality with 3 time dimensions and one space dimension even be? Is it something the human mind can even imagine?
In: Physics
Tachy means fast, in this case, faster than light.
All massless particles move at the speed of light, and particles of negligible mass move at significant fractions of the speed of light. This is called c. To speed up a particle to the speed of light requires infinite energy. It’s like an exponential decay function flipped upside down, for a given mass, you can never reach the speed of light but can get ever so close.
Negative mass is impossible, but you can think of mass as a function of some other mystery quantity, i.e. the square root of it (M^0.5). If that quantity is positive, the mass is positive, and therefore cannot reach the speed of light. If it’s zero, then it is at the speed of light (sqrt of 0 is 0), and if it’s negative, then the mass is imaginary, and moving faster than the speed of light. Tachyons are particles moving faster than light due to this property.
This isn’t necessarily an accurate explanation, but one you can get behind using some early high school math.
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