Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, do particle physicists ever make mistakes? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: all the time. One time I ordered licorice ice cream,
Speaker 1: big mistake. I once had garlic ice cream that was
Speaker 1: That was probably a bigger mistake. Do you know they
Speaker 1: make garlic ice cream? Yeah, they have pretty experimental flavors,
Speaker 1: sometimes with ice creams. What I mean is, have physicists
Speaker 1: ever written papers that, like scientific papers that turn out
Speaker 1: to be wrong? You know, it does happen. The most
Speaker 1: famous example comes from the Maybe the Opera experiment, which
Speaker 1: in two thousand eleven claimed to have measured neutrinos going
Speaker 1: faster than the speed of light. Wow. Turns out they
Speaker 1: just had a cable loose, and when they jiggled it,
Speaker 1: all the numbers got back into sink and everything was
Speaker 1: traveling happily less than the speed of light. Oh man,
Speaker 1: particles can't travel faster than light. Probably not. But you know,
Speaker 1: if particles could travel fast in the speed of light,
Speaker 1: physicist are already set up with an awesome name for them.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they have a good name for this far
Speaker 1: faster than light particles. They called the garlic kino or
Speaker 1: the liquor on um linker. That's like a terrible pun
Speaker 1: like a not safe for work pun him and I'm
Speaker 1: Daniel and welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain
Speaker 1: the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio in which
Speaker 1: we take the universe and explain everything in it to you,
Speaker 1: including things which might not be possible that's right, thanks
Speaker 1: with that are tasteful and nice, and things that are
Speaker 1: maybe a little tacky, things which stretch the boundaries of understanding,
Speaker 1: things which might even break the laws of physics themselves.
Speaker 1: To be on the pro graam we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about take eons. Are they real? What are they? Are
Speaker 1: they really tacky? What are they on? Who taught them
Speaker 1: their sense of style exactly? Um Tacons are a fascinating
Speaker 1: concept because, first of all, theoret from the theoretical physics
Speaker 1: point of view, they're interesting, like the idea for a
Speaker 1: tachion is a particle that travels faster than the speed
Speaker 1: of light, and so that already is like immediately arresting,
Speaker 1: like is it possible? How would that work? What would
Speaker 1: it mean? Right? But they also exist in science fiction.
Speaker 1: So this is a particle that it exists in the
Speaker 1: minds of physicists, but we don't know if it exists
Speaker 1: in the real world. Yeah, exactly, And it's the really
Speaker 1: interesting history sort of of the idea. There was a
Speaker 1: short story written by somebody in which they had particles
Speaker 1: going faster than the speed of light. So it started
Speaker 1: in science fiction, and then there was a physicist that
Speaker 1: read that story and thought, could you do that? Would
Speaker 1: that be possible? And sat down and sort of worked
Speaker 1: out the mathematics of it, and then gave it a name,
Speaker 1: called it attack eon Um. And then more science fiction
Speaker 1: writers heard about that and thought, oh, well, this must
Speaker 1: be a real thing now, And now it's like everywhere
Speaker 1: and science fiction and we heard attack eons everywhere. It's
Speaker 1: like a cosmic bad case of telephone exactly exactly, just
Speaker 1: sort of an idea of bouncing around, and you know
Speaker 1: there must be something really to it. If it's really
Speaker 1: resonating in the minds of physicists and science fiction authors,
Speaker 1: you know, it's something tantalizing, something exciting, something people want
Speaker 1: to be true, right, because it it would expand our
Speaker 1: kind of what's possible in the universe, right, yeah, Or
Speaker 1: it would expand the plot options available to science fiction authors. Right.
Speaker 1: If you can send particles fast in the speed of
Speaker 1: light and backwards in time and all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 1: Then there's lots of things you can do with your plots.
Speaker 1: That's right. If you follow the laws of physics, all
Speaker 1: science fiction would be pretty boring. Right, that's right. You
Speaker 1: know everything in the first scene. You can predict the
Speaker 1: whole story. Right. Actually, I feel like a lot of
Speaker 1: science fics is like that. You read one chapter, you
Speaker 1: know the whole story. You know the whole story. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Did this writer come up with the name for the
Speaker 1: tacon or was it the physicists who read this story? No,
Speaker 1: it was the physicist. Um. So the story was written
Speaker 1: by a guy named Blish and the story is called Beep.
Speaker 1: Involves like messages from aliens that come in. At the
Speaker 1: end of every message, there's a beep and it turns
Speaker 1: out of the beep and codes like all future messages
Speaker 1: or whatever. Oops, I just spoiled the story for everybody anyway, um,
Speaker 1: because parts of the message traveled fast in the speed
Speaker 1: of light. And so then the physicists read the story
Speaker 1: and came up with it in a n paper of
Speaker 1: this physicist named Gerald Feinberg, and so he coined the name.
Speaker 1: Take on as far as I eroners did. But you
Speaker 1: know now it's everywhere. It's in the pop culture, everywhere
Speaker 1: you turn. Yeah, he should have named after the author
Speaker 1: The Blisson, I think catch on quite as much or
Speaker 1: the Beeps. No, but you know, I read about the
Speaker 1: tacons because they're part of the integral part of the
Speaker 1: plot of one of my favorite comic books and in fact,
Speaker 1: one of the most famous comic books of all time.
Speaker 1: What is Jorge's favorite comic book? I'm dying to know.
