On What Basis is an Intelligent God Possible w/o Evolution?

[harvey1]

On another thread in another sub-forum, QED asks:

[H]ow [can] a prime mover, or uncaused cause, such as [ to design, create and keep things on track] have so much intelligence -- a property we otherwise associate with the product of billions of years of evolution in challenging and complex environments like our own[?] Intelligence is only understood by us in these terms. This is mostly why I can't bring myself to jump on your gravy train. I want to know how the rational mind can conceive of disembodied intelligence in posession of all the necessary tools to build a universe.

Anyone have a response to QED?

[harvey1]

You misquoted that article:

No, I did not.

Yes you did. I showed the "but" in bold which proved that you took the article out of context.

Actually, the conjecture was proposed in 1998, it was confirmed 6 months ago, March 30, 2006(by experiment).

The 1998 experiment was not a conjecture, it was an experiment. Do you know the difference between an experiment and a conjecture? And, as I alluded, by your logic it takes three experiments to know something is discovered. That's not how scientific discoveries are determined.

No, it means that evidence indicates it might be true, it is NOT a guess. Assumption is a position taken on the assumption IT IS true.

Conjecture means "an opinion or conclusion based on incomplete information; a guess." Are you trying to re-define the English language? I suppose this means that you accept the Novikov self-consistency conjecture too? Previously you rejected that conjecture as piffle.

all seem either implausible, contradict other principles of physical law, or appear to be contradicted by experiment

Those, my friend ARE REASONS TO RULE IT OUT!!! In fact they are the BEST reasons to rule it out.

So, when Lord Kelvin said that it was physically impossible for the earth to be old enough for life to evolve according to natural selection that this was good enough reasons to rule natural selection out?

Milton Rothman says it better than I can

So, what about the 300+ papers on tachyons? Are you saying that those aren't real physicists who haven't abandoned tachyons. It seems to me that your physics knowledge here is based on what someone wrote and you believed him without checking the facts. You need to check the facts, Grumpy. And, more importantly, when the facts are presented to you, you need to surrender your view. Stubborness is not often a good trait in science.

[Grumpy]

Harvey1

Conjecture a : inference from defective or presumptive evidence b : a conclusion deduced by surmise or guesswork c : a proposition (as in mathematics) before it has been proved or disproved

The two in bold come closer to the meaning in physics.

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?b ... conjecture

I suppose this means that you accept the Novikov self-consistency conjecture too? Previously you rejected that conjecture as piffle.

Actually, Harvey, a good bit of your statements I consider piffle. It has nothing to do with you, everything to do with your philosophy. I am of a scientific bent, you of the philosophical. That's just fine 'til you start asserting that because you can come to conclusions because of your logic(and the assumptions behind it) that they dictate what must be in the material world WITHOUT CONFIRMATION BY OBSERVING THAT WORLD.(ala Plato et al) Philosophical blather is useless unless confirmed by reality.

So, when Lord Kelvin said that it was physically impossible for the earth to be old enough for life to evolve according to natural selection that this was good enough reasons to rule natural selection out?

Of what use is the uninformed philosophical blatherings of Lord Kelvin in this matter??? Of what relevance is the ignorant opinion of LK to this discussion??? Evidence indicates LK simply did not know what he was talking about(sort of like Plato et al).

I repeat

Quote:
all seem either implausible, contradict other principles of physical law, or appear to be contradicted by experiment
Those, my friend ARE REASONS TO RULE IT OUT!!! In fact they are the BEST reasons to rule it out.

Until valid evidence to the contrary is produced.

So, what about the 300+ papers on tachyons? Are you saying that those aren't real physicists who haven't abandoned tachyons. It seems to me that your physics knowledge here is based on what someone wrote and you believed him without checking the facts. You need to check the facts, Grumpy. And, more importantly, when the facts are presented to you, you need to surrender your view. Stubborness is not often a good trait in science.

You would do well to heed your own advice. There are thousands of pseudoscientific papers on the world wide flood of legend, that does not mean that ANY of them are valid. It seems some scientists haven't gotten the word yet. And since when is it a new phenomena that scientists cling to discredited theories long after others have moved beyond those theories??? Lamarckism comes to mind, as does Steady State Universe Theories. Even Einstein resisted Quantum Mechanics for years. Numbers of papers is not a measure of veracity(and what's in them has considerable bearing on the matter).

