Originally posted by Yarium
Interesting thought just occured to me...
It is said that there is no reason that time couldn't run backwards, but that we'd never notice because to us it would appear to be going forwards.
Perhaps tachyons travel backward in time because, to them, it's forwards in time - not backward. A sort of temporal-cosmic undertow if you will. It
could be bringing information from the future to the past. Fascinating. But still, without proof of the tachyon's existance, such speculation as I
have made is baseless.
In 2001 Huw Price at the Univ. of Sydney discovered that information moves from future to past as well as the normal flow we think of. Ill try to
paraphrase this from a book.
At the quantum level all energy waves have 2 parts; an "offer wave" emited by a particle (a photon of light for instance) which travels into the
future along the normal path of time. This wave always interacts with a second wave coming in the opposite direction, future to past, and this is
called the "echo wave" because it echos the signature of the first wave only in the other direction. This interaction between the two waves
determines the reality we see in the present. The interaction is known as the "handshake" between the waves.
In the double slit experiment light is sent forward and travels through both slits because at a quantum level all possibilities have to be explored.
Two offer waves are sent out. When a slit is closed the echo wave knows that it only travels through one slit, so only one echo wave is sent back. The
offer wave and echo wave are reinforced in one slit, but the offer wave has traveled through both slits. The handshake crystalizes the reality of one
slit being open.
The fact that theres only one echo wave shows that the event of one slit being closed was deteremined in the future, and this information had been
traveling backwards in time to reach the moment that one slit was closed and the echo wave met its offer wave. (page 220 in "Breaking the time
barrier" by Jenny Randles)
So here is an event happening because it has already happened.
(Sorry but i wanna throw something else in: an experiment used pre recorded tapes of random lengths of pleasant and unpleasant sounds. These tapes
were sent to people and they were told to concentrate on hearing more pleasant sounds. When the tapes were sent back, they had more pleasant sounds on
them then unpleasant ones. The test subjects had altered the recording of sounds on these tapes which was carried out weeks before they ever heard the
tape!)
Sorry this doesnt have anything to do with tachyons, but I thought u guys would be interested. Heres some stuff on tachyons:
Richard Gott, an astrophysicist from Princeton, calculated that if tachyons do exist, they would move at
just above light speed, for subatomic
distances and for very short periods of time.
Anything with mass could not accelerate to the speed of light, it would require all the energy in the universe and its mass would become infinite
(because when the barrier of light speed is reached all the energy going into making it go fast could not be used to accelerate anymore and that
energy would turn back into mass via e=mc^2 since energy equals mass).
However Einstiens equations showed negative numbers in calculations of faster than light speeds. These negatives imply a whole range of particles that
mirror normal matter. This would indicate particles, like tachyons, that only go faster than light and cannot be slowed down even to light speed.
Some experiments involving particle collisions in supercolliders show new particles that could be tachyons, but have yet to be proven. An interesting
experiment using photographic plates to record high-energy particles hitting the Earth in cosmic ray showers found that some particles were hitting
the plates before the shower even started. These may have been particles moving so fast that the reached the plates before they even left.
