Tachyon facts for kids
A tachyon is a made-up particle that could travel faster than the speed of light. The idea of tachyons was first suggested by a scientist named Gerald Feinberg.
Most scientists today think that tachyons probably do not exist. Einstein's theory of special relativity says that nothing can speed up to go faster than the speed of light. However, if tachyons did exist, they would always be moving faster than light. If a tachyon were real, it would have a very strange kind of mass that is hard to imagine.
Some scientists believe that if even one tachyon existed in the universe, then many more would quickly appear. This is because the slower a tachyon tries to go, the more energy it would gain. But even with more energy, a tachyon would never slow down to the speed of light or slower.
Particles that move slower than the speed of light and have normal mass are called bradyons. These are the particles we know and see every day.
Could Tachyons Be Real?
For a short time, some scientists thought that tiny particles called neutrinos might have moved faster than the speed of light in experiments at the ATLAS detector in CERN. This was exciting because neutrinos have a normal mass, and if they went faster than light, it would challenge our understanding of physics.
However, it was later discovered that the strange results were almost certainly caused by a problem with the equipment. So, it seems that neutrinos do not move faster than light after all. This means that the idea of tachyons still remains just a theory for now.