I chose Milton Rothman's paper because of it's brevity and succinctness, there are plenty of other papers that say the same basic thing, but use a lot of technical jargon unnecessary to get my point across. The current growing consensus is that tachyons were a wrong turn, a dead end, especially in view of the recently confirmed non-zero mass of the neutron. There has been no valid evidence that they(tachyons) exist.

As Monty Python(John Cleese) said, "That is a dead parrot, it is no more, it has gone to it's reward, etc. etc...".

Grumpy

[harvey1]

inference from defective or presumptive evidence... before it has been proved or disproved

In other words, there's nothing stated in a conjecture which tells us something is definitely ruled out, is there? So, why are you stating as fact that time travel is ruled out?

Of what use is the uninformed philosophical blatherings of Lord Kelvin in this matter??? Of what relevance is the ignorant opinion of LK to this discussion??? Evidence indicates LK simply did not know what he was talking about

Thank you for making my point. Unless there is very strong evidence to the contrary, one cannot rule out time travel based on the limited understanding that physicists have of time and space. You overstated human knowledge by saying that time travel is ruled out. Unfortunately you won't admit as much.

Those, my friend ARE REASONS TO RULE IT OUT!!! In fact they are the BEST reasons to rule it out.

Until valid evidence to the contrary is produced.

You have it backwards. You don't rule out propositions that you have absolutely no idea is true or false. You remain agnostic about their possibility. You rule out something when you have strong evidence that it is not the case. Time travel cannot be ruled out because we simply do not know enough about space and time to rule on the topic either way.

So, what about the 300+ papers on tachyons? Are you saying that those aren't real physicists who haven't abandoned tachyons. It seems to me that your physics knowledge here is based on what someone wrote and you believed him without checking the facts. You need to check the facts, Grumpy. And, more importantly, when the facts are presented to you, you need to surrender your view. Stubborness is not often a good trait in science.

You would do well to heed your own advice... I chose Milton Rothman's paper because of it's brevity and succinctness, there are plenty of other papers that say the same basic thing, but use a lot of technical jargon unnecessary to get my point across. The current growing consensus is that tachyons were a wrong turn, a dead end, especially in view of the recently confirmed non-zero mass of the neutron. There has been no valid evidence that they(tachyons) exist.

Then please answer the question. Why in the past 4 years have 300+ papers been written by physicists (most of them published)? Why are they being discussed in string theory seminar sessions as the main topic in multiple sessions? Why don't you just admit that you are wrong about these 3 issues?:

1) Tachyons have been abandoned by physicists
2) Time travel is ruled out by conjectures
3) Neutrino mass discovery was made 6 months ago

These are all obviously wrong. Why should anyone debate with you when you can't even admit three obvious errors on your part? You don't provide much motivation for anyone to discuss an issue with you.

[Grumpy]

harvey1

Misrepresent other's opinions and statements much???

1) Tachyons have been abandoned by physicists
2) Time travel is ruled out by conjectures
3) Neutrino mass discovery was made 6 months ago

1. Tachyons have been abandoned by most particle physicists, the rest will come along eventually. It is a failed idea not deemed valid any more, but the idea has taken root and will require some time before it is seen to be as valid as the aether concept was(and we all know how long it took for that to die out). The fact that some have not accepted this is not suprising, considering the investment of time and reputation involved. The current growing concensus is that tachyons were a dead end and do not exist, that is just a fact.( and I could quote physicist after physicist expressing that, but why bother?)

2. I said that Hawking has come to the position that time travel(other than moving forward in time) is not allowed by the universe, and I gave the reasons why he now holds that position. As in all science, that position is not cast in stone, but the reasons given are STILL valid. I happen to trust Hawking, so I accept his position and you have provided no reason to change that view. Speculate and mind experiment all you like, there are reasons(sufficient IMO and Hawkings{or vise versa})to think the universe will not allow travel back to a non-existent past.

3. Neutrino mass CONFIRMATION was announced 6 months ago, from an experiment started 1 year ago. We can now say with confidence(though never certainty) that neutrinos have a non-zero mass. Prior to 6 months ago no experiment of sufficient precision had been performed(they had to build it first), though speculation and conjecture were already heading that way.

