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A tachyon (/ ˈ t æ k i ɒ n /) or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always travels faster than light. Physicists believe that faster-than-light particles cannot exist because they are inconsistent with the known laws of physics.
Faster-than-light (superluminal or supercausal) travel and communication are the conjectural propagation of matter or information faster than the speed of light (c). The special theory of relativity implies that only particles with zero rest mass (i.e., photons ) may travel at the speed of light, and that nothing may travel faster.
In 1978, Phillippe H. Eberhard's paper, Bell's Theorem and the Different Concepts of Locality, rigorously demonstrated the impossibility of faster-than-light communication through quantum systems. [5] Eberhard introduced several mathematical concepts of locality and showed how quantum mechanics contradicts most of them while preserving causality.
With this modified setup, it can be demonstrated that even signals only slightly faster than the speed of light will result in causality violation. [ 47 ] Therefore, if causality is to be preserved, one of the consequences of special relativity is that no information signal or material object can travel faster than light in vacuum.
Another experiment overseen by A. M. Steinberg, seems to indicate that particles could tunnel at apparent speeds faster than light. [39] [40] Other physicists, such as Herbert Winful, [41] disputed these claims. Winful argued that the wave packet of a tunnelling particle propagates locally, so a particle can't tunnel through the barrier non ...
While it takes light approximately 2.54 million years to traverse the gulf of space between Earth and, for instance, the Andromeda Galaxy, it would take a much shorter amount of time from the point of view of a traveler at close to the speed of light due to the effects of time dilation; the time experienced by the traveler depending both on velocity (anything less than the speed of light) and ...
The delayed-choice quantum eraser does not communicate information in a retro-causal manner because it takes another signal, one which must arrive by a process that can go no faster than the speed of light, to sort the superimposed data in the signal photons into four streams that reflect the states of the idler photons at their four distinct ...
The speed of light is the upper limit for the speeds of objects with positive rest mass, and individual photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light. [39] This is experimentally established in many tests of relativistic energy and momentum .