Speaker 1: One of my favorites. Is it you can throw banana
Speaker 1: peels from the tips of his fingers and make anybody slip.
Speaker 1: It's a liquorice lady, lady. Wow, there's so many not
Speaker 1: safer work jokes that can make about the curse lady. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they'll they'll need to be peeped out. Um exactly. Um,
Speaker 1: So tell me what is your favorite comic book. One
Speaker 1: of my favorite comic books, and that, uh is one
Speaker 1: of the most famous comic books of all time is Watchman?
Speaker 1: Have you seen the comic book or the graphic novel
Speaker 1: or the movie. I have read the graphic novel and
Speaker 1: I have seen all eleven hours of the movie, all
Speaker 1: different versions, all the slow emotion scenes that Zack Snyder added. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I love Mr Tomic who can basically do anything at
Speaker 1: the end of the movie, so all plots can just
Speaker 1: be resolved by Mr Atomic if necessary, Mr Dr Manhattan
Speaker 1: with his name document professor at I like your version better,
Speaker 1: Mr Atomic. That sounds that sounds better. Now it's a
Speaker 1: Doctor Manhattan or Mr Manhattan. I think Dr Manhattan And um, yeah,
Speaker 1: so he can see Tacon, so that that's kind of
Speaker 1: how he can and he sort of exists in this
Speaker 1: kind of quantum you know, uncertainty space time kind of mindset,
Speaker 1: so he can see the future, see the past, he
Speaker 1: sees it all sort of at the same time. Um.
Speaker 1: And so that's how the villain in the comic book
Speaker 1: I'm not going to spoil it kind of gets around
Speaker 1: is he confuses Dr Manhattan by adding a lot of
Speaker 1: take on interference and so he can't take the future
Speaker 1: and he doesn't know what's going to happen. M Very clever, Yes,
Speaker 1: very clever. Um. You also see taggons a lot in
Speaker 1: Star Trek. I noticed as like take on I pulses,
Speaker 1: tactionic fields and all sorts of stuff. Anytime they need
Speaker 1: to go back in time or send messages back in
Speaker 1: time or whatever they're They're always using tacons, right, They
Speaker 1: just always sort of forget to say that these things
Speaker 1: are not real. Well, you know, they're real in the
Speaker 1: Star Trek universe. I suppose they don't really play with
Speaker 1: all the consequences. You know, if you really did have takions,
Speaker 1: a lot of things would break about modern physics. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I had a bit of a tachyonic experience today. Actually,
Speaker 1: that just reminds me. I went to file some paperwork
Speaker 1: for my student who just defended his PhD, and he
Speaker 1: wasn't in town, so he couldn't file it himself. So
Speaker 1: I went to this office in the basement and turned
Speaker 1: in these forms, and the woman at the desk must
Speaker 1: have thought that it was my PhD, because when I
Speaker 1: turned the forum, she reached out she said congratulations, as
Speaker 1: if I was getting my PhD. At this moment, I thought, wow,
Speaker 1: all right, maybe I went back in time and now
Speaker 1: I looked like I'm twenty seven again. Or maybe she
Speaker 1: wasn't wearing her glasses. That's another It was a pretty
Speaker 1: dark basement, so I can excuse her. It's in the basement,
Speaker 1: it's in the basement, but his thesis was not on
Speaker 1: take on. So, but actually we don't know if they're
Speaker 1: real or not, right like we do. It's a theoretical possibility,
Speaker 1: but we have no confirmation. Do we have confirmation that
Speaker 1: they can exist. We do not know that they cannot exist. Right.
Speaker 1: But that's a pretty broad caveat because in general, it's
Speaker 1: really hard to prove the non existence of something. And
Speaker 1: you can always say with an asterisk, like if all
Speaker 1: we know about physics turns out to be wrong or
Speaker 1: a special case of the unit part of the universe
Speaker 1: we're living in, than anything could happen. Right, So in
Speaker 1: general it's pretty hard to say with a very with
Speaker 1: absolute certainty, something cannot exist. But you can say, and
Speaker 1: we'll get into this more more deeply, that would be
Speaker 1: pretty hard to full take eons into our modern understanding
Speaker 1: of physics, right, maybe harder than choking down a whole
Speaker 1: scoop of licorice ice cream more impleasant than you really
Speaker 1: wish you would you could go back in time, you know.
Speaker 1: The The joke is, my wife actually loves licorice ice cream,
Speaker 1: and one time we went to an ice cream place
Speaker 1: and she ordered to scoop to the licorice ice cream
Speaker 1: and I saw her eating her deliciously. She didn't tell
Speaker 1: me what it was, and I tried to take a
Speaker 1: bite out of it, and it literally like jumped out
Speaker 1: of my mouth. It was impulsive. Wow, ejected itself from
Speaker 1: my mouth. That's like your your kryptonite or your taon interference. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it turns out, actually there's lots of things can defeat me.
Speaker 1: But one of them on the long list is a
Speaker 1: licorice ice cream. Yes, one of them upsets your stomach, yeah,
Speaker 1: or my tongue. Well, attacks is. It's kind of a
Speaker 1: cool name. First of all, take eons and but and
Speaker 1: we know that it's in science fiction a lot. It's
Speaker 1: in comic books and science fictions in science fiction. But
Speaker 1: we were wondering how many people out there knew what
Speaker 1: it means and what it refers to it. So I
Speaker 1: went around the U c ir on campus and I
Speaker 1: accosted random students and said, hey, would you answer a
Speaker 1: random zience question? And all of them said yes, And
Speaker 1: so I asked them about take eons and here's what
Speaker 1: they had to say. Have you ever heard of attack on?