These are all obviously wrong. Why should anyone debate with you when you can't even admit three obvious errors on your part? You don't provide much motivation for anyone to discuss an issue with you.

You are oblivious to the irony of your statement. This has been a major complaint about your arguements for some time. I am not wrong on these points, you have shown nothing in refutation(other than arguement by volume of paper). If AIG starts cranking out reams on the Flood, does that make it any less bogus??? Tachyons are a dead parrot, time travel is seen to occur only in thought experiments and neutrons were only CONFIRMED to have mass in the last 6 months. These are all true statements to the best of current scientific knowledge. Just because I do not agree with you doesn't mean I am wrong(we've had that problem before, you and I), I agree with Hawking and the other researchers.

Grumpy

[QED]

OK. Maybe the maths is simple because the phenomena are simple -- that's hardly something we would expect of any form of higher consciousness.

We follow pretty simple logical guidelines, and often the more simple logical guidelines we follow the more intelligent people say that we are.

So all the complexity of the brain is redundant? I think not. Brains, I believe, are held to be the most complex things in the known universe. Complexity has a cost that is paid for with time and events. I wonder if you think that there is a shortcut that's been overlooked by natural selection?

But, alternatively, couldn't we view ourselves as machines entirely controlled by approximate Newtonian mechanical processes as LaPlace envisioned? In that case, nothing is an IGUS. We can eliminate IGUS talk entirely by talking about the biochemical stuff happening at the molecular level. For example, if we could see only atoms and nothing bigger than that, brains would have lots of movement and its atoms would have lots changes in energy states and emissions of photons, but it wouldn't look any more IGUS-like than a pot of stew.

The point of this illustration is to show that any interpretation of IGUS behavior must come from our real perspective as humans. And, from our real perspective, nature exhibits IGUS behavior. Sure, we can imagine scenarios where the IGUS behavior can be shown to be no smarter than a rock rolling down a hill, but that's true even of any IGUS. (In fact, I think your quasi-materialist philosophy commits you to a view that there are in fact no real IGUSes in nature: it's just all "particle stuff" moving about like pot stew.)

So is the desire (will) of a rock to go downhill the same as our desire to go down to the kitchen for breakfast? You need to convince me of this before I will consider your Quantum examples.

I'm not arguing that these examples show intelligence of a willy nilly sort. (E.g., "I'm feeling a little lawful, I'll stop this experiment from obtaining which-path information this time.") Rather, I'm only arguing that it is an example of non-selected IGUS behavior. Even programmed robots are examples of IGUS behavior.

They were the original inspiration I believe. Do you have any other examples that do show what I'm looking for or shall we agree that complex behaviour requires a complex platform and selection is the only known process that can deliver on this?

However, on a wider scale, the IGUS behavior seen in nature is exactly what Spinoza would have expected. Even theist philosophers of the past would have had no problem in seeing nature act lawfully. Afterall, the Hebrews had an infatuation with God as a lawgiver who wouldn't depart from the laws one iota.

Well, they might have been impressed, but anything acting that rigidlyis a simple machine to me. Frankly I'm a little bit baffled by your desire to use simple physical examples to uphold your claim that nature contains intelligence that is not the product of selection. The whole idea in asking for such an example was to make it understandable for me how a mind capable of "twiddling the cosmic dials" to incredibly accurate and specific settings could gather the required knowledge in order to arrive at these particular "numbers". The foresight required in order to end up with the specifics of the periodic table (such that atoms could become arranged into the fabulously complex patterns of life) has no echo within your examples. I can make no useful connection therefore between what you've offered and what I'm asking for.

[harvey1]

The fact that some have not accepted this is not suprising, considering the investment of time and reputation involved. The current growing concensus is that tachyons were a dead end and do not exist, that is just a fact.( and I could quote physicist after physicist expressing that, but why bother?)

This is just a ridiculous statement. I've shown string theory seminars dealing with the topic, I've shown 300+ papers: most of them published, and still you will not relinquish that you are wrong. I'm putting you back on ignore. You are not qualified in my opinion to have a serious discussion. In the future I will make a statement referring to this correspondence so that any reader can see how obviously closed-minded you are, and leave it at that.

