Of Tesla and Tachyons

July 07, 2008

Pssst! Have I got a deal for you! For a measly $400, you can sleep better, heal faster, age more slowly, and have more energy. And that's not all! The incredible Tesla Shield (TM) -- brought to you by the fine folks at Life Technology -- also "stimulates the third eye chakra and improves intuition"; "enhances psychic abilities"; and "assists in astral projection," among other mystical benefits. Really, $400 is quite the bargain when you take all that into account.

How does it work? There's a lot of science-y sounding stuff on their Website about "bioactive modules," "harmonic oscillation," "human energy fields," and every New Ager's favorite: quantum mechanics. But the real secret ingredient behind the Tesla Shield (TM) is -- ta-da! -- tachyons! Life Technology claims that their device is a new and improved version of a "Personal Oscillator" invented by Nikola Tesla around 1907, claiming that Tesla "first described tachyon fields at the end of the 19th century." And tachyon fields, supposedly, are what supplies all living organisms with that vital life-force energy. Or something.

There's a few problems with these extravagant claims. First, Our Man Nikola was a bona fide genius, and a true scientific visionary, but he was not the first to describe tachyons: technically defined as hypothetical particles/waves that travel faster than the speed of light. That honor belongs to his contemporary,  Arnold Sommerfeld, although it was Gerald Feinberg who coined the term "tachyon" in the 1960s.

And while Tesla advanced some  pretty wacky ideas, particularly later in life, on the whole, he still was grounded in the rigorous principles of science. His wilder schemes never materialized. Conceptually, the Tesla Shield seems to have its roots in the Teslascope, a radio transceiver supposedly invented by Tesla to communicate with other planets. While Tesla did muse upon this possibility, he never built anything like it.

Most importantly, tachyons don't exist -- not in our world, anyway. (Sorry, Star Trek Voyager fans. You won't be using tachyon energy to scan "subspace" any time soon, or to create bizarre space-time anomalies.) They reside in a hypothetical "mirror universe" where objects have negative mass and time runs backwards. This is due to an odd quirk of special relativity. No object with mass -- even a teensy bit of mass, like a subatomic particle --  can ever reach exactly the speed of light, never mind travel faster.

There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, if your name is Albert Einstein. The speed of light is like a cosmic speed limit. An object will gain mass proportionally as it speeds up, getting heavier and heavier, and thus requiring ever more energy to keep accelerating -- until it got so heavy it would take an infinite amount of energy to keep accelerating to the speed of light. Only something on the other side of this imaginary space-time barrier, could travel faster than that: a tachyon.  Furthermore, as an object speeds up, time literally slows down, coming to a complete stop at exactly the speed of light. You could say that photons (particles of light) exist in a perpetual "Now." An object moving faster than light, therefore, would be traveling backwards in time -- at least from our perspective.

The best analogy for what we might see if we encountered a tachyon is the sound wave generated by a supersonic jet. There's no way we'd see it coming, since we can only see things via light, and a tachyon moves faster than light. But after it passed, we would see it appear to split in two: one image would appear to be arriving, the other departing, particularly if  we happened to be standing in prime viewing position: smack in the path of traveling tachyon. How cool is that?

If we could travel faster than the speed of light, we, too, would travel backwards in time, leading to all kinds of complications, like the infamous Grandfather paradox: what if we traveled back in time and accidentally killed out grandfather? If we were never born, how could we then travel back in time to commit the murder in the first place? I'm sure you see the difficulty.

No wonder tachyons show up so often in science fiction. And that's where they're staying, because tachyons don't exist: there isn't a shred of experimental evidence for or against them. Even if they did, theoretical physicists concur that they still couldn't transmit information faster than the speed of light, thereby violating causality.

So the good news is, our grandparents are safe from our future homicidal selves. It's only bad news for the folks at Life Technology and their bogus Tesla Shield (TM). Still, there's a sucker born every minute. If a Tesla Shield sounds like just the ticket, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in purchasing.

Photos: (top) Nikola Tesla in his Colorado Springs laboratory, circa 1900. (bottom) Visualization of a tachyon in motion. Both from Wikimedia Commons.

Comments

[birdwatch]

Geez, Jennifer. I suppose now you're going to spill the beans on transporters, food replicators and warp drive engines. Great column!
Irene

[Dave Mosher]

"...after it passed, we would see it appear to split in two: one image would appear to be arriving, the other departing, particularly if we happened to be standing in prime viewing position: smack in the path of traveling tachyon. How cool is that?"

VERY cool. Excellent post... absolutely blew my mind!

[Sunny Kalara]

What a timely post! July 10th is recognized as the "Nikola Tesla Day." In fact,the county of Los Angeles has adopted July 10th as the Global Energy Independence Day, held annually on the birth date of Nikola Tesla.

He is surely the most prolific forgotten American scientist,

I also think that as the concept of wireless energy transmission takes shape, he will become more and more prominent.