Speaker 1: You know what attack on is? What's your best guess
Speaker 1: it's a particle which gets admitted from a backle is
Speaker 1: that it I would assume it has something to do
Speaker 1: with uh space, space, Okay, I have no idea. Okay,
Speaker 1: not yet. I haven't heard of it, Okay. I've also
Speaker 1: heard it in a TV show. I think it's in
Speaker 1: the Flash. I think they talk about that, But I
Speaker 1: don't know what it is. That sounds cool? Sound cool? No,
Speaker 1: I have no idea, okay, oh, no, attack on. I
Speaker 1: don't know what it is, but it sounds like something chemical,
Speaker 1: something from Star Trek. That's literally, as far as my
Speaker 1: knowledge goes. I'm not actually sure if it's even real
Speaker 1: or not. It could be entirely from science fiction as
Speaker 1: far as i'm more. Alright, not a single positive answer,
Speaker 1: Not a single positive answer. A lot of people have
Speaker 1: heard of it, right, Some well, I've never heard of it,
Speaker 1: but some people heard of it in the context of
Speaker 1: science fiction or Star Trek or this kind of stuff. Oh,
Speaker 1: in the Flash, right, I think they have it in
Speaker 1: the TV show with the Flash. Yeah, the Flash must
Speaker 1: have it right, because he breaks all sorts of laws
Speaker 1: of physics. It's basically the laws of physics break particle
Speaker 1: right anytime you need to break physics just and start
Speaker 1: some taions. She just called the plot hole on the plot.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, it's like filling a pothole, right with
Speaker 1: phil potholes with take eons, filled plot holes with takes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's done. Not not a common name that people
Speaker 1: are familiar with. Um, So let's break it down, Daniel.
Speaker 1: But first let's take a quick break. Let's start with this.
Speaker 1: What is a tacon alright? So takeon is a theoretical particle, right,
Speaker 1: it's an idea. It's idea for a particle that can
Speaker 1: travel faster than the speed of light. Right, And remember,
Speaker 1: in relativity we say nothing can travel faster than the
Speaker 1: speed of light. We say things that have mass can
Speaker 1: travel less than the speed of light. Thing and approach it.
Speaker 1: Things with no mass, like photons, they travel always at
Speaker 1: the speed of light. Right, this, so there's the speed
Speaker 1: limit to the universe, the speed of light in a vacuum.
Speaker 1: Tachons are like, what if something could break that? What
Speaker 1: if something could move faster than the speed of light?
Speaker 1: How would that work? And what should we call it?
Speaker 1: So that's what a tachian is. I like, how that's
Speaker 1: the second most important question about it, not how dis
Speaker 1: revolutionize our understanding on our ability to travel the costumers,
Speaker 1: It's like, what are we going to call it? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's big fights over the names of stuff, right. You know,
Speaker 1: if you come up with a cool idea, you gotta
Speaker 1: name it so it sticks right and you get the
Speaker 1: credit for it. You know. This is that famous case
Speaker 1: in particle physics where two groups discovered the same particle
Speaker 1: on the same day and gave it different names right
Speaker 1: the same day, the same day. Yeah, there's a whole
Speaker 1: lot of fun whisper stories about how maybe grad students
Speaker 1: in one group tipped off grad students in the other group. Anyway,
Speaker 1: they named it on the same day, and they gave
Speaker 1: it two different names. As so now we call that
Speaker 1: particle the j sside particle. We use both names because
Speaker 1: nobody can agree, right, really, people, you guys have fights
Speaker 1: about this, Like I wanted to be called J No,
Speaker 1: I wanted to be called side. Like, well, I think
Speaker 1: it is personal with the guy who called it j.
Speaker 1: He's Chinese, and I think jay Is looks like the
Speaker 1: Chinese character for his name, so I think he's basically
Speaker 1: naming it after himself. But now these are like the
Speaker 1: kids of divorced parents, you know, end up with the long,
Speaker 1: complicated names anyway. Yes, so naming things very important, and
Speaker 1: as you and I have discussed many times in this podcast,
Speaker 1: physicists don't always do a great job of naming things.
Speaker 1: Like sometimes they don't even come up with a new name.
Speaker 1: They're just like, use a word that already exists in
Speaker 1: English that means something else to describe some physics thing, right, Like,
Speaker 1: we have particles that have flavor and color, and like
Speaker 1: part don't have actual flavor and color, so we should
Speaker 1: have come up with different words. So in this case,
Speaker 1: I think it's awesome that they actually came up with
Speaker 1: a new, cool sounding word. Yeah. I think if you
Speaker 1: discover a quark, Daniel, you should call it a new
Speaker 1: flavor licorate, the disgusting quirks, the revolting quirks, the vomit quirks.
Speaker 1: It turns out vomit is made a little vomit on particles. Technically,
Speaker 1: that's true, Yeah, if you write it in a physics paper, right,
Speaker 1: So um, but it's always fun theoretically to think about,
Speaker 1: like how could this work? What would it mean if
Speaker 1: we took the laws of special relativity and try to
Speaker 1: use them to describe something going faster than the speed
Speaker 1: of light. What would happen? What exactly would break? How
Speaker 1: could we tested? That's sort of the point of attacking.
