Talk:Tachyonic field

Pendulum Analogy, not clear, needs visuals[edit]

I'm trying to understand imaginary mass, as a layman. So I'm grateful an attempt to explain it with analogy was given, but I couldn't follow the pendulums. First question: Are they arranged to swing fore and aft or sideways?

"Now consider an initial condition where at time t=0, all the pendulums are pointing straight up."

When I imagine pendulums, I think of the things that hang out of old clocks. I don't imagine "straight up" as a possible position. My difficulty here illustrates a point about this section of the article: that it could probably benefit a lot from some visual aids, if anyone is generous enough to make that contribution.

Understanding imaginary mass based only on complex numbers and newtonian physics: I think of mass as indirectly inferred from gravity. Since the force of gravity between two objects is (approximately) proportional to the product of their masses, I infer there is negative gravity(repulsion) between two objects of imaginary mass and imaginary gravity (pulls in the direction of an imaginary dimension of space?) between an object of real mass and an object of imaginary mass. If these intuitive statements are valid, then consider adding them to the article. 24.233.151.201 (talk) 01:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC) (PS: Having trouble logging in)[reply]

"Negative Mass Squared"??[edit]

The following sentence doesn't make sense to me as a lay reader. Would someone with more expertise in the field please clarify or correct it? My understanding of imaginary numbers is that an i² = -1, this seems almost to be implying that i = (-1)² which is mathematically incorrect. I might be missing something, however. "There is a simple mechanical analogy that illustrates that tachyonic fields do not propagate faster than light, why they represent instabilities, and helps explain the meaning of imaginary mass (negative mass squared)" Indiasierradelta (talk) 15:25, 28 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It means the mass, squared, is negative. 76.118.180.76 (talk) 15:30, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Article name[edit]

Another possibility is "Tachyon (field)". Waleswatcher (talk) 13:39, 1 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move[edit]

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus to move. Vegaswikian (talk) 21:53, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think Tachyon should be moved to Tachyon (particle), and if so, this article name should move to Tachyon (field) for consistency. Waleswatcher (talk) 15:41, 12 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Why is this request linked to the Tachyon RM? Each title should be under the common name of its topic, regardless of where the other one is. The nominator created this article less than two weeks ago. The title should be either Tachyonic field or Tachyon (quantum). Kauffner (talk) 10:19, 13 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's linked to the Tachyon RM simply for consistency in naming between the two articles. Why do you say it should be "Tachyon (quantum)"? This has little to do with quantum mechanics, you can perfectly well have a tachyon of this type in classical field theory.

The real issue here is that this usage of "tachyon" - as a field with imaginary mass - is overwhelmingly the most common in the scientific literature. I did a quick count using inspires, and there are something on the order of 4,000 papers citing the top 25 papers that have "tachyon" in their title. Not one of those top 25 uses the term to mean a FTL particle, they all mean the field. So that's 4,025 (minus some redundant ones) reliable sources using the term to mean the field. How many reliable sources use it to mean particle? By the same token it's also the primary usage by the enduring notability and educational value criterion. So really, this article should be Tachyon, and the current article Tachyon (particle). But in view of the resistance to that I'm willing to accept as a compromise that neither is primary, and Tachyon is a disambiguation page. Waleswatcher (talk) 01:06, 15 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Doubled paragraph[edit]

Although the notion of a tachyonic imaginary mass might seem troubling because there is no classical interpretation of an imaginary mass, the mass is not quantized. Rather, the scalar field is; even for tachyonic quantum fields, the field operators at spacelike separated points still commute (or anticommute), thus preserving causality. Therefore information still does not propagate faster than light,[8] and solutions grow exponentially, but not superluminally (there is no violation of causality).

This paragraph, verbatim, appears twice in the article !!! Very comical. I don't know which to remove. 76.118.180.76 (talk) 15:33, 1 November 2015 (UTC)a[reply]