Particles that travel faster than light are called Tachyons. All sorts of problems with a fundamental rule of the universe can be caused by Einstein's show that such particles allow for communication back in time. There are good reasons to believe that tachyons don't exist.

The barrier that can't travel at the speed of light isn't just an expression of the limitation of engineering, it's also a representation of a failure of imagination. It's baked into the laws of the universe according to Einstein's theory.

You would like to travel faster than the light. Give yourself some time to get used to it. You have mass, so you have to overcome inertia to get going. You light up a rocket and it goes off.

There is a question about the speed of light.

You don't stop once you're off the launch pad. You have an advanced engine that will cause you to accelerate. Everything makes sense if you fire your engines at a slower speed.

Something funny happens when you approach the speed of light. If you put the same amount of energy into your engine, it will give you less and less speed. You are inching closer to the speed of light despite working your engines to the limit. You realize that you don't have enough energy in your engines to achieve light speed at some point.

The problem is that energy is mass. The more energy you have, the heavier you are. It takes a lot of rocket power to get to the speed of light.

The tachyon workaround

The rules apply to objects with mass. Massless objects travel at light speed and never slow down or speed up. A new class of particle was proposed by physicist Gerald Feinberg. The square root of -1 is referred to as imagination. Tachyons would travel at the same speed as light. They would have a hard time slowing down to light speed because they would have to go above light speed.

Feinberg was the one to coin the phrase "Faster-than-light particles". Einstein discovered that the central rule of the universe was causality.

Everything we understand about the workings of the universe is based on causality. Causality states that cause must come before the effects. I have to text you before your phone rings, I have to eat cheese before I can eat it, and so on.

Causing trouble

Tachyons are able to violate causality. Let's conduct a thought experiment. While you're out in the universe, I'm on Earth. I want to send you a signal with tachyons, so I am going to fire up my tachyon transmitter.

The tachyons race away from me at a faster pace than you can see. So far, it's been great.

The tachyon will reach you in less time if you are standing still. It's not a big deal if you can't see the tachyon coming until it passed you. If you had a telescope pointed at me, you would get the tachyon before seeing the image of me pressing the button. It was curious, but no big problem.

If you start moving, there is a problem. From your point of view, Earth appears to be retreating. The action of me pressing the button slows down from your viewpoint. If you travel fast enough, you can receive my tachyon and send a reply before I even hit the button.

You can play a lot of fun games if you can send signals back in time. You can send a message back to prevent your grandparents from meeting, but you need to exist to prevent your grandparents from meeting in the first place. There is a way to destroy the tachyon emitter before it gets your message. It's possible to destroy yourself in your past.

It seems unlikely that tachyons exist because we don't live in a universe where these contradictions occur.

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