Speaker 1: So it starts with a hypothesis like what if one
Speaker 1: of these particles could go faster than like, what would
Speaker 1: it look like? Yes, exactly exactly what would it look like?
Speaker 1: How do we see it? Could you like break two
Speaker 1: things at one so that in the end it's not broken, right, Like,
Speaker 1: sometimes you have to break one law of physics and
Speaker 1: that has a consequence somewhere else, and you're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well maybe I'll just break that one also, and then
Speaker 1: things will be honky dory. Right. So sometimes you can
Speaker 1: make big discoveries by breaking two things at once. Right,
Speaker 1: you can reveal that there were two mistakes to misunderstandings
Speaker 1: we had about the universe. That would be like two
Speaker 1: Nobel Prizes in one afternoon, two wrongs making it right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so that's actually sort of happens here. Um. And
Speaker 1: so as you folks listening might know. The interesting idea
Speaker 1: and relativity. One of the core ideas and relativity is
Speaker 1: that you can have infinite amount of energy. There's no
Speaker 1: limit on the energy of particle can have or you
Speaker 1: can keep pouring energy into a particle, but there is
Speaker 1: a limit on speed. Right. So for example the Large
Speaker 1: Hadron Collider, we push particles using little waves, so they
Speaker 1: surf and they get more and more energy, but then
Speaker 1: they approach the speed of light and they never really
Speaker 1: get faster. That doesn't limit us from adding more energy
Speaker 1: to the particles, right, It's kind of like an infinite
Speaker 1: bucket almost, like you can keep pouring energy into it,
Speaker 1: but the speed just won't won't go over the speed
Speaker 1: of light. Yeah, and if you're a visual person, you
Speaker 1: can think of sort of a graph. Right. Our basic
Speaker 1: idea of the relationship between speed and energy is that
Speaker 1: they're they're directly connected. Right. Um, as you go faster,
Speaker 1: you get more energy, and that's true, but then as
Speaker 1: you approach the speed of light, it sort of bends
Speaker 1: over and asymptotically approaches the speed of light. So you
Speaker 1: can keep pouring energy in, but the speed never goes higher.
Speaker 1: And there's this mathematical relationship. You can write it down
Speaker 1: and you can look at it on Wikipedia. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: involves this complicated expression. It's like energy is mass squared
Speaker 1: over the square root of one minus v squared over
Speaker 1: C squared. And that's mathematically how you get that expression.
Speaker 1: The cool thing is you can say, all right, well,
Speaker 1: what happens if you just plug in velocity is twice
Speaker 1: the speed of light? What happens mathematically? What does that mean? Oh?
Speaker 1: I see, like, what have you um cross over that line?
Speaker 1: What have you assume that you filled the bucket and
Speaker 1: went over? Yeah, exactly, And you know it's just playing around.
Speaker 1: This is what theoretical physicist due for fun. They're like,
Speaker 1: let's poke these equations and see what happens. And so
Speaker 1: it does get interesting because on the bottom of the
Speaker 1: equation um it gets the number inside the square root
Speaker 1: goes negative. Right, so you have like the square root
Speaker 1: of a negative number. And you're probably thinking, what you
Speaker 1: can't have the square rod of a negative number, right,
Speaker 1: Like what number when you multiplied by itself, gives you
Speaker 1: negative two? Right, Well, there's no real number. You have
Speaker 1: to go to imaginary numbers, which means that this particle
Speaker 1: is imaginary or it has imaginary mass. Well, it means
Speaker 1: it has imaginary energy, right, because the expression is energy
Speaker 1: is basically mass over this crazy velocity term. If the
Speaker 1: velocity term goes, it goes imaginary. Then the energy goes imaginary,
Speaker 1: and you're like, what what does that mean? So this
Speaker 1: is what I mean by breaking two things. So then
Speaker 1: physicist thought, okay, well what if we make the top
Speaker 1: part of the equation also in imaginary. So we make
Speaker 1: the mass imaginary. Then you have velocity grid in the
Speaker 1: speed of light, imaginary mass, but real energy like actual energy.
Speaker 1: So if you just say that this particle has imaginary mass,
Speaker 1: and let's get into what that means. But if you
Speaker 1: say that it has imaginary mass, then the laws of
Speaker 1: physics technically don't break. If this particle goes faster than
Speaker 1: might well, if I don't know that, the loss of
Speaker 1: physics don't break. We can talk about that a little later.
Speaker 1: It turns out they break other things also. But this
Speaker 1: one equation does hold, right, This equation for the relationship
Speaker 1: essentially between energy and speed does hold. But yeah, it
Speaker 1: requires you to have imaginary mass, and it also means
Speaker 1: for other really weird things. For normal particles, as the
Speaker 1: velocity increases, the energy increases, right Right In this case,
Speaker 1: if you look at the equation, as the speed goes up,
Speaker 1: the energy actually goes to zero. So the faster it goes,
Speaker 1: the less energy it has. That's pretty weird, yeah, because
Speaker 1: everything in nature wants to have low energy. So that
Speaker 1: means this particle will just keep going faster and faster
Speaker 1: and faster to infinity exactly. So as it goes to
Speaker 1: zero energy, it has infinite speed. Like what does that
Speaker 1: even mean? You know, now you have a particle like
Speaker 1: infinite speed and imaginary mass but no energy. Right, it's
Speaker 1: pretty weird thing. But technically maybe could exist. Technically maybe
Speaker 1: could exist. Right, There's some causality issues we'll talk about
Speaker 1: a little later, but that's sort of the concept. Like,
Speaker 1: that's the idea of attacking on and it's a fun
Speaker 1: thing to play with theoretically, And you know this, before
Speaker 1: you think this is a waste of time, remember this
Speaker 1: is how progress is made. You know. This is how,
Speaker 1: for example, antiparticles were discovered. People were looking at the
Speaker 1: equations and they were like, what if you flip the
Speaker 1: sign of this and flip the sign of that. Look
Speaker 1: looks like this equation would also hold for opposite charge particles.
