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Tachyons are hypothetical subatomic particles that travel faster than the speed of light.

Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was thought to prohibit Faster-Than-Light particles; in 1961, George Sudarshan, et al, showed that particles with either real positive rest mass or real positive energy were possible. These particles would always have a speed greater than light; they are prohibited from moving as slow as, or slower than, light.

In 1967 Gerald Feinberg proposed a solution to casual objections to the existance of these hypothetical particles, and named them Tachyons; Greek for swift ones.

For the general public, a more readable article by Feinberg appeared in the February 1971 issue of Scientific American magazine.

In research, no serious experimentation or theoretical work on tachyons has been generally accepted since the Feinberg reinterpretation principle.

Tachyons in Science Fiction

Much has been made of tachyons in Science Fiction techno-babble particularly in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager where tachyons are often mentioned in relation to time travel and other space time anomalies.

Sources

Bilaniuk, Deshpande, Sudarshan, "Meta Relativity," American Journal of Physics, XXX (1962): 718ff;

Gerald Feinberg, "Possibility of Faster-than-light Particles," Physical Review, CLIX (1967): 1089-1105.

See Bilaniuk et al., "More about Tachyons," Physics Today (December 1969), p. 49;

David Bohm, The Special Theory of Relativity (New York: W. A. Benjamin, 1965), p. 158;

F. A. E. Pirani, "Noncausal Behavior of Classical Tachyons," Physical Review, D 1 (1970): 3224.

Bilaniuk and Sudarshan, Particles beyond the Light Barrier," Physics Today (May 1969): 47

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