[harvey1]

So all the complexity of the brain is redundant? I think not. Brains, I believe, are held to be the most complex things in the known universe. Complexity has a cost that is paid for with time and events. I wonder if you think that there is a shortcut that's been overlooked by natural selection?

Intelligence is the ability to exercise better algorithms on a consistent basis. If the best choices are already mathematically determined, then intelligence means in that case to follow those choices on a mechanical basis.

So is the desire (will) of a rock to go downhill the same as our desire to go down to the kitchen for breakfast? You need to convince me of this before I will consider your Quantum examples.

I think that if the doctrine of materialism is true, then this must be the case. According to the materialist, the motion of quarks and leptons do not evolve according to the will of a human being wanting breakfast. Rather, a whole bunch of quarks and leptons are in a state which leads to the body going down and having breakfast. However, the quarks and leptons themselves are following the same behavior of the quarks and leptons in a rock rolling down the hill. There is no difference between them. Just the structure is different.

Do you have any other examples that do show what I'm looking for or shall we agree that complex behaviour requires a complex platform and selection is the only known process that can deliver on this?

I gave you, I think, enough convincing examples to show that IGUS behavior is present for non-selected behavior. I suppose you are looking for willy nilly behavior, and that's not what I would characterize as an actual IGUS function. IGUS behavior is always algorithmic otherwise it would be random. If you want examples of non-selected random behavior, then I can provide to you non-selected quantum behavior that is random.

Well, they might have been impressed, but anything acting that rigidlyis a simple machine to me.

But, how is pre-knowing what the experiment or experimenter will do an example of being a simple machine--especially when it means preserving physical law? That's like saying that a man predictably trying to save his son is acting like a simple machine. The cost of violating natural law is extremely high, so you expect rigid behavior.

Frankly I'm a little bit baffled by your desire to use simple physical examples to uphold your claim that nature contains intelligence that is not the product of selection. The whole idea in asking for such an example was to make it understandable for me how a mind capable of "twiddling the cosmic dials" to incredibly accurate and specific settings could gather the required knowledge in order to arrive at these particular "numbers". The foresight required in order to end up with the specifics of the periodic table (such that atoms could become arranged into the fabulously complex patterns of life) has no echo within your examples. I can make no useful connection therefore between what you've offered and what I'm asking for.

But, that is shown in the example of the delayed choice quantum erasure experiment. The experiment showed that the read condition removes the interference pattern outcome whereas a partial read does not. The main difference between those two situations is that one could figure out the which-path under a read condition, but could not do so under an erase (partial read) condition. If we assume presentism, then that requires a knowledge of Fourier transforms, which makes nature smarter than someone who just memorizes the periodical table. Presumably, if the creation of life were needed to preserve some kind of natural requirement, then life itself would be created using the same abilities that nature here uses to determine read/erase effects and make the appropriate countermeasures.

Incidentally, Spinoza I believe advocated just this kind of universe. He would be more than pleased with the delayed choice quantum erasure experiment results, I think.

[Grumpy]

Harvey 1

This is just a ridiculous statement. I've shown string theory seminars dealing with the topic, I've shown 300+ papers: most of them published, and still you will not relinquish that you are wrong. I'm putting you back on ignore. You are not qualified in my opinion to have a serious discussion. In the future I will make a statement referring to this correspondence so that any reader can see how obviously closed-minded you are, and leave it at that.

That's OK, Harv. It's what I've come to expect from you. This time you don't have the excuse that I hurt your feelings.

Tachyons appear to violate causality (the so-called causality problem), since they could be sent to the past under the assumption that the principle of special relativity is a true law of nature, thus generating a real unavoidable time paradox (Maiorino and Rodrigues 1999). Therefore, it seems unavoidable that if tachyons exist, the principle of special relativity must be false, and there exists a unique time order for all observers in the universe independent of their state of motion.

Tachyons can be assigned properties of normal matter such as spin, as well as an antiparticle (the antitachyon). And amazingly, modern presentations of tachyon theory actually allow tachyons to actually have real mass (Recami 1996).