Speaker 1: I wonder if they exist. Let's go look, and they
Speaker 1: did exist and they do exist. Yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: rich source of searching around for the corners of the
Speaker 1: equations and seeing they describe some actual physics that might
Speaker 1: be real that we just hadn't imagined, because there's a
Speaker 1: lot of crazy stuff out there in the universe that
Speaker 1: we haven't conceived of. Well, it's kind of a philosophical
Speaker 1: thing because it's it's you sort of saying that anything
Speaker 1: that can exist mathematically so far we think has existed,
Speaker 1: right Like, if the equations say that this is possible
Speaker 1: and doesn't break everything else, then you keep searching, you
Speaker 1: sort of so far you sort of you found it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a subtle point, right. Sometimes we have mathematical descriptions
Speaker 1: of things and then we look at the mathematics, were like,
Speaker 1: well the math says that, but physics says no. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: sometimes a mathematical equation will have two solutions and one
Speaker 1: of them will be nonsense, and you say, well, that's
Speaker 1: not physical, so we'll ignore it. But yeah, then you
Speaker 1: have to wonder is it really is that? Are we
Speaker 1: doing science there? Are we just sort of like enforcing
Speaker 1: our um prejudices, right? Should we be more open minded
Speaker 1: and explore all the possibilities of the math? And sometimes
Speaker 1: the math is all we have, like, look at quantum mechanics.
Speaker 1: You can't even apply your intuition. You just have to
Speaker 1: blindly follow the math and say, well, quantum mechanics says
Speaker 1: a particle can appear on one side of the barrier
Speaker 1: and then appear on the other side of the barrier
Speaker 1: without passing through it. So and then we do the
Speaker 1: experiments and it happens, right, So sometimes you just have
Speaker 1: to follow the math. Yeah, you're saying, sometimes you have
Speaker 1: to be kind of open minded and say, hey, what
Speaker 1: if mass could be imaginary and let's see what happens. Then, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's exactly that's the whole point, right, That's why you
Speaker 1: poke these equations, because it could just be our prejudice.
Speaker 1: It could be that the way we're thinking about the
Speaker 1: universe is determined by the way we have experienced it,
Speaker 1: which is, we know, not typical and not fundamental. Right,
Speaker 1: So we don't want to be um have our eyes
Speaker 1: closed because of the biases and the way we have
Speaker 1: lived and grown up, right, So we want to keep
Speaker 1: our eyes open, and sometimes the math is a very
Speaker 1: helpful guide. We'll have a great money making scheme for you, Daniel.
Speaker 1: It's called the takeon diet makes your math imaginary. Gee,
Speaker 1: I imagined you were fat, but I guess that was wrong.
Speaker 1: You just had the wrong perspective in physics. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: what what's the diet? Run fast in the speed of
Speaker 1: light and you'll lose weight. I think it's it's go
Speaker 1: back in time and stop yourself from eating all that
Speaker 1: liquors ice cream? Is you know, we're recording this podcast
Speaker 1: on pie day, so we should have done all these
Speaker 1: examples with pie instead of ice cream. Liquor liquorice pie.
Speaker 1: That sounds even more gross than the gurors ice cream,
Speaker 1: if that's even possible. Here, let's go back in time
Speaker 1: using tacons and start over and replace search and replace
Speaker 1: ice cream with pie. But hey, pie and ice cream
Speaker 1: go well together, So we'll start with ice cream and
Speaker 1: we'll switch over to pie and then the episode will
Speaker 1: be like ala mode. Yeah, they go well together. So um,
Speaker 1: so let's get into what they actually might look like.
Speaker 1: But first let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel.
Speaker 1: So that's attack on. It's a theoretical particle with imaginary
Speaker 1: mass that can go faster on the speed of light.
Speaker 1: So what what does that even look like? What would
Speaker 1: the attack on look like, what could we interact with it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's where it gets really fun is you start to think,
Speaker 1: how could we see take eons? What experiments could you
Speaker 1: build to detect them? Right? And um, we think take eons.
Speaker 1: You know they have mass though it's imaginary, um, and
Speaker 1: we think we could interact with them. We don't know
Speaker 1: what kind of interactions they might have, but imagine that
Speaker 1: they're visible, right, that they interact with light, then you
Speaker 1: can think about like doing an experiment to look at
Speaker 1: a tack eon. This already gets really tricky because the
Speaker 1: tagions are moving faster than the light they might be emitting.
