Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible Read Free Page B

New York, published his theory of tachyons in the scientific journal Physical Review. (Tachyon comes from the Greek word 'tachys' = fast.) His article was not just the ravings of a visionary; it described a piece of serious scientific research. A course of lectures on it has already been given at the Eidgenossischen Technischen Hochschule in Zurich.
     
    The following is a brief description of the tachyon theory. According to Einstein's theory of relativity the mass of a body grows in relation to the increase in its velocity. A mass (= energy) that reached the speed of light would be infinitely large. Feinberg supplied mathematical proof that there was a counterpart to Einsteinian mass, namely particles that move infinitely fast, but become slower when they approach the speed of light. According to Feinberg, tachyons are a billion times faster than light, yet they cease to exist when they are reduced to the speed of light or below it.
     
    Just as the theory of relativity (without which present-day physics and mathematics simply could not function) had only a mathematical proof for decades, tachyons are not yet demonstrable experimentally, but only mathematically. However, Feinberg is working on an experimental proof.
     
    Believing in the future as I do, my fantasy runs away with me when I hear about research of this kind. Time and again during the last hundred years we have ultimately lived to see things that were considered impossible in the form of industrially manufactured products. So on this occasion I think I am entitled to enlarge upon an idea that, as I have said, is still in its infancy.
     
    What might happen in the future?
     
    If it became possible to capture tachyons or produce them artificially, they could also be transformed into the propulsive energy for space sondes. Then, I assume, a space-ship would be brought up to the speed of light using a photon propulsion unit. As soon as it was reached, a computer would automatically switch on the tachyon propulsion unit. How fast would the space-ship travel then? A hundred, a thousand times faster than light? No one knows the answer today. Scientists suspect that once past the speed of light so-called Einsteinian space would be left behind and the spaceship hurled into an as yet undefined, superimposed space. But at this vital moment in the history of space travel the time factor would become almost meaningless.
     
    I know of many fields of research in which the work going on is mainly devoted to the service of interstellar space travel. I have been in many laboratories and talked to many scientists. No one knows how many physicists, chemists, biologists, atomic physicists, parapsychologists, geneticists and engineers are working on the project that will enable man to fly back to the world of the stars—they are often lumped together, somewhat inaccurately, under the generic name of futurological projects.
     
    It seems to me to be an under-evaluation of the human potential if, under the pressure of proof provided by technological advances, people admit the possibility of investigating cosmic space at some future date, but obstinately deny that the universe may contain intelligences who knew all about interstellar space travel thousands of years before we did and so could have visited our planet.
     
    Because it has long been the custom to hammer into us as schoolchildren the presumptuous idea that man is the 'lord of creation', it is obviously a revolutionary and unpleasant thought that many thousands of years ago there were unknown intelligences who were superior to the lord of creation, but however disagreeable it is, we had better get used to it.
     
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    2 - On The Track Of Life
     
    In my book Chariots of the Gods? I put forward the speculative idea that 'God' had created man in his own image by means of an artificial mutation. I voiced the suspicion that homo sapiens became separated from the ape tribe by a deliberately