Browsing the Web the other day, I came upon several websites that sell products that supposedly harness the power of… tachyon energy. These products include “tachyon-infused” silica disks, beads, crystals, elbow wraps, blankets, bottled water, and of course massage oils and body lotions. 
Suspending disbelief for a moment, I explored the websites hoping to discover the secret behind the process of Tachyonization. The discovery of tachyons itself, not to mention being able to control them at room temperature, surely deserves worldwide attention! I have no idea why any of these companies hasn’t gone public with their discovery. No idea at all! So let’s begin.
The last time I checked, a tachyon is a hypothetical particle that is one of the byproducts of special relativity. Recall that Einstein’s famous relation
yields both real and imaginary solutions. The real solutions apply to real-world physical particles, that is, particles that travel slower than the speed of light. The imaginary solutions arise when we invent a particle that has a velocity (v) greater than the speed of light (c). Since Einstein’s equation permits this kind of solution, there’s nothing stopping us from imagining such a particle.
The thing to remember, however, is that just because the equation allows such solutions does not automatically imply that such particles actually exist. In fact, the existence of tachyons would present significant problems for physics as we know it, since their interaction with normal matter (if it’s allowed) would violate the laws of causality, since any matter or information traveling faster than light must also travel backwards in time.
Apparently, what the naïve mainstream physicists fail to realize is that there’s a ton of money to be made from selling New Age products that claim to harness the True Power of tachyons!
A company called Advanced Tachyon Technologies (no joke!), has been marketing such products, which include glass beads for $50 that “have been proven to be the most effective directional antennas for the localized clearing of blockages in the Energetic Continuum.” The company peddles its products through a multi-level marketing scheme (MLM), where various distributors organize their own websites and sell the products on behalf of the parent company. Examples of these sites are here, here, and here.
So what exactly is this “tachyon energy” they speak of? The ATT website attempts to explain this, but I’ll spare you the mind-numbing pseudoscientific psycho-babble, and instead provide a short excerpt:
Tachyon Energy is the very first energetic structure that emerges out of non-structured, formless Zero-Point Energy. Just like Zero-Point Energy, Tachyon is not limited to a certain frequency. Tachyon cannot be measured in the Hertzian frequency spectrum. It is not a certain type of energy. Rather, it includes all energies within itself. Its qualities are much like Zero-Point Energy, varying only in that it is a structured field.
Very rarely have I seen this many misuses of scientific terminology in a single paragraph. What is an “energetic structure”? Why is zero-point energy “formless”? What other “frequency spectrum” is there besides the “Hertzian” one? This paragraph alone should be enough to taint our confidence in the effectiveness of the Tachyon line of products.
In another page of their website, ATT attempts to explain the “physics of tachyons.” This should be good…
The condensation of zero-point energy into tachyon energy is the beginning of the Energetic Continuum, which is directly responsible for all forms on the planet. It is this condensation that creates all forms. In the production of matter, this formless zero-point energy condenses into faster-than-light tachyon. At the point of the speed of light, tachyon interacts with the Subtle Organizing Energy Fields (SOEFs).
Once again, pure garbage. Each sentence becomes more and more devoid of meaning to anyone but the most scientifically ignorant. They proceed to give a diagram and an explanation of a tachyon interacting with other particles:
For this explanation, we will explore the interaction of tachyon energy with the lepton family of particles. The first elementary particle in the lepton family is a pion. The pion exists below the speed of light and has a consistent mathematically computable orbit, which we call the Subtle Organizing Energy Field (SOEF).
This paragraph, if anything, is the nail in the coffin, since it speaks volumes about the background of the “scientists” behind these products. A pion is indeed a known particle, but it’s by no means a lepton (it’s a meson). The family of leptons includes the electron, the muon, and the tau. (There are also three flavors of neutrinos, and all the corresponding antiparticles.)
Even if we assume that the author meant to say “tau” instead of “pion,” there is still a slew of problems. The tau is not the “first” particle in the lepton family. That would be the electron. Also, the author speaks of a “mathematically computable orbit.” Orbit around what?
It’s fairly clear that these ramblings are from a person with a high-school level grasp of physics who has taken too many issues of Popular Science too seriously. It’s highly unlikely that this person not only proved the existence of tachyons, but invented a process that alters matter at the subatomic level, allowing tachyons to be focused, thereby healing the human body of all ailments. The fact that the “inventor” of this technology hasn’t yet been invited to Stockholm for the Nobel ceremony proves this point definitively.
