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As I mentioned yesterday, Hollywood screenwriter working on a TV pilot about physics trying to get the details right.

What empirical evidence is there that tachyons do not exist? I understand that objects with mass cannot accelerate to (much less past) $c$. So anything capable of FTL travel would have to be massless or very strange. But is there any astronomical evidence that allows us to conclude that superluminal travel does not happen in nature?

Like is there some specific phenomenon we would expect to see in the sky if non-free, interacting tachyons existed, and we're not seeing it? Or is the objection entirely mathematical?

Murf
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Like is there some specific phenomenon we would expect to see in the sky if non-free, interacting tachyons existed, and we're not seeing it? Or is the objection entirely mathematical?

The objection is from mainstream physics, and main stream physics is about mathematical models that fit observations and are predictive of future observations.

Laws of physics are the axioms necessary to pick up the mathematical functions relevant to measurements and observations.

A tachyon /ˈtæki.ɒn/ or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always moves faster than light. Most physicists believe that faster-than-light particles cannot exist because they are not consistent with the known laws of physics. If such particles did exist, they could be used to build a tachyonic antitelephone and send signals faster than light, which (according to special relativity) would lead to violations of causality.

Italics mine.

We have not observed or measured in our laboratory experimentally violations of causality, i.e. effects before cause, or communications from the future.

(If the mediums' communications , messages from the future, become accessible to laboratory experiments, maybe a drastic revision of the laws of physics will allow tachyonic particles in our list of observable particles.)

anna v
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There have been many searches for tachyons in cosmic rays, $e^+e^-$ collisions, beta decays, neutrinos, and elsewhere, all with ultimately negative results. The Particle Data Group no longer lists tachyon limits, but earlier limits can be found on page 1811 of the 1994 Review of Particle Properties. For more up-to-date limits, see Robert Ehrlich's 2022 article "A Review of Searches for Evidence of Tachyons".

David Bailey
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You cannot (or at least, not without phenomenal effort, in the best of cases) prove a negative existence statement in science, i.e. find something that will tell you, with certainty, that some "whatever" does not exist. Not with tachyons, and not with Bigfoot, either.

The evidence that they don't exist is simply that in all attempts to find one, we never have. You may have heard that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" - but absence of evidence where we might expect to find evidence can indeed be evidence (not proof) of absence. Of course, we also don't know of all places where we might find evidence - so again, the strength of our "they don't exist" claim likewise has to be circumscribed there, too. Just like with Bigfoot - there's enough people in the woods that, since such are an environment where you'd expect to find them, the failure to observe bones likewise constitutes empirical evidence in the same way that it does not exist. But it is always - always possible whatever you're after exists in potentially any places you have not looked.

Theoretical arguments about causality are not disproofs - theory could be wrong. But the fact nobody has sent us a message from the future in any incident that passes scientific muster is, like above, also countermanding evidence. That said, there are ways tachyons could exist in which they would also be prevented from retrocausal action - one possibility is that absolute relativity is wrong instead, and there is a preferred rest frame (which might only be detectable using tachyons). Instead of considering them "disproofs", I'd actually consider them explanations for why that tachyons "don't exist" in the empirical sense mentioned above. There are many ways that our world could be put together that resolve these causality issues - but the easiest one is simply that the relevant retrocausal phenomena just don't exist to begin with.