h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Your 'now' is not my 'now'."

-quote by Charles Lamb, 1817

"The distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one."

-Albert Einstein

"Imaginary time is another direction of time, one that is at right angles to ordinary, real time. We could get away from this one-dimensional, linelike behavior of time.... Ordinary time would be a derived concept we invent for psychological reasons. We invent ordinary time so that we can describe the universe as a succession of events in time rather than as a static picture, like a surface map of the earth.... Time is just like another direction in space."

-Stephen Hawking,
"Playboy," 1990

"Everything used to measure time really measures space."

-French philosopher Jerome Deshusses

"What then is time? If someone asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I know not."

-Aurelius Augustinus,
Bishop of Hippo in North Africa

"If tachyons are one day discovered, the day before the momentous occasion a notice from the discoverers should appear in newspapers announcing 'Tachyons have been discovered tomorrow.'"

-Paul Nahin,
"Time Machines"

"Spacetime has no beginning and no end. It has no door where anything can enter. How break and enter what will only bend?"

-Archibald MacLeish,
"Reply to Mr. Wordsworth"

"There was a young couple named Bright
Who could make love much faster than light.
They started one day
In the relative way,
And came on the previous night."

-Anonymous MIT student

Time which we know as "present" "past" and "future" is just an illusion but the fact is that
TIME IS PAST ONLY IN THE UNIVERSE WHICH IS DISPLAYED FROM ONE SCREEN
CALLED "LOOH_E_MEHFOOZ".
QURANIC THEORY BY
HIS DIVINE QALANDER BABA AULIA

Just a quick not to ask the writer of the article concerning the discovery of tachyons-how is that possible? Surely you can't use tachyons to send information faster than the speed of light from one place to another. Doing so would require creating a message encoded some way in a localized tachyon field, and sending it off at superluminal speed toward the intended receiver. But you can't have it both ways - localized tachyon disturbances are subluminal and superluminal disturbances are nonlocal. Any answer would be appreciated.

First of all: Please give you a nicer name and write some introduction on your personal space.

Concerning your question: There are no tachyons. Serious science abandoned this idea decades ago.

I have often heard of tachyons compared to unicorns. Just because popular opinion says they can't exist doesn't they don't. In fact, no matter what the topic, politics, science or movies at the mall the popular opinion is rarely the right. Let me know if your interested on the existence of tachyons or unicorns and I can give you a whole slew of books to read.

Tachyons *can* exist, but even if they did, we couldn't see them by principle. And then, effectively, they don't exist. It makes no sense to assume the existence of something that cannot interact with anything in our world.

Or it does? Well, then I postulate the 'Cefpretion'. It is very small, pink, always happy, and perpetually invisible.

Or, modifying an anecdote of Russel and Wittgenstein: Look outside your window. Do you see a hippo? No? How can you be so sure?

You see, it's obviously pointless. Keep you world view as simple as possible, and Tachyons or Unicorns are not necessary to explain *anything* we see.