Feinberg's tachyon, outward
Feinberg names the faster-than-light particle in 1967, having been set thinking by a 1954 story; the word then goes back into fiction, carrying its physics exactly once (Timescape) and travelling everywhere else as a stock word for faster than light.
Kind: lineage · Span: 1954–1991 · Last reviewed: 2026-09-13
The line
The line starts in fiction, which is the surprise. Gerald Feinberg told Gregory Benford that he had begun thinking about tachyons because he was "inspired by James Blish's short story 'Beep'", the 1954 story of a faster-than-light communicator whose signals go into the past, and that he "had set out to see if such a gadget was theoretically possible" [HIGH] S2 (Benