Tachyons in Science Fiction vs. Reality

Few concepts from theoretical physics have captured the imagination of science fiction writers as thoroughly as tachyons. Since the 1960s, these hypothetical faster-than-light particles have appeared in novels, television, films, and comic books, serving as all-purpose plot devices for time travel, faster-than-light communication, and exotic energy sources. But the tachyons of fiction bear little resemblance to the tachyons of theoretical physics. Understanding where the two diverge reveals both the appeal of the concept and the depth of the real science.

Early Tachyon Fiction

Tachyons entered the scientific literature in the 1960s through the work of Bilaniuk, Deshpande, Sudarshan, and Feinberg. They entered fiction almost immediately afterward.

James Blish, the American science fiction author best known for his Cities in Flight series and his adaptations of Star Trek episodes, was among the first to incorporate tachyons into narrative fiction. Blish had a genuine interest in physics and often engaged with cutting-edge theoretical concepts in his work. His stories treated tachyons with more care than most subsequent portrayals, acknowledging the constraints imposed by special relativity.

The most scientifically rigorous tachyon novel is Gregory Benford’s Timescape (1980). Benford, a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, wrote the novel around the physics of tachyonic communication with the past. In the story, scientists in 1998 attempt to send a tachyon message back to 1963 to avert an ecological catastrophe. Benford treats the physics with unusual fidelity: the tachyonic signals cause resonance effects in nuclear magnetic resonance experiments, the messages are fragmentary and noisy, and the paradoxes of retroactive communication drive the plot rather than being hand-waved away. Timescape won the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and remains the gold standard for tachyon fiction grounded in actual physics.

Tachyons in Star Trek

No franchise has done more to embed the word “tachyon” in popular culture than Star Trek. Tachyons appear in dozens of episodes across multiple series, usually as a catch-all technobabble term for anything faster-than-light or temporally anomalous.

The Next Generation

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, tachyons serve numerous narrative functions. In the series finale “All Good Things…” (1994), Captain Picard encounters an “anti-time eruption” caused by a convergence of tachyon pulses from three time periods. The episode uses tachyon beams as a scanning technology that inadvertently tears open spacetime. The physics is entirely fictional: real tachyon theory says nothing about “tachyon beams” that can be aimed like searchlights, and the concept of “anti-time” has no basis in physics.

TNG also introduced the “tachyon detection grid,” a network of sensor beams stretched between starships to detect cloaked vessels. The premise is that cloaked ships cannot avoid disturbing a tachyon field, though the show never explains why tachyons would interact with cloaking technology differently than photons would.

Voyager and Deep Space Nine

Star Trek: Voyager continued the tradition, frequently referencing tachyon bursts, tachyon eddies, and tachyon surges as sources of spatial anomalies. Deep Space Nine used tachyons in connection with the Bajoran wormhole and temporal displacement. In each case, the word “tachyon” functions as a signifier of advanced physics rather than as a reference to any specific theoretical concept.

The Flash and the Speed Force

In DC Comics and the CW television series The Flash, tachyons are intimately connected to the Speed Force, the extradimensional energy field that grants speedsters their powers. In the show, the villain Eobard Thawne (the Reverse-Flash) uses a “tachyon device” to enhance his connection to the Speed Force, allowing him to travel faster and through time.

The show’s version of tachyons is essentially a form of super-energy that can be harnessed, stored, and channeled through technology. This has no connection to real tachyon theory. In physics, tachyons are defined by their kinematic properties (superluminal velocity, imaginary mass, inverse energy-speed relation), not as an energy source. The Speed Force itself is pure fiction, but its association with tachyons reflects the word’s cultural connotation of “the fastest thing imaginable.”

Watchmen

Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986) provides one of the more thoughtful uses of tachyons in popular fiction. The character Dr. Manhattan, a being with godlike control over matter and energy, perceives all of time simultaneously. However, in the climactic chapters, the villain Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias) surrounds his Antarctic base with a dense field of tachyons, which interfere with Dr. Manhattan’s ability to perceive the future.

Moore’s conceit draws loosely on real physics. If tachyons travel faster than light and can propagate backward in time, then a sufficiently dense tachyonic field might plausibly disrupt any process that relies on information from the future. The specifics are fictional (Dr. Manhattan’s temporal perception has no basis in physics), but the underlying logic, that tachyonic signals could interfere with temporal information, is at least thematically consistent with the theoretical properties of tachyons.