Speaker 1: So you know how like an airplane moving through the
Speaker 1: air creates a sonic boom because it's moving faster than
Speaker 1: the sound it makes right, Right, That means that you
Speaker 1: can't hear the airplane coming. Right, one of those airplanes
Speaker 1: is coming at you, then you're not gonna hear it
Speaker 1: coming because the sound it's making is trailing behind it,
Speaker 1: so you it would just magically appear to you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's the same thing for attacking on. Right, If
Speaker 1: attack on is moving and it's moving faster than the
Speaker 1: speed of light and it's coming right at you, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't see it until it's on top of you, right,
Speaker 1: it would It would just appear to you. That's just
Speaker 1: bad manners. I mean, that's just tacky. You know, it's
Speaker 1: tacky and it's on you. That must have been how
Speaker 1: they got the name attacking and I spilled my liquorice
Speaker 1: pie all over my suit. Let's just show up at
Speaker 1: this guy's house and be like, is this why you
Speaker 1: came up with the name have some Pie? Yeah? In fact,
Speaker 1: in fact, you would see the tacky on But even
Speaker 1: weirder than it just appearing all of a sudden, is
Speaker 1: it would look like it's going away from you. What. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you see something moving away from you, what you're
Speaker 1: really seeing are a bunch of time slices. Right, you
Speaker 1: see it's closer to you. Now, it's a little further
Speaker 1: away from you. A moment later, it's a little further
Speaker 1: away from you a moment after a Right, that's the
Speaker 1: order of arrival of images from tachyons. You would first
Speaker 1: see the photons that are that it admitted when it
Speaker 1: was close to you, before you saw the photons that
Speaker 1: it admitted when it was far from you. Exactly exactly so,
Speaker 1: if you play that movie. Your brains gonna be like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's attacking on moving away from you, right, So attacking on.
Speaker 1: If you see attacking on moving away from you, it
Speaker 1: means you just got hit by attacking on. But you
Speaker 1: would see it, so you would see it. You you
Speaker 1: almost see it moving backwards and in time, right, like, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: you see it moving the reverse direction. It's actually going mm.
Speaker 1: So that's weird. That's pretty weird, right. It's weird for
Speaker 1: particles to look like they're going different speeds if they're
Speaker 1: coming towards you or going away from you. Right. We're
Speaker 1: just not used to that, and that's because of this
Speaker 1: weird feature that they travel faster than the information that
Speaker 1: they're sending. Right. Well, that that's kind of one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why physicists don't think you can even go
Speaker 1: faster than the speed flight because it would just be
Speaker 1: so weird. Yeah, exactly, would break a lot of rules.
Speaker 1: But you know, sometimes things are weird, and being weird
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong, you know. I think
Speaker 1: one of the really fascinating things is this question of
Speaker 1: imaginary mass that we mentioned earlier, Like, I'm still what
Speaker 1: does that mean? Well, what does it mean, right, And
Speaker 1: you have to think for a moment about what we
Speaker 1: mean by a particle's mass. When we say, you know,
Speaker 1: electron has a certain mass, what we mean is that
Speaker 1: the particles is stable, like exists, it could hang out
Speaker 1: for a little while. And um, we just did that
Speaker 1: episode about what particles are and turns out particles are
Speaker 1: not like the building block of the universe at all.
Speaker 1: They're just excited states of quantum fields. Right, So what
Speaker 1: is a particle of of a certain mass. It's a
Speaker 1: stable excitation of a quantum field, meaning there's this weird
Speaker 1: jelly out there that knows how to wiggle, and it
Speaker 1: can wiggle in a certain way that sticks around for
Speaker 1: a while. Mass is kind of a marker of how
Speaker 1: stable the wiggles are. Yeah, exactly. So if you talk
Speaker 1: about a particle with imaginary mass, you're talking about strange
Speaker 1: wiggles going through this these quantum fields. Right, These jellies
Speaker 1: um wiggling in a weird way and not in a
Speaker 1: way that's stable. Right. Imaginary mass does not mean it's
Speaker 1: a stable particle. It means it's something else. And you're
Speaker 1: trying to describe it in terms of a particle and
Speaker 1: so you get a weird answer. You know. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like if you use the language of one thing
Speaker 1: to try to describe something else, it doesn't really make sense,
Speaker 1: you know. So it's almost like we can we have
Speaker 1: to stop using the word particle and just say wiggles
Speaker 1: in a quantum field. And if you just stop calling
Speaker 1: it a particle and just call everything wiggles in a
Speaker 1: quantum field, then you could technically have a wiggle that
Speaker 1: has imaginary mass. Yeah, exactly right, And it breaks your
Speaker 1: idea of what a particle is. But anyway, what's your
Speaker 1: idea of a particle is. It's probably wrong anyway, so
Speaker 1: feel free to break it all, smash it all the heck,
Speaker 1: you know, just using the word particle. Yeah, well, it's true.
Speaker 1: You know, particles are not fundamental, right, They are an
Speaker 1: emergent phenomena. They come from how wantum fields wiggle? And
Speaker 1: we don't know quantum fields are fundamental either or there's
Speaker 1: something else that makes them. But we do know the
Speaker 1: particles themselves are not fundamental because you know, they can
Speaker 1: be created and disappear. So tachons are like a weird
Speaker 1: different way for quantum fields to wiggle and that's what
Speaker 1: imaginary mass is. It's this. It's a sort of a
Speaker 1: breakdown of trying to describe quantum fields in terms of particles. Right,
Speaker 1: it's saying you should look at this in a different way.
Speaker 1: But but it could technically exist, like what these fields
Speaker 1: could wiggle in that way? I don't think so. And
Speaker 1: and the reason is that if you had take eons,
Speaker 1: then these fields could wiggle in a way that breaks causality. Right,
Speaker 1: And so this is physics, right. The math says, it's fine.