Speaking of the Tachyonization process, the ATT website states that the inventors would rather “keep it proprietary” instead of patenting it (I wonder why!). The website does, however, try to explain what tachyonization is not:
The Tachyonization process is not a frequency, spin manipulation, or transfer. It is not a high frequency or coil technology. It does not use magnets or sounds. It does not use sacred geometry to inform products. It is not a photon-based technology. It is not an SE-5 or other form of radionics-based technology. It does not require prayer or meditation. The technology does not use crystals or orgone technologies. It is absolutely not operator-sensitive.
Well of course it’s not any of those things. It’s not anything! Correction, it is something: it’s a cleverly-worded excuse for these companies to charge $30 for a bottle of water and $50 for a bunch of glass beads.
These companies have created the perfect recipe for sucking in highly impressionable New-Agers: throw in a bunch of the usual vague spiritual buzzwords: energy, healing, flow, balance, chakra, any of which would give an unsuspecting customer a hard-on… and combine them with the latest cool-sounding scientific jargon hijacked by the New Age movement: frequency, spectrum, continuum, fields, waves, and now, tachyons.
Combining all these words into randomized, barely coherent sentences, as ATT has done, speaks of a very naïve, superficial understanding of physics and mathematics, not to mention medicine. The only terminology that the website uses correctly is the financial and legal terminology for recruiting distributors and reeling in unsuspecting customers to pay through their noses for glass beads, silica disks, and bottled water.
Once again, tachyons are hypothetical, and not real! Even if they do “exist,” it would certainly not be possible to manipulate them. It’s not even clear what it would mean to manipulate them. Even if tachyons could be controlled, doing so would not be possible by modifying ordinary matter. And even if it were possible to control tachyons using ordinary matter, it’s absurd to assume that they would have some sort of healing effect on the human body!
My god, browsing all these sites has made my head hurt. It’s a bullshit overdose!
August 18th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Hi. Came upon this looking for orgone/tachyon/emf protection. I theorize that if humans survive this present wave of extinction, (source: The New Yorker) and there is indeed an evolution of our species in a spiritual direction, we will begin to understand energetic medicine. Like in the Star Trek movie where the crew is trying to take a whale back and Scotty has to go the hospital and the doctor gets all incensed over the primitiveness of allopathic medicine and whips out his little energy machine and fixes Scotty.
For instance, I use a qlink; migraines lessened and sleep is deeper over the course of a year. I’ve used homeopathy, an energetic medicine, for years and know it works.
I also know that emf is probably dangerous because my commonsense tells me so. We are electrical, we are water, water vibrates, we are living on a magnetic earth, etc. I don’t have to know all the science. Reich and Tesla were geniuses and they discovered very important energetic processes. I don’t have to have a background in physics to intuit that. Or to understand that they were persecuted for it and that someone tried to snuff out their contributions and history. (Why don’t schoolchildren know who Tesla is?)
What I feel offended about very often is that while many of these “new age technologies” are probably onto something because we are living in a mysterious universe and real scientists are properly humbled by that fact, why do their “inventors” join the ranks of rank capitalists in sharing their stuff? If there are energetic processes that kill off every virus, save us from chemtrails and the nwo, cure cancer and aids and speed up our spiritual evolution why is the cost so damn high?
(But the orgone “gifters” are nice, aren’t they, whether or not they are kooks. I don’t know if they are…
I can see why some new age artisans sell their lovely orgone devices and that some dowsers and other magical folks use their expertise to make a living, but good grief. Don’t talk about how tachyon can save the planet and cause humans to “ascend” blah blah blah (I like it here thanks, as Van Morrison said, “give me my rapture today”) while charging fantastical sums of money from desperate, unfortunate, gullible people.
But for all of you know it alls: I once had a boyfriend named Bill, my political science professor. I was seeing a homeopath and an acupuncturist who cured me of mono in two weeks and he chortled oh-so-knowingly while sneering. I said, “Bill, I feel so privileged to be with someone who knows everything…”
How about that MMS stuff? Good lord, people are drinking chlorine dioxide. And who is Jim Humble? Scary.
If you see the buddha selling enlightment on the internet, don’t buy from him.
August 18th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
@lily,
It seems like you’re almost on the right track, but you just can’t take the full plunge into healthy skepticism regarding this nonsense. For instance, take your statement:
Really? You don’t see why they are rank capitalists?! They’re trying to make a quick buck by selling nothing to morons who will buy into anything! Is that so difficult to admit? These technologies and these “energetic processes” do nothing.
Does your “commonsense” also tell you that the earth is flat?
Your outright refusal to learn “all the science” is at the heart of the problem. It’s science that tells us that EMF is not dangerous! Science is a field where you have to leave your “intuition” at the doorstep. But I guess you’ve got it all figured out.
Mononucleosis is a self-limiting disease, and two weeks is a perfectly normal time for symptoms to subside. The quack practitioners did nothing.