[Matt]

Awesome article. I could talk special relativity all day.

[Mang]

It was beginning to sound like an "Orgone Accumulator" on steroids. Yikes.

[Bjoern]

Nice post. Only a small quibble:
"They have to have negative mass in order to go faster than light..."

Actually, they have to have *imaginary* mass. Negative mass (although already that sounds quite strange) isn't sufficient.

[Jennifer Ouellette]

That should have been corrected by now. But thanks for pointing it out....

[ehswan]

As I understand it (not much) space moves and has no speed limit, so all you have to do is move the space you're in and you're not subject to no stinking speed limit. But what happens with time? I have no idea?

[Jennifer Ouellette]

I don't quite understand ehswan's question. He seems to be referring (confusedly) to length contraction and time dilation, both hallmarks of special relativity. Space as we know it most definitely has a speed limit: the speed of light (in a vacuum, if you want to pick nits). As an object speeds up, it gets heavier and heaver. Its length also contracts, so by the time it gets close to the speed of light, it's whisper-thin. And time dilates, too, since space and time are one, so that a photon (particle of light) traveling at exactly the speed of light, exists in an eternal "Now." Very Zen. :) This effect has been experimentally verified many times.

The best take I've heard on this is that length contraction and time dilation occur to ensure that the speed of light is constant within any reference frame...

[Michael]

I think there is still a problem with this. Tesla's theory works in an opposite way to Einstein's. He said that as you approach the speed of light, you lose mass. If you were able to reach the speed of light, you become light, or to put it more accurately, you would become photons. Since gravity is associated with space-time, due to mass, travelling "backwards" through time may only be an artifact of the mass. Once you lose the mass, maybe there is no reason you could not accellerate beyond the speed of light without that artifact. And it may just be that bending the fabric of space itself only depends on reaching a photon state. All of this is unproven theory, even Einstein's. So, if anyone wants to challenge that Tesla was every bit the genius Einstein was, all you need to do is start your car (Tesla created the ignition), or turn on a light (alternating current). We all know what Einstein created. Tesla was amazing. While we may not be able to find a tachyon, we do not KNOW, that they do not exist. I believe him. Just my two-cents. Still a great article, though.

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Unfortunately, the technical substance of Michael's comment is too incoherent to address those points. But I can address some of his other "points".

First, this whole Einstein vs. Tesla nonsense: it's not a competition, dude. They can both be geniuses in different ways. I personally greatly admire them both.

Second, "All of this is unproven theory, even Einstein's." This comment shows that Michael really doesn't understand the nature of a scientific theory. Tachyons are more of a hypothesis: no empirical evidence exists in support of them. The same cannot be true of Einstein's relativity. Many, many experiments have been conducted over the years to test his predictions, with greater and greater sensitivity as our technology improves, and the results always verify Einstein's predictions. That makes it VERY different from tachyons.

Finally, there is this: "While we may not be able to find a tachyon, we do not KNOW that they do not exist. I believe him." [meaning Tesla] Even Tesla would shudder at this statement. We can't find a unicorn, either, or Russell's imaginary teapot, so we don't KNOW they don't exist. Science is not a question of "belief." That's the realm of religion.

[Dr Bill]

It's too bad Dr. Tesla is not still alive. Maybe he would've discovered light speed travel abilities by now and humans would be exploring distant stars instead of wasting time (and money) sending robotic explorers to Mars.

NASA num-nuts take note.

[IR8D8R]

If it weren't for that bufoon Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla's work would have received the attention it deserved and we would live in a different world. Tesla was a nut for sure and a genius beyond compare but Edison was a door-to-door salesman. My public-school education gave credit to the wrong guy. I know that now. Pity we can't travel time and rectify that wrong of "recorded" history. Maybe the polar ice wouldn't be melting today. George Westinghouse recognized it. ...So we have power in our homes coast to coast. Thanks to Edison and his jealousy over Tesla's ability and intellect we got the electric chair method of execution. Shocking (no pun intended?) that a man would go so far as to use a thing to kill to discredit a (superior) rival. And he didn't even bother to use a Tesla coil which would have made it so much more eff... uh Humane. That should be Edison's legacy since most of his were the work of empoloyees. Or he was in reality beaten by someone. Good to be a salesman when the media's about. Barbarian.

IR8D8R

[Imaginary Unit]

Hello Jennifer,

"They [tachyons] reside in a hypothetical 'mirror universe' where objects have negative mass and time runs backwards."

Richard Feynman pointed out that an electron with negative mass going back in time cannot be distinguished experimentally from a positron with positive energy going forward in time.

Working with anti-matter, it seems, we are already interacting with the 'mirror universe'.

all the best

[Joe Threepack]

"No object can travel faster than the speed of light" is not quite true. It's a technicality, but a cool one.

Light travels slower in a medium than it does in a vacuum. Thus, stuff can travel faster than "the" speed of light -- the speed of light in a medium. Look up Cherenkov radiation for more.