<p>Just come to this board. I'm going to be relying on you guys to make me not feel like crap after I get my rejection letter.</p>
<p>Btw...I know I will get rejected due to a little somethign called Tachyons. Google it if you're curious.</p>
<p>If you understand that...</p>
<p>lol I am sort of understanding what tachyons are, but I don't see how it will make you get rejected...<em>scratches head</em> oh well, always nice to see that words I recognize from Star Trek are real I suppose</p>
<p>Since they have v > c and imaginary mass then it is theoretically possible that they go faster than light. (Indeed, it has been shown that there are situations in which information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light, but they fail to take down Relativity due to mostly technicalities surrounding the nature of the information [i.e. the information isn't necessarily "new]) If a particle can go faster than light, there are exciting possibilities of being able to send information to the past. I have a bag of some tachyons (lol), so I every once in a while send one out with some information regarding the present, and my past self sees it and knows his future (since his future is my present). I just received one about my RSI status. :(</p>
<p>o_O <em>confoozed</em></p>
<p>so you think that in the RF of the tachyon, things have happened already, while in our, slower-moving RF, they haven't? See, now that violates causality, and time, instead of moving forward in the tachyon's RF would go backwards, or off on some imaginary tangent.</p>
<p>To even try imagining that, I think you have to be drunk and awake at around 3 AM.<br>
Otherwise, risks of overheating brain might arise.</p>
<p>lol, I get it now! that's pretty cool. I just said I can see the future (xinerz doesn't believe me but we'll see) but hey, if I can see the future can't I also do long-distance hypnosis?? hehe</p>
<p>do you mean you have a bad dream?</p>
<p>are you asking about me having a bad dream or someone else?</p>
<p>Dang this thread will take an interesting course once the deadline is past :-P</p>
<p>Actually, the concept of the tachyon sort of deconstructs the RF. This is because if you consider the Lorentz factor for a tachyon, the time dilation, momentum, etc. are all imaginary. So, to account, we give the tachyon imaginary mass. Then, the Lorentz factor for a tachyon of velocity v > c and mass i*M (where i = sqrt(-1)), is 1/sqrt(v^2/c^2 - 1). Here, things get wacky, since the faster a tachyon goes, the less timespace gets dilated, so to account for this we construct a third axis of travel (in addition to the 2 dimensions of space/time).</p>
<p>Now, you may say "causality is violated!" but if you think about it, how is it violated? In conventional terms, A => B means A precedes B, but when we make this sort of 4th dimensional pretzel, there is no reason that A has to precede B. This is explored thoroughly in a book by Martin Gardner (I don't remember the title right now...).</p>
<p>In any case, this is how I know of my future RSIlessness and how you can think about these things even if you are sober and its still 6:30.</p>
<p>ahh ok so thats the turn its going to take! :-)</p>
<p>and for my input...</p>
<p>Tachyon: a particle that does magical things on star trek! Don't know what all this other jazz is....</p>
<p>I've never seen Star Trek, so I don't know what they make of it.</p>
<p>Must....wade...through....brain...spasms!</p>
<p>Isn't Lorenz factor, i.e. time dilation => dt = dt' / sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2) ? Your Lorenz factor == 1/sqrt(v^2/c^2 - 1), which is fundamentally different, and would be real for v > c. </p>
<p>Also, "the faster a tachyon goes, the less timespace gets dilated, so to account for this we construct a third axis of travel (in addition to the 2 dimensions of space/time)."</p>
<p>So we're creating a new dimension simply to account for an imaginary dilation? </p>
<p>Also, by "causality is violated" I meant that since a moving RF's space-time grid is warped to come closer to the c axis (45 deg.), the s-t grid of something moving faster than c would get all kinds of screwy, and causality would get royally raped. By causality, BTW, I mean that A causes B to do something, not A precedes B. If we're moving in an imaginary time, when accoutning for the warp, the effect would occur before the cause in the stationary time frame. </p>
<p>See, you DO need to be drunk. Or at least partially insane. </p>
<p>Actually, I'm pretty sure that what I just said doesn't make sense.</p>
<p>on Wikipedia it says how they're used in Star Trek. who here learned a whole lot of vocab from Star Trek? <em>raises hand!</em></p>
<p>dmitry, the Lorentz factor for a tachyon would have an imaginary denominator since v > c => v^2 > c^2 => v^2/c^2 > 1. Therefore, we factor out a sqrt(-1) from the denominator and make this produce the new axis.</p>
<p>wow, lotsa nerdiness goin on in here =P</p>
<p>"dmitry, the Lorentz factor for a tachyon would have an imaginary denominator since v > c => v^2 > c^2 => v^2/c^2 > 1. Therefore, we factor out a sqrt(-1) from the denominator and make this produce the new axis."</p>
<p>Oh.. I thought as much. So, the time dilation has an additional factor....of...i. So the time is imaginary, and we make it go off in a new D. mffg!</p>
<p>It seems to make sense now. Thanks, dude</p>
<p>haha I kinda get it too!...yay...haha isn't this nerd central? (in a good way)</p>
<p>Away with ict. In General Relativity, there is no concept of "spatial coordinate axes" or even a meaningful concept of "spatial coordinates". The geometry of spacetime is -represented- by imposing a Lorentzian metric defined in terms of one or more coordinate charts, and the (unique) Levi-Civita connection defined by the metric tensor, whose curvature is the Riemann curvature tensor.</p>