Wolf Gnards

Scientific Illustration of Tachyon Particle

By far my favorite bit of Sci-fi voodoo… a little deus ex tachyon particles. Meaning when in doubt throw in some tachyons. Are you a screen writer, and have you written yourself into a corner? No need to fear, tachyon particles are here. Call it a MacGuffin, call it technobabble, call it anything you want, the tachyon is your way out. What can a tachyon do, you ask? What can’t they do? Spilled some red wine? Tachyons and club soda will get that right out. Killer shark off the coast? Explode some tachyons in its jaws. Have a friend trapped behind enemy lines? Give that tachyon a gun?

What is a Tachyon?

A tachyon is a hypothetical subatomic particle that move faster than the speed of light. Unlike ordinary particles (bread crumbs, Legos, and such), a tachyon’s speed increases when energy decreases, which means once set in motion the tachyon particle would keep moving on and on, faster and faster. Being a subatomic particle also means it’s much smaller than your average Lego, making a tachyon not particularly useful for travel. In science fiction and hypothetical theory, tachyons are used for transporting not people, but data, mostly for interstellar communication. However, if tachyons are used to “phone home” you run into a slight dilemma known as the “Tachyon Telephone Paradox.”

The Tachyon Telephone Paradox

Faster than light communication sounds awfully cool, but there’s a hitch: the tachyon telephone paradox. If you use tachyon particles to place a phone call (sometimes called the tachyonic anti-telephone), you’ll end up sending the call before you actually make the call. This is home it works, as an object approaches the speed of light, time actually slows down, and once a object actually passes the speed of light (which a Tachyon would eventually do), time moves backwards. So, your call would actually arrive to your outpost or destroyer fleet before you actually even made the call. Is this why my iPhone drops so many calls?

Follow up:

Tachyon’s in Fiction

Will the wonders of Tachyon’s ever cease? Babylon 5, for instance, is one of the few series to actually use tachyons for long distance communications (their intended purpose). Here are just some of the many off brand uses of Tachyon’s in fiction.

Watchmen – Dr. Manhattan’s ability to see into his future is muddled by “a hail of tachyons” in deep space. This actually makes a weird sort of sense.

Space Battleship Yamato (Starblazers) – Tachyons are used as an energy source for guns and starship engines, so something akin to subatomic gun powder or coal.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer – In the movie, Reed Richards creates a tachyon pulse to separate the Silver Surfer from his board. Why? How? Who knows. We’re to believe a being with almost unlimited powers was stopped with a cell pone.

X-Men – Silver Samurai has the mutant power to channel a tachyon field into his katana blade because as we were all taught in elementary school fast molecules make knives sharper.

Dune – A tachyon web was used to try and locate ships, sort of like a fishing net. This is actually a pretty common use of tachyons in science fiction, as sort of a cosmic trip wire. However, considering that space is infinite (or at the very least very, very large), your tachyon beam will eventually hit something or be tripped by someone, and there would no telling what it was that tripped it.

Dr. Who – Tachyons were used for space travel until the Time Lords developed the warp matrix engine. In one episode, an alien race used tachyons for a cloning and for casting illusions. Cloning may not be right, but if you traveled into the past, it’s kind of like clone.

Star Trek – The tachyon emission is perhaps the greatest and most used of all the treknobabble. Star Trek uses the tachyon for almost everything, Riker’s beard is made out of tachyons. Tachyons in Star Trek are used to track cloaked ships meaning tachyons may be involved in cloaking to some degree or at least are a by-product of the cloaking device. Actually, pretty much everything leaves a trail of tachyons in the future. For a theoretical particle, it sure gets around. Tachyon pulses, also, disrupt shields; great for whenever force shields conveniently turned off. And most time travels are usually dripping in tachyons.

Try this out, every time you hear or see tachyons in science fiction, replace the word “tachyon” with “bluetooth” and see how much sense it makes.