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Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
tachyon

1967, hypothetical faster-than-light particle, from tachy- "swift" + -on.

Wiktionary
tachyon

n. 1 (context particle English) A hypothetical particle that travels faster than the speed of light. 2 (context physics English) A flaw in a physical theory that predicts the existence of tachyons or similar paradoxical results. Compare with ghost.

Wikipedia
Tachyon

A tachyon or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always moves faster than light. Most physicists believe that faster-than-light particles cannot exist because they are not consistent with the known laws of physics. If such particles did exist, they could be used to build a tachyonic antitelephone and send signals faster than light, which (according to special relativity) would lead to violations of causality.

In the 1967 paper that coined the term, Gerald Feinberg proposed that tachyonic particles could be quanta of a quantum field with imaginary mass. However, it was soon realized that excitations of such imaginary mass fields do not in fact propagate faster than light, and instead represent an instability known as tachyon condensation. Nevertheless, in modern physics the term "tachyon" often refers to imaginary mass fields rather than to faster-than-light particles. Such fields have come to play a significant role in modern physics.

The term comes from the , tachy, meaning "rapid". The complementary particle types are called luxons (which always move at the speed of light) and bradyons (which always move slower than light); both of these particle types are known to exist. The possibility of particles moving faster than light was first proposed by O. M. P. Bilaniuk, V. K. Deshpande, and E. C. G. Sudarshan in 1962, although the term they used for it was "meta-particle".

Despite theoretical arguments against the existence of faster-than-light particles, experiments have been conducted to search for them. No compelling evidence for their existence has been found. In September 2011, it was reported that a tau neutrino had travelled faster than the speed of light in a major release by CERN; however, later updates from CERN on the OPERA project indicate that the faster-than-light readings were resultant from "a faulty element of the experiment's fibre optic timing system".

Tachyon (software)

Tachyon is a parallel/multiprocessor ray tracing software. It is a parallel ray tracing library for use on distributed memory parallel computers, shared memory computers, and clusters of workstations. Tachyon implements rendering features such as ambient occlusion lighting, depth-of-field focal blur, shadows, reflections, and others. It was originally developed for the Intel iPSC/860 by John Stone for his M.S. thesis at University of Missouri-Rolla. Tachyon subsequently became a more functional and complete ray tracing engine, and it is now incorporated into a number of other open source software packages such as VMD, and SageMath. Tachyon is released under a permissive license (included in the tarball).

Tachyon (disambiguation)

A tachyon is a hypothetical faster-than-light particle.

Tachyon or tachyonic may also refer to:

  • Tachyonic field or tachyon, a field excitation with imaginary mass
  • Tachyon (software), ray-tracing software
  • Tachyon: The Fringe, a 2000 computer game
  • Tachyon XC, a video camera
  • Tachyon Publications, a US book publisher

Usage examples of "tachyon".

Eventually, Tachyon rose from his chair and kind of wandered around the apartment for a while, then went to the liquor cabinet, mixed bourbon, gin, Cointreau, vodka, and brandy in a tall cocktail shaker, then gulped the lot.

And the tachyon transmitter had been lost with the Embe and the singleship.

Gregg, Tachyon, and the other political members of the junket were in attendance.

Tachyon was making a koan, a Zen riddle designed to teach a subtle lesson about the nature of life.

He had built a tachyon detector which did not detect tachyons, and that would be enough for Titus Summet to close it down.

Gravitational waves laid hold of the tachyons which sprang into being, paired with tardyons, and formed them into a beam, and modulated it.

In other words, tachyons and tardyons must coexist everywhere and are merely different expressions of identical phenomena.

Turtle dropped like a plummeting stone, and seizing Tachyon with his teke, he deposited him on the steps of a fountain.

Tachyon and Senator Hartmann and their entire party of touring Europeans know this?

Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology werelike tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers longat best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques.

According to this Sacred Physics book, the Big Bang Story that broke open the cosmic ylem egg showered out the Beings along with all the quarks and tachyons and all the rest of them.

Tachyon had told the authorities it was a mutant form, capable of reinfecting even stable aces and jokers.

Moreover, the work of Gliozzi, Scherk, and Olive had one other crucial result: They showed that the troublesome tachyon vibration of the bosonic string does not afflict the superstring.

Tachyon was waiting just beneath the ABC skybox, wearing his cavalier coat with the slashes and turnbacks, the riding breeches and boots.

Tachyon, Senator Hartmann, Hiram Worchester, and other important and influential politicians and aces streamed toward the limos waiting for them, while Chrysalis, Wilde, and the other obvious jokers on the tour had to make do with the dirty, dented jeeps clustered at the rear of the cavalcade.