Tick Tock Tachyons

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Given the responses to my Relativitycobblers thread (in the general autism discussion section) it would seem appropriate to indicate the dangers of accepting mathematical outlooks at face value, without properly analyzing them or applying checks. In his marvelous book, The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowsky, an otherwise impeccable thinker, showed how easy it is to become confused when men try to deal with length and time as if they were variables. When trying to explain Relativity (as best I can recall) imagined a moving observer hurtling towards a distant clock that he was somehow able to read. He related that the observer, as the distance between them decreased, that the clock appeared to speed up, to “catch up” with his own, which he translated as his own time frame slowing down, due to his velocity. Now this is a nice challenging little conundrum to those enamoured with something as exotic and surrealist as RT, and many will no doubt have been convinced by his explanation, so let’s apply some analysis.


A little thought should bring to mind that, as the observer approaches the clock, the distance the image from the clock has to travel decreases, and so the difference between the times indicated by the two clocks decreases, leaving no need to suppose anything as fantastic as a change in time rate.
Can we check this? Yes; all the observer would need to do is look behind him at the giant clock he started his journey from. At the off, it would have shown the same time as his own clock, but as more time for transmission came to be needed, the images would become increasingly late, suggesting, by the original method, that the observers time frame was speeding up. Can his time frame be decreasing and increasing simultaneously? Of course not; that’s a paradox, but aficionados of RT don’t seem to notice this! Einstein himself made the same mistake in his book Relativity (of which I own an English translation, and wish I hadn’t paid so much for it!) quite near the beginning (chapter three, I think) when he related the different observations relating to two lightning strikes, which he accorded to the velocity of the train on which he was travelling. It was not; it was purely down to the fact that he was in a different location; anyone standing on the embankment as he passed would have observed the same thing!


So there you have it; The General Theory of Relativity is underpinned by one of Einstein’s not infrequent screw ups! Far from being the greatest mind of the 20th century (or all time, as some would have it) he was in fact a sloppy thinker!


He’s not alone; there are a dozen or more TV professors who have gone on record as saying tachyons, it they exist, are travelling backwards through time, due to being faster than light, so let’s take a look at that.
Imagine another clock face speeding towards you faster than light, well one problem should be immediately apparent; if they emit images of the clock face at C, claimed to be a universal invariable in hat other thread, then don’t they somehow have to travel through this image, and without disrupting it (how would it be readable otherwise). Well let’s not trouble ourselves with that enigma, and just accept that we can read the clock. In that case, what should happen is that the tachyon should reach us before the first images, followed by the most recent ones, followed by older and older images. This would create the impression that the tachyon is in fact travelling away from us, and the clock would appear to be running backwards, so this means time travel? Not a bit of it; no more than does running a film backwards, yet no end of celebrity physicist and assorted PhDs who consider themselves of intellectual elite, have failed to understand this! You’ll find this in that other thread where multiple protagonists, convinced that reality can only be understood through transformations and imagined other spaces, that they seem altogether incapable of doing the kind of straightforward thinking demonstrated here, just as they failed to explain away any of the conundra I set them, yet they remain convinced they are right.


It may be that any aspect of reality can be defined mathematically, but it does NOT follow that anything that can be defined mathematically, however internally consistent it may be, is an aspect of reality…

I just found the "Relativity Cobblers" thread here. I'll comment later.

There seems to be something missing in the first post of this thread -- such as a fundamental understanding of science. We are asked to believe in an imaginary particle, which allegedly carries energy which itself cannot be proven to exist, but which any fool can use to explain just about anything he or she wants.

Jacob Bronowski was only a poet, teacher, mathematician (Ph.D.) and science historian. He was also a humanist. Even though he was a prolific writer, I find no evidence that he was a researcher -- no published, peer-reviewed research papers to his name. If such papers do exist, then please provide links to same.

Tachyons are purely imaginary and have never been observed in nature. Their very existence would violate the principles of physics, especially the principle of causality. Thus, there is no empirical evidence for the existence of tachyons. Modern physicists -- real scientists -- use the term 'Tachyon' to describe something imaginary.

Despite being imaginary, tachyons are alleged to be the main ingredient in many "New Age" products such as beads, belts, shoe inserts, sweatbands, pillows, massage oils and vials of homeopathic water. All of these are nothing more than ordinary items with a "New Age" price tag.