It has been proposed that tachyons could be produced from high-energy particle collisions, and tachyon searches have been undertaken in cosmic rays. Cosmic rays hit the Earth's atmosphere with high energy (some of them with speed almost 99.99% of the speed of light) making several collisions with the molecules in the atmosphere. The particles made by this collision interact with the air, creating even more particles in a phenomenon known as a cosmic ray shower. In 1973, using a large collection of particle detectors, Philip Crough and Roger Clay identified a putative superluminal particle in an air shower, although this result has never been reproduced.

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Tachyon.html

Only seen once, never repeated by anyone. Hmmm, sounds like Bigfoot to me.

It is a well known fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. At best, a massless particle travels at the speed of light. But is this really true? In 1962, Bilaniuk, Deshpande, and Sudarshan, Am. J. Phys. 30, 718 (1962), said "no". A very readable paper is Bilaniuk and Sudarshan, Phys. Today 22,43 (1969). I give here a brief overview.

Draw a graph, with momentum (p) on the x-axis, and energy (E) on the y-axis. Then draw the "light cone", two lines with the equations E = +/- p. This divides our 1+1 dimensional space-time into two regions. Above and below are the "timelike" quadrants, and to the left and right are the "spacelike" quadrants.

Now the fundamental fact of relativity is that E2 - p2 = m2. (Let's take c=1 for the rest of the discussion.) For any non-zero value of m (mass), this is a hyperbola with branches in the timelike regions. It passes through the point (p,E) = (0,m), where the particle is at rest. Any particle with mass m is constrained to move on the upper branch of this hyperbola. (Otherwise, it is "off-shell", a term you hear in association with virtual particles - but that's another topic.) For massless particles, E2 = p2, and the particle moves on the light-cone.

These two cases are given the names tardyon (or bradyon in more modern usage) and luxon, for "slow particle" and "light particle". Tachyon is the name given to the supposed "fast particle" which would move with v>c. (Tachyons were first introduced into physics by Gerald Feinberg, in his seminal paper "On the possibility of faster-than-light particles" [Phys.Rev. v.159, pp.1089--1105 (1967)]).

Now another familiar relativistic equation is E = m*[1-(v/c)2]-1/2. Tachyons (if they exist) have v > c. This means that E is imaginary! Well, what if we take the rest mass m, and take it to be imaginary? Then E is negative real, and E2 - p2 = m2 < 0. Or, p2 - E2 = M2, where M is real. This is a hyperbola with branches in the spacelike region of spacetime. The energy and momentum of a tachyon must satisfy this relation.

You can now deduce many interesting properties of tachyons. For example, they accelerate (p goes up) if they lose energy (E goes down). Furthermore, a zero-energy tachyon is "transcendent", or infinitely fast. This has profound consequences. For example, let's say that there were electrically charged tachyons. Since they would move faster than the speed of light in the vacuum, they should produce Cherenkov radiation. This would lower their energy, causing them to accelerate more! In other words, charged tachyons would probably lead to a runaway reaction releasing an arbitrarily large amount of energy. This suggests that coming up with a sensible theory of anything except free (noninteracting) tachyons is likely to be difficult. Heuristically, the problem is that we can get spontaneous creation of tachyon-antitachyon pairs, then do a runaway reaction, making the vacuum unstable. To treat this precisely requires quantum field theory, which gets complicated. It is not easy to summarize results here. However, one reasonably modern reference is Tachyons, Monopoles, and Related Topics, E. Recami, ed. (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1978).

However, tachyons are not entirely invisible. You can imagine that you might produce them in some exotic nuclear reaction. If they are charged, you could "see" them by detecting the Cherenkov light they produce as they speed away faster and faster. Such experiments have been done. So far, no tachyons have been found. Even neutral tachyons can scatter off normal matter with experimentally observable consequences. Again, no such tachyons have been found.
How about using tachyons to transmit information faster than the speed of light, in violation of Special Relativity? It's worth noting that when one considers the relativistic quantum mechanics of tachyons, the question of whether they "really" go faster than the speed of light becomes much more touchy! In this framework, tachyons are waves that satisfy a wave equation. Let's treat free tachyons of spin zero, for simplicity. We'll set c = 1 to keep things less messy. The wavefunction of a single such tachyon can be expected to satisfy the usual equation for spin-zero particles, the Klein-Gordon equation:

(BOX + m2)phi = 0

where BOX is the D'Alembertian, which in 3+1 dimensions is just

BOX = (d/dt)2 - (d/dx)2 - (d/dy)2 - (d/dz)2.

