Mainstream News & Papers on Tachyons
Tachyons in the News: What Physicists Are Actually Saying
Marvel and Star Trek treat tachyons as a convenient plot device. Mainstream physics, it turns out, has been publishing on them too — and 2024 saw a real cluster of coverage taking the idea seriously again.
Also covered by:
- Phys.org — Physicists and the Special Theory of Relativity
- Earth.com — How Tachyons Fit Into Special Relativity
- Futurism — Materials That Move Faster Than Light
- WION — Faster-Than-Light Particles and Dark Matter
Tachyons May Be Reconcilable With Special Relativity
July 15, 2024
A paper covered by The Debrief argues tachyons could finally be made mathematically consistent with special relativity, decades after physicist Gerald Feinberg first floated the idea in the 1960s. The catch has always been the paradoxes: since tachyons could in theory carry information backward in time, cause and effect start to break down. The new approach gets around this by calculating a tachyon's behavior using both its starting state and its end state together, rather than just projecting forward from the start — and once you do that, the old contradictions reportedly disappear. The authors frame it as more than a math trick, too: they suggest tachyons could turn out to play a real role in how matter itself first formed, and that the future constraining the present isn't as fringe an idea in physics as it sounds.
Could Tachyons Explain Dark Matter?
April 17, 2024
A separate paper covered by Live Science goes further, proposing that tachyons might not just exist — they could make up the dominant form of matter in the universe, effectively standing in for dark matter. The physicists behind it say the model already lines up surprisingly well with current observations, and the next step is testing it against large-scale data like the cosmic microwave background and galaxy distribution. Their own framing: cosmology tends to find its breakthroughs by chasing the unorthodox ideas, not by avoiding them.
Academic Papers on Tachyons
This isn't a new fascination either — formal papers on tachyons go back decades. A running list, updated as more surface:
- RAND Corporation (2009) — read the paper (PDF)
- University of Melbourne (1992) — read the paper (PDF) / ADS record
Take it for what it's worth: mainstream physics is now publishing papers arguing tachyons are mathematically consistent, possibly tied to dark matter, and possibly even to how matter formed in the first place. That's the same particle Marvel, Star Trek, and Cobra's own material have been circling from entirely different directions. Draw your own conclusions.
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