The Glitch- Chronon or Tachyon

Aayushi Vaish
6 min readAug 28, 2023

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

I am talking about “TIME”.

Imagine there’s a big gap between two things: the way science talks about the basic rules that govern everything in the universe (like particles and forces), and the way we talk about human stuff like feelings, history, beauty, and hope.

Richard Feynman once said that both sides of this gap are important. He thought it was a mistake to only focus on one side and ignore the other. He compared it to standing at the end of a pier and only walking in one direction, hoping to understand everything that way.

In 1987, there was a special meeting where scientists and thinkers gathered to discuss these things. They saw connections between science and ideas about God and the universe. They noticed that the concept of the universe coming from nothing (like God creating from nothing) was similar to the Big Bang theory. And the idea that life keeps changing and growing (like evolution) was a bit like the idea of continuous creation.

Time is a big deal in all of this. In science, time is like a rule that decides how things happen. In history, time is what makes things change and develop, like how Earth and life have changed over a long, long time. Even when people talk about deep things like beauty and hope, time is a part of it.

In science, especially in tiny things like atoms, time is linked to stuff like how often things happen, how long things stay the same, and how likely things are to happen. This makes time a super important link between the scientific world and the human world.

I’ve been considering a theory about the nature of time lately. It revolves around the idea that time might be generated by the frequency of longitudinal energy waves. According to this theory, the repetitions of these waves could be what gives us our perception of time. This perspective also suggests that time isn’t a fixed constant but changes depending on motion. I’ve also been connecting this concept to Einstein’s theory of relativity and using the example of time dilation to back up my theory.

While I find these ideas intriguing, I understand that the nature of time is still an area of active scientific research and philosophical discussion. Time is such a complex concept that it intersects with many different fields like physics, philosophy, and psychology.

Einstein’s theory of relativity has demonstrated that time can be influenced by factors like motion and gravity. From what I’ve read, time dilation is well-supported — it’s when time seems to pass more slowly for an object in motion compared to an observer at rest. This has been verified through experiments with high-speed particle accelerators and observations of events in space. However, what precisely gives rise to our sense of time and the mechanisms behind it are still open questions. While my theory proposes a connection between longitudinal energy waves and our perception of time, I’m aware that there’s no definitive empirical evidence available yet to confirm or refute this idea. The nature of time is intricate, and it needs further exploration and investigation from various angles.

I find it fascinating how the fields of physics, philosophy, and neuroscience all intersect when it comes to understanding the nature of time and how we perceive it. The theories about time are constantly evolving as our knowledge of the universe deepens. I believe there’s a lot more to discover in the future that will shed even more light on this captivating aspect of our existence.

I’ve been delving into a fascinating class of speculative physics theories, and I thought I’d share some of what I’ve been reading about. These theories are a bit out there and are probably not entirely coherent, but they’re intriguing to consider. They fall under the umbrella of “ghost condensate” theories, and while they’re not as well-established as concepts like the Higgs boson theory, they’re still worth exploring.

Chronon-

Think about going to a butcher shop. When you’re there, you see that people who arrived before you are served before you. This order of events, where one thing happens before another, is kind of like how time works. We can call these time units “chronons.”

“Fracture in Time”

Now, let’s say you notice that the order in which people are served seems a bit random. But here’s the trick: If you knew more about everyone’s daily routines, you might be able to predict why someone gets served before someone else. For example, if you know that you always come to the shop after your neighbor, you can understand why you wait for your turn.

When it comes to really tiny things, like particles, something similar happens. Imagine a bunch of uranium atoms. They’re like neighbors, but they’re throwing out tiny particles called “particles.” Now, sometimes one uranium atom shoots out an “a particle” before its neighbor does. This might seem puzzling, like why does one do it before the other?

The reason we can’t easily explain this is because we don’t know all the tiny details of these subatomic particles’ lives. It’s like not knowing about the daily routines of these super tiny things. But just like in the butcher shop example, if we knew more about what’s happening in the world of these particles, we might be able to understand why one does something before the other.

So, the idea here is that there’s a sort of order in how things happen in time, just like waiting your turn at the butcher shop. And even though things might seem random sometimes, there’s often a hidden pattern or reason behind it that we might discover if we understood more about the smaller details of the world.

Tachyon-

Interestingly, the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle, is said to be “tachyonic,” meaning it has a negative mass squared at its origin in field space. However, as it acquires a vacuum expectation value, it transitions out of this state and becomes non-tachyonic. On the other hand, “ghost” fields are those where the kinetic term is negative. Ghost condensate theories suggest that these fields can also condense like the Higgs boson, leading to a vacuum expectation value. The intriguing part is that, unlike the Higgs boson, ghost condensates don’t settle into a constant vacuum expectation value. Instead, they develop one that grows over time, effectively breaking time translation invariance. The disturbances or fluctuations of these ghost condensates could be likened to “time particles,” as they seem to distort time itself.

“Three Exotic Particles”

It’s important to note that these theories are likely not entirely consistent within the framework of healthy quantum mechanics. The proposal of ghost condensates and their ability to distort time is quite unconventional and might even challenge our fundamental understanding of how things work. However, I find it valuable to explore a range of theoretical frameworks, even the more complex or speculative ones, to gain a broader perspective.

There’s a whole array of related theories that form a sort of complex bestiary in theoretical physics. Some of these theories might even propose the existence of particles that could be dubbed “time particles.” However, due to their tendency to violate certain conditions in established theorems, they have to be studied on their terms. It’s fascinating to realize that many of these theories could potentially be inconsistent with the principles of quantum mechanics, although definitively proving that can be a challenge.

“Overall, while these speculative theories might not have achieved mainstream acceptance, they contribute to the rich tapestry of ideas that physicists explore in their quest to uncover the mysteries of the universe and time’s mystery is the biggest of them.”

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Aayushi Vaish

An Explorer of the Infinite Multiverse . MS - Physics , Northeastern University.