The difference with tachyons is that m2 is negative, and m is imaginary.

To simplify the math a bit, let's work in 1+1 dimensions, with co-ordinates x and t, so that

BOX = (d/dt)2 - (d/dx)2

Everything we'll say generalizes to the real-world 3+1-dimensional case. Now - regardless of m, any solution is a linear combination, or superposition, of solutions of the form

phi(t,x) = exp(-iEt + ipx)

where E2 - p2 = m2. When m2 is negative there are two essentially different cases. Either |p| >= |E|, in which case E is real and we get solutions that look like waves whose crests move along at the rate |p|/|E| >= 1, i.e., no slower than the speed of light. Or |p| < |E|, in which case E is imaginary and we get solutions that look waves that amplify exponentially as time passes!

We can decide as we please whether or not we want to consider the second sort of solutions. They seem weird, but then the whole business is weird, after all.

1) If we do permit the second sort of solution, we can solve the Klein-Gordon equation with any reasonable initial data - that is, any reasonable values of phi and its first time derivative at t = 0. (For the precise definition of "reasonable", consult your local mathematician.) This is typical of wave equations. And, also typical of wave equations, we can prove the following thing: If the solution phi and its time derivative are zero outside the interval [-L,L] when t = 0, they will be zero outside the interval [-L-|t|, L+|t|] at any time t. In other words, localized disturbances do not spread with speed faster than the speed of light! This seems to go against our notion that tachyons move faster than the speed of light, but it's a mathematical fact, known as "unit propagation velocity".

2) If we don't permit the second sort of solution, we can't solve the Klein-Gordon equation for all reasonable initial data, but only for initial data whose Fourier transforms vanish in the interval [-|m|,|m|]. By the Paley-Wiener theorem this has an odd consequence: it becomes impossible to solve the equation for initial data that vanish outside some interval [-L,L]! In other words, we can no longer "localize" our tachyon in any bounded region in the first place, so it becomes impossible to decide whether or not there is "unit propagation velocity" in the precise sense of part 1). Of course, the crests of the waves exp(-iEt + ipx) move faster than the speed of light, but these waves were never localized in the first place!

The bottom line is that you can't use tachyons to send information faster than the speed of light from one place to another. Doing so would require creating a message encoded some way in a localized tachyon field, and sending it off at superluminal speed toward the intended receiver. But as we have seen you can't have it both ways: localized tachyon disturbances are subluminal and superluminal disturbances are nonlocal.

tachyon
A purely speculative particle, which is presumed to travel faster than light. According to Einstein's equations of special relativity, a particle with an imaginary rest mass and a velocity greater than c would have a real momentum and energy. Ironically, the greater the kinetic energy of a tachyon, the slower it travels, approaching c asymptotically (from above) as its energy approaches infinity. Alternatively, a tachyon losing kinetic energy travels faster and faster, until as the kinetic energy approaches zero, the speed of the tachyon approaches infinity; such a tachyon with zero energy and infinite speed is called transcendent.
Special relativity does not seem to specifically exclude tachyons, so long as they do not cross the lightspeed barrier and do not interact with other particles to cause causality violations. Quantum mechanical analyses of tachyons indicate that even though they travel faster than light they would not be able to carry information faster than light, thus failing to violate causality. But in this case, if tachyons are by their very nature indetectable, it brings into question how real they might be.
tachyon paradox
The argument demonstrating that tachyons (should they exist, of course) cannot carry an electric charge. For a (imaginary-massed) particle travelling faster than c, the less energy the tachyon has, the faster it travels, until at zero energy the tachyon is travelling with infinite velocity, or is transcendent. Now a charged tachyon at a given (non-infinite) speed will be travelling faster than light in its own medium, and should emit Cherenkov radiation. The loss of this energy will naturally reduce the energy of the tachyon, which will make it go faster, resulting in a runaway reaction where any charged tachyon will promptly race off to transcendence.
Although the above argument results in a curious conclusion, the meat of the tachyon paradox is this: In relativity, the transcendence of a tachyon is frame-dependent. That is, while a tachyon might appear to be transcendent in one frame, it would appear to others to still have a nonzero energy. But in this case we have a situation where in one frame it would have come to zero energy and would stop emitting Cherenov radiation, but in another frame it would still have energy left and should be emitting Cherenkov radiation on its way to transcendence. Since they cannot both be true, by relativistic arguments, tachyons cannot be charged.

