I remember ( several decades ago ..... ) when tachyons were the flavour of the month. These hypothetical particles travel faster than light and this implies that they have an imaginary mass ( in the sense of square root of minus one, complex numbers etc ). Only one catch though ...... you can't detect them! :-)
Cheers, Mike.
The understanding I had was rather the opposite, that it would be impossible not to detect them from secondary effects. They're going faster than the c, so they emit cherenkov radiation and loose energy, but since they already have a negative KE the more they loose the faster they go until their KE is infinitely negative, thier velocity infinitely high, and thier radiation output infinitely large.
The most interesting results I found use some beautiful mathematics, having to do with a kind of number called an octonion. These are numbers that you can divide, but they fail to satisfy the other rules, such as commutativity and associativity. Feza Gürsey, from Yale University and his students, especially Murat Gunyadin, have for years been exploring the idea that the octonions might be connected to string theory. Using octonions, I was able to develop an attractive idea (from Corrine Manogue and Tevian Dray of Oregon State University) that explains why space may look three-dimensional while being, in a certain mathematical sense, nine-dimensional. I don't know if the direction I took is right, but I did find that it is indeed not so hard to use background-independent methods to formulate and study conjectures about what M theory is.
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid for so long? - John Archibald Wheeler
everything is true, the opposite of everything is also true
RE: I remember ( several
)
The understanding I had was rather the opposite, that it would be impossible not to detect them from secondary effects. They're going faster than the c, so they emit cherenkov radiation and loose energy, but since they already have a negative KE the more they loose the faster they go until their KE is infinitely negative, thier velocity infinitely high, and thier radiation output infinitely large.
Breaking the Light Barrier &
)
Breaking the Light Barrier & Tachyon/Synchron Mechanics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/cherenkov.html
http://www.ps.uci.edu/~silvestr/thesis/THESIS/node38.html
http://www.gae.ucm.es/~emma/tesina/node4.html
http://rd11.web.cern.ch/RD11/rkb/PH14pp/node26.html
everything is true, the opposite of everything is also true
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/acm/
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin03/smolin03_print.html
http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-1998-1/
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2003-10/msg0055425.html
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2003-10/msg0055518.html
everything is true, the opposite of everything is also true
http://www.edge.org/3rd_cultu
)
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin03/smolin03_print.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octonion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/cnfGrHg.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/twfcontents.html
everything is true, the opposite of everything is also true
http://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~r
)
http://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/
http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521837332
everything is true, the opposite of everything is also true