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TACHYONS IN [#3 PARALLAX], [#44 FLASHBACK],
[#46 THE SWARM], [#51 FUTURE'S END, PART TWO], [#57 CODA] |
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Tachyons are subatomic particles which exist only at faster-than-light speeds. A tachyon cannot travel slower than light, just as many other particles cannot normally exceed the speed of light. Tachyons can be used to detect objects concealed by a Romulan cloaking device, as indicated in [TNG: Redemption]. Romulan vessels use tachyon scan sensor technology, which is noted in [TNG: The Pegasus]. A tachyon sweep of a nebula can be used to detect cloaked vessels within the nebula, as noted in [#44 Flashback], and episode whose events (excluding a "visit" induced by a mind-meld into the past) take place in early 2373:
 | Tuvok confuses the image of a Delta Quadrant nebula on a computer monitor with an Alpha Quadrant nebula he saw decades previously. He suggests to Kim, Chakotay and Torres: "I suggest we conduct a tachyon sweep of the nebula. It would reveal the presence of any cloaked ships."
Chakotay: "Cloaked ships?"
Tuvok: "Yes. We should be extremely cautious this close to Klingon space." |
above two pictures: [#44 Flashback] | They look at him in surprise.
Torres: "Tuvok, the Klingon Empire is on the other side of the galaxy."
Tuvok comes to himself, dragging his mind from the Alpha Quadrant back to the Delta Quadrant. "Yes, you are right, of course. I'm uncertain why I would make such an obvious error."
Chakotay: "Maybe you should go back to sickbay." |
In early 2371, in [#3 Parallax], Voyager engineer Lieutenant Joe Carey sends out a tachyon signal to try to scan the quantum singularity which Voyager has come upon, but all he gets back is static.
In [#33 Dreadnought], Torres, intent on destroying the Cardassian missile Dreadnought and so save the populated planet which it is targetting from destruction, says that it they can provoke Dreadnought to fire its thoron shock emitter at full power it may destabilise its reactor core for 30 seconds and a single sustained tachyon beam might penetrate the core and destroy it.
In early 2373, in [#46 The Swarm], Janeway decides to take Voyager through the space of an extremely xenophobic species which the crew name by describing them as the Swarm. The Swarm's sensor net which guards their territory uses a series of interlaced tachyon beams. Voyager is able to adjust shields to refract the beams around the starship so that they can get past the sensor net without disrupting it. The Swarm's tachyon detection grid would seem to be similar technology to that devised in 2368, in [TNG: Redemption], by Starfleet chief engineer Geordi La Forge (who is, incidentally, seen in an eventually unrealised timeline in [#100 Timeline]) to detect cloaked Romulan ships; the grid involves a network of active tachyon beams and required about 20 starships in order to be tactically effective. In 2373, Klingon forces employ a tachyon detection grid to protect the Klingon Chancellor Gowron's command centre, [DS9: Apocalypse Rising].
[#46 The Swarm] | Janeway joins Chakotay and Kim at Ops. They look at the display on the wall monitor which shows the extent of the Swarm's territory.
Chakotay: "Captain, I think we've found it: a way to get across the border without being detected."
Janeway: "Let's hear it."
Kim: "Their sensor net uses a series of interlinked tachyon beams. If we adjust the shields to refract those beams around the ship, we can slip across without appearing to have disrupted the net."
Janeway is impressed. "Not bad." |
[#57 Coda] | Janeway and Chakotay are crewing the shuttlecraft Sacajawea and are being pursued by Vidiian ships. Janeway says: "If we're experiencing a temporal field, a tachyon burst might disperse it." They emit the tachyon burst (pictured). This seems to succeed when the Vidiian ships disappear. |
In [#71 Day Of Honor], Seven assists Torres in the attempt to establish an experimental Borg transwarp conduit by setting up the parameters for the tachyon burst which will be needed to create it.
In mid-2373, in [#51 Future's End, Part Two], in an eventually unrealised timeline, Tom Paris detects tachyon emissions coming from a lorry leaving the Chronowerx headquarters building and believes that the villain Henry Starling is moving the 29th century Federation timeship. He later discovers, after following the lorry, that a temporal transponder was set to give off the tachyon emissions in order to act as a decoy and that the timeship is not really in the truck.
Ever since Albert Einstein convincingly demonstrated in 1905 that nothing with nonzero rest mass can travel at or
faster than the speed of light, physicists have been trying to
invent ways for material particles to break the "light barrier".
Breaking the sound barrier was essentially an engineering challenge. Aircraft designers needed to find ways to make ailerons (an aileron is the control surface on the wing of an aircraft) and other airplane control surfaces stable under the extreme stresses and turbulence a plane encounters when it approaches the sound barrier. Unlike the sound barrier, however, the light barrier is a fundamental property of the physics of the universe, not just an engineering challenge.
In the special theory of relativity, Einstein showed, and subsequent experiments with subatomic particles have confirmed,
that as an object increases its velocity, its mass also increases.
This effect is so small at low speeds that it is not measurable.
But close to the speed of light, relativistic mass increases
exponentially. For example, at a speed of l,000 kilometrer per second (kps), a one-kilogram mass weighs in at 1.0000056 kilograms (kg), just a fraction over its rest mass. At ninety percent the speed of light (270,000 kps), the mass increases to 2.29 kg. At ninety-nine percent the speed of light, the mass increases to 7.09 kg. Notice that mass is increasing exponentially as we get closer to the speed of light. It turns out that as the velocity of a
moving object gets closer and closer to the speed of tight, its
mass approaches infinity. Since it would require an infinite
amount of energy to accelerate an infinite mass, a material
object can never reach the speed of light.
Tachyons are hypothetical particles, conceived by theoretical physicists, that can only travel faster than light. Tachyons
have never been observed in nature, but they do not violate the
special theory of relativity, as long as they never travel at or
slower than the speed of light. In some ways tachyons "mirror"
the properties of ordinary matter. For example, when a tachyon loses energy it actually speeds up. If a tachyon were accelerated to infinite velocity, its energy would drop to zero. Tachyons
also have the curious property that they travel backward, not
forward, in time. To the mind of a theoretical physicist, this
bizarre conjecture isn't necessarily that hard to swallow.
Richard Feynman once noted that from the point of view of the
laws of physics, antimatter particles could be thought of as
ordinary matter moving backwards in time; i.e. a positron can
be treated as an electron travelling backward in time.
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