Can't hve a charge, can't therefore, interact with matter, can't be detected and no evidence of their existence(besides one possible erronious sighting). Sounds non existent to me.

http://www.alcyone.com/max/physics/laws/t.html

tachyon- definition- Particle whose mass (squared) is negative; its presence in a theory generally yields inconsistencies.

http://www.site.uottawa.ca:4321/

Causality
The property of causality, a fundamental principle of theoretical particle physics, poses a problem for the physical existence of tachyons. If a tachyon were to exist and were allowed to interact with ordinary (time-like) matter, causality could be violated: roughly, there would no longer be a way to tell the difference between the future and the past along the worldline of a given piece of ordinary matter. A particle could send energy or information into its own past, forming a so-called causal loop. This would lead to logical paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox, unless the theory was set up in such a way as to prevent them. At present such a fix is not known: for example, the Novikov self-consistency principle has not been obtained within a quantum field theory, but has to be imposed by hand. At the very least the principle of special relativity would have to be discarded.

Starting to get the gist, Harvey??? The particle has not been shown to exist and SUSY does not require them. Dead Parrot.

Unless you want
Tachyon energy-Free energy!!!
Tachyon health products-tachyon generators to lengthen your life!!!
Tachyon cannons-useful on Zargons!!!
Tachyon game-Play today!!!

Grumpy [/b]

[harvey1]

If anyone is interested, here's the last annual string theory conference in China (2006) where even Stephen Hawking attended. Of course tachyons are playing a huge part in that conference (see for example, "the role of tachyons in black hole evaporation" by G. Horowitz on Friday afternoon. Or, Nakayama's talk on "exactly solvable dynamics of rolling D-brane" where he talks about Tachyon-Radion correspondence (page 4 of his presentation)). Unfortunately this won't change the mind of a stubborn individual. Obviously physicists have not abandoned tachyons.

[Grumpy]

Harvey 1

Obviously physicists have not abandoned tachyons.

Not all have, just most of them.

Super String Super Symmetry does not posit the existence of tachyons, in fact theory precludes their existence. It is now the dominant theory in string theory. Ergo tachyons HAVE been abandoned by most physicists. Dead Parrot.

We derive the rules to construct type IIB compact orientifolds in six and four dimensions including D-branes and anti-D-branes. Even though the models are non-supersymmetric due to the presence of the anti-D-branes, we show that it is easy to construct large classes of models free of tachyons. Brane-antibrane annihilation can be prevented for instance by considering models with branes and antibranes stuck at different fixed points in the compact space. We construct several anomaly-free and tachyon-free six-dimensional orientifolds containing D9-branes and anti-D5-branes. This setup allows to construct four-dimensional chiral models with supersymmetry unbroken in the bulk and in some D-brane sectors, whereas supersymmetry is broken (at the string scale) in some `hidden' anti-D-brane sector. We present several explicit models of this kind. We also comment on the role of the non-cancelled attractive brane-antibrane forces and the non-vanishing cosmological constant, as providing interesting dynamics for the geometric moduli and the dilaton, which may contribute to their stabilization.

http://www.citebase.org/abstract?id=oai ... %2F9908072

About 25 years ago, a number of physicists suggested the possibility that there exist particles that normally travel faster than the speed of light. In order for this hypothesis to be consistent with relativity, the mass of such particles would have to be imaginary-that is, contain the square root of minus one. Gerald Feinberg gave this hypothetical particle the name "tachyon" and was most prominent in publicizing his brainchild, with the aid of an avid press corps. Mind you, the theory was a proper theory in the sense that it was mathematically consistent, and also because it predicted certain observable consequences-namely, that if tachyons existed they would emit a certain type of radiation (Cerenkov radiation) in a vacuum. This radiation was searched for, and none was found. So, after a flurry of excitement, physicists lost interest in tachyons and went on to more massive hypotheses, such as black holes. As far as physicists are concerned, tachyons do not exist. (But black holes do!)

http://www.csicop.org/sb/9409/reality.html

But wait!!! There's more!!!

Grumpy