Speaker 1: The maths is, there's no problem with it. You can
Speaker 1: incorporate this into special relativity. You get these weird things
Speaker 1: like zero energy and infinite speed. But you know, the
Speaker 1: math is happy with it. Physics says no. Physics says,
Speaker 1: but we have these other rules, these other rules, like
Speaker 1: causes happen before effects. You know, messages have to arrive
Speaker 1: after their scent, not before. Right. You have to be
Speaker 1: born after your grandfather, not before this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: We impose these requirements on the universe and on the
Speaker 1: laws of physics separately. Right, But why why does the
Speaker 1: universe have to follow causality? Couldn't we, like you said,
Speaker 1: be open minded and imagine a universe that is not causal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I suppose we could, but it's sort of hard to
Speaker 1: logically argue for a non causal universe because logic imply
Speaker 1: requires causality. Right, Well, I feel like you're saying logic
Speaker 1: requires logic, but what if yes, maybe the universe is
Speaker 1: not logical. Yeah, so you're saying, like, could we describe
Speaker 1: could we have laws of physics to describe a universe
Speaker 1: that doesn't have laws? But I don't know how to
Speaker 1: do that. It's so fundamental to the way we think.
Speaker 1: It's fundamental to the way humanity thinks, not even just
Speaker 1: about physics. You know, I think that we are storytellers.
Speaker 1: We weave all of our experiences into stories, and that's
Speaker 1: how we remember things and forget things and communicate to
Speaker 1: each other. That's how we build models of the world
Speaker 1: that are that's outside our head. And stories are causal
Speaker 1: right there, and they're a narrative that I did this,
Speaker 1: and then this happened. I shot this laser beam and
Speaker 1: then you know, uh this the wall burned down or whatever, right,
Speaker 1: the korish ice cream, and then I threw up right
Speaker 1: this cause and effect. So you can write stories, I
Speaker 1: mean science fiction you can write stories that that have
Speaker 1: tagowns in them. Do you know what I mean? Like,
Speaker 1: you can if you can imagine it, story breaks the story. Right,
Speaker 1: it's a huge plot hole. That's why I hate time
Speaker 1: travel in science fiction because it breaks causality. Right, it
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense. Okay, well let's break it that.
Speaker 1: What does it mean? Like, if this particle existed and
Speaker 1: it can go faster than light, what are some of
Speaker 1: the things cool things you could do with it? Right? So,
Speaker 1: in special relativity, if you have something that goes faster
Speaker 1: than light, what it means is you can break causality.
Speaker 1: You can kind of go backwards in time. Now, Remember
Speaker 1: we talked about special relatively down another episode, and something
Speaker 1: we talked about is how there's no universal description of
Speaker 1: how things happen. Right If um, for example, if I
Speaker 1: shoot UM two laser beams, one to the left and
Speaker 1: one to the right, and I'm just looking at both,
Speaker 1: I can say, okay, they two laser beams hit the
Speaker 1: targets at the same time because the target is the
Speaker 1: same distance away. Somebody else with a different speed might
Speaker 1: see those events happening at different times. They might say,
Speaker 1: oh uh, laser beam one hit before laser beam two,
Speaker 1: and somebody else that a dafferent speed might see laser
Speaker 1: beam two happened before laser beam one. Right, So if
Speaker 1: you can change so you can change the order in
Speaker 1: which you see things happening based on your speed. That
Speaker 1: just tells you there's no absolute truth to the universe, right, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: but those things are not causally linked. Right, It doesn't
Speaker 1: really matter if if laser beam one hits or laser
Speaker 1: beam two hits. But what if you just had the
Speaker 1: one laser beam and you press the button? Right? Can
Speaker 1: the laser beam arrive before it leaves? Right? Can laserbeam
Speaker 1: hit the target before you prey the button? Those two
Speaker 1: things are costly linked, right, It seems impossible for it
Speaker 1: to get there before you press the button. Well, it's
Speaker 1: constantly linked. If you go backwards in time, do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Like it arrived because in the
Speaker 1: future I'm going to press the button. Yeah, But what
Speaker 1: if it arrives and then you change your mind, You're like,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm not going to hit that laser
Speaker 1: beam button right now, but it's already arrived. But if
Speaker 1: you change your mind, that means you didn't see it
Speaker 1: do it. I feel like this is a like. You
Speaker 1: can pick it a different movie to go with your theory.
Speaker 1: There's the movies that they're not alright, find graphic novels.
Speaker 1: That's really no like. Seriously, the laser beam arrives and
Speaker 1: if later you still have a choice to make about
Speaker 1: whether to press that button, then you could choose not
Speaker 1: to fire the laser beam right and then, But the
Speaker 1: laser beams already arrived, So how does that work? Anyway?
Speaker 1: The point is multiverse. Point is the relativity covers that.
Speaker 1: Relativity says that for events that are not causantly linked,
Speaker 1: or one could happen before the other, you can travel
Speaker 1: fast enough if you want that you could see either
Speaker 1: one happen first. But for things that are causally connected,
Speaker 1: where one has to happen before the other, like pressing
Speaker 1: a button on your laser and then hitting the target,
Speaker 1: there's no speed you can go to see the laser
Speaker 1: arrive before you press the button. To do that, you
Speaker 1: would have to go faster than the speed of light
Speaker 1: to reverse the order of events, and relativity says you can't.
