RE: starship-design: Tachyons

["Kyle R. Mcallister" <stk@sunherald.infi.net>]

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From: 	Jonathan J Jay[SMTP:jon_jay1@juno.com]
Sent: 	Wednesday, May 27, 1998 5:29 PM
To: 	starship-design@lists.uoregon.edu
Subject: 	starship-design: Tachyons

>  To be or Not to be? That is, in a way the question. Has anyone given 
>serious thought as to the possibility of tachyons, or perhaps, ways of
>harnessing such power. If tachyons existed, I'm not saying they do or
>don't, but if tachyons existed and we had a way of controlling them,
>there
>would be a definite possibility of getting to other star systems in
>"record"
>time.  

First of all, yes, tachyons can exist. There is nothing that precludes them from existing that we know of. There has even been an experiment that reported to have detected tachyons, but I'm not putting money on it: it was a lone occurence. I do not believ tachyons would be of much help to space travel, as their mass would likely be incredibly small, and we would need record numbers to provide propulsion. Then theres the problem of containment... I would put my money on possibly developing a way to bend space infront of a star ship to provide a propulsive force. If done right *theoretically* you might be able to travel at relativistic velocity or faster, causality violations being unlikely in lieu of the plethora of experiments that do not support them.

Kyle R. Mcallister