Interstellar

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) does not use the word “tachyon” explicitly, but its central conceit, communication across time through a higher-dimensional “tesseract”, draws on related physics. The film was developed with physicist Kip Thorne as executive producer and scientific consultant, and its treatment of general relativity, black holes, and time dilation is unusually rigorous for a Hollywood production.

The tesseract sequence, in which the protagonist sends gravitational signals backward through time, invokes the same fundamental issue as tachyon communication: information traveling from the future to the past. Thorne’s companion book The Science of Interstellar discusses how closed timelike curves in a five-dimensional bulk spacetime could permit such communication without strictly violating causality in the higher-dimensional framework. This is more scientifically grounded than most fictional treatments, though it remains speculative.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe

The MCU uses tachyons sparingly but meaningfully. In Avengers: Endgame (2019), the time travel mechanism involves “quantum realm” navigation rather than tachyons per se, but the theoretical underpinnings borrow from the same family of concepts. More directly, Marvel Comics has long used tachyons in its cosmic storylines. Characters like the Silver Surfer traverse the galaxy via “tachyon surfing,” and various alien civilizations use tachyon-based communication systems.

The comic book treatment is predictably loose with the physics. Tachyons function as a generic advanced-technology particle, interchangeable with “quantum” or “subspace” as a prefix denoting futuristic capability.

What Science Fiction Gets Wrong

Across all these franchises, several consistent errors emerge:

Tachyons as controllable beams

Real tachyon theory offers no mechanism for generating, directing, or modulating tachyons. If they exist, they would be produced in high-energy particle interactions, not by devices that can aim them like lasers. The inverse energy-speed relationship means that a tachyon with well-defined momentum would have poorly defined position, making “tachyon beams” fundamentally problematic.

Tachyons as energy sources

Fiction often treats tachyons as a form of energy that can be stored, transferred, and consumed. In reality, tachyons would have less energy at higher speeds and more energy at lower speeds. A tachyon slowed down (energized) toward the speed of light would require infinite energy input, making them a terrible energy source.

Tachyons without causality consequences

Most fictional treatments ignore the causality problems entirely. Characters routinely send tachyonic messages or scan with tachyon beams with no temporal side effects. In real physics, any controlled tachyonic communication would constitute a Tolman antitelephone, with all the attendant paradoxes.

Simple detection

Fiction assumes tachyons can be easily detected by sufficiently advanced sensors. Real detection would face severe challenges: tachyons with high velocity carry very little energy, and their interactions with ordinary matter (if any) are entirely unknown.

What Science Fiction Gets Right

Despite the liberties, fiction does capture certain aspects of tachyon physics:

The association with time. If tachyons exist, they genuinely do have implications for temporal physics. The connection between FTL travel and time travel is not a fictional invention; it is a direct consequence of the Lorentz transformations.
The exoticism. Tachyons are deeply strange. Imaginary mass, inverse energy relations, and mandatory superluminal velocity are genuinely bizarre properties. Fiction’s sense of wonder at these concepts is appropriate.
The fundamental barrier. Most franchises correctly portray tachyon physics as extremely advanced and poorly understood, even by their fictional civilizations. This reflects the real scientific situation: tachyons remain hypothetical, and their properties are counterintuitive even to trained physicists.

Why Tachyons Make Appealing Plot Devices

The enduring appeal of tachyons in fiction comes from a convergence of narrative convenience and genuine scientific mystery:

The name itself sounds technical and exotic, lending credibility to science fiction narratives
The FTL property solves the core problem of space opera: how to traverse interstellar distances in a human-scale narrative
The time travel connection provides a built-in mechanism for temporal plots without requiring a separate invention
The real scientific basis gives writers a veneer of plausibility that purely invented particles lack
The unresolved status means writers cannot be definitively proven wrong, since no one knows what tachyons can or cannot do

Gregory Benford’s Timescape remains the standard against which all tachyon fiction should be measured, precisely because it takes the real physics seriously. The paradoxes are not ignored; they drive the story. The tachyonic signals are not clean data streams but noisy, fragmentary, and ambiguous. The characters are physicists who understand the implications of what they are attempting. It is the rare work of fiction that becomes more interesting the more physics you know, rather than less.

For the real physics behind these fictional portrayals, see the complete tachyon guide and the grandfather paradox.