Speaker 1: But what if there wasn't the speed limit? Right? What
Speaker 1: if you could shoot particles fasten the speed of light. Well,
Speaker 1: then you could go fast enough so that messages could
Speaker 1: arrive before their scent. Right, laser beams could hit the
Speaker 1: targets before you press the button if you go fast
Speaker 1: in the speed of light, so it breaks causality if
Speaker 1: the light goes faster than the speed of light, or
Speaker 1: if you send a message video TA, if you send
Speaker 1: a message via taions, Yeah, exactly, Okay, so take eons.
Speaker 1: If they can travel fasten the speed of light can
Speaker 1: sort of reverse the events, reverse orders of events, so
Speaker 1: that effects happen before causes, right, which is pretty which
Speaker 1: is pretty cool. It would be pretty cool. Sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, like, hey, I already ate that pie. Now
Speaker 1: I'd like to go back in time and decided not
Speaker 1: to eat that pie. Then you could have eaten the
Speaker 1: pie and have decided not to eat the pie, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it would break the universe, but at least it wouldn't
Speaker 1: gain those five pounds that would That would be kind
Speaker 1: of tacky though, if you did that at a restaurant,
Speaker 1: not if it's liquorice pie, then I totally endorsed just
Speaker 1: breaking the universe to avoid eating it. So it's almost
Speaker 1: like an anti telephone like it. It sends you sends
Speaker 1: your message before you even think about sending the message. Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: And that's what it's called. It's called a tachonic anti telephone. Exactly.
Speaker 1: If you had tacons, you could use them to build
Speaker 1: a telephone that sent messages back in time exactly that way.
Speaker 1: That's what I should tell my kids. It's not that
Speaker 1: I don't want them to play with my phone, it's
Speaker 1: just that we're an anti telephone. It's an anti telephone.
Speaker 1: Don't bring it near a telephone. It'll blow up. So
Speaker 1: you're basically saying that tacoons are are kind of impossible
Speaker 1: because it would break the logic of the universe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I mean if you hold causality be a fundamental
Speaker 1: principle of the universe, which I do, then it's pretty
Speaker 1: hard to believe that anything could go fast in the
Speaker 1: speed of light. But the math says tachyons could exist,
Speaker 1: and it's possible that we're wrong about causality. That it's
Speaker 1: just it's a prejudice that we've imposed on the universe
Speaker 1: because it's the way we think, and maybe the universe
Speaker 1: doesn't operate the way we think. Totally possible happened lots
Speaker 1: of times in physics that we've up ended our basic
Speaker 1: understanding of the universe, right, and then I've been confronted
Speaker 1: by reality. Yeah, all right, Well that was cool to
Speaker 1: learn what attacking is and how it's an imaginary or
Speaker 1: it has imaginary maths and it's theoretically possible but not likely.
Speaker 1: And uh dennity idea of closing this episode with a limerick. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was doing some research about tacking once and I
Speaker 1: found this hilarious physics poem. Right, It's not that often
Speaker 1: that you find physics and humor and poetry altogether, and
Speaker 1: so I thought, let's jump on the opportunity. Right, subgenre
Speaker 1: science fiction. Not many authors specialized in this area, but
Speaker 1: there is one. This is by a gentleman named Reginald Buller,
Speaker 1: and it goes like this. There was a young lady
Speaker 1: named Bright whose speed was far faster than light. She
Speaker 1: went out one day in a relative way and returned
Speaker 1: the previous night. So there is your physics poetry. I
Speaker 1: noticed you didn't laugh. Well, I was just hunging up
Speaker 1: on that first line. Um, her name is Bright. That
Speaker 1: sounds like a like a plot hole to me. I see, mr.
Speaker 1: The universe follows the laws of television shows and movies
Speaker 1: is now criticizing the physics poetry for not being accurate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know how many? How many people do you know
Speaker 1: are called right? Anyways, I'm actually a member of an
Speaker 1: organization called the Brights. I don't know what to do
Speaker 1: with that. I'm not joking. Um alright, So thanks to
Speaker 1: everyone for listening to this non tacky episode about a
Speaker 1: tack eons, for bending your mind a little bit. And
Speaker 1: remember that some of those crazy ideas that are in
Speaker 1: physics his head and science fiction authors are writing about
Speaker 1: they could actually be real, and one day we might
Speaker 1: discover that the universe is far far stranger than we
Speaker 1: ever imagined. Yeah, and if one day you do discover Takeons,
Speaker 1: why don't you send a message to yourself backwards of
Speaker 1: time and let us know such right here, we could
Speaker 1: do a test right now, right in the future, somebody,
Speaker 1: somebody discovers take On, send us a message to arrive
Speaker 1: right now. Wait, hold on, I just got a call.
Speaker 1: Wait here we go, let me let me pick it up.
Speaker 1: Hold on, is it from a lady name Bright. She's
Speaker 1: pissed at you for insulting her name. Ask her? Ask
Speaker 1: her in the future of our podcast is a huge success. Okay,
Speaker 1: hold on, let me texting. Oh well, wait, my phone
Speaker 1: doesn't send things. But wait does send things into the future,
Speaker 1: So it does send things into the future, just not backwards.
Speaker 1: All right. Well, well, we hope you enjoyed that. See
Speaker 1: you next time. Guys. Thanks for tuning in. If you
Speaker 1: still have a question after listening to all these explanations,
Speaker 1: please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 1: You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at
Speaker 1: Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening,
Speaker 1: and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explaining the Universe is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
Speaker 1: my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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