Word: feinberg
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...Impossible, that's all," Asimov insisted in 1967. "Possible, that's all," retorted Clarke in a recent issue. Feinberg's fascination is understandable. The particle is his conception, although he is still not certain that it really exists...
...Feinberg has long felt frustrated by Einstein's 1905 conclusion that velocities greater than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) are absolutely im possible. Such speeds must be approached before man will ever be able to travel to distant stars, and Feinberg says that he does not "like the thought of being permanently confined by lim ited velocities to a small region around our solar system...
Tedious Trip. Spurred on by that hemmed-in feeling, Feinberg brazenly began questioning the inviolable Einsteinian speed limit more than a dec ade ago. But no matter how he analyzed the set of mathematical equations that define relativity, he could not es cape the conclusion that matter cannot be accelerated to the speed of light, to say nothing of higher velocities. The equations showed that at the velocity of light, the mass and energy of any ordinary particle would become infinite -a clearly impossible situation. Beyond it, his mathematics suggested, the mass and energy of the particle can only...
...Feinberg was unable to get around this mathematical roadblock until he was struck by an ingenious idea. If mass becomes imaginary at high velocities, why not see what happens when an imaginary number is substituted for mass at rest? When he made the substitution, he was able to derive a real number for the energy of a particle traveling above the speed of light. Translating this concept into physical terms, Feinberg conjured up a strange particle that seemed to exist only on the other side of the speed-of-light barrier; it could move at velocities greater than...
According to the relativity equations, that "tachyon" (a name that Feinberg coined from the Greek word for "swift") should have other strange characteristics. Unlike familiar particles, which gam mass and energy as they accelerate toward the speed of light, Femberg's particle would lose mass and energy as it accelerated beyond the light barrier. At infinite speeds, it would theoretically have no mass or energy at all. Like a plane going faster than the speed of sound, a tachyon with an electrical charge would generate a "light boom" as it traveled faster than 186,000 m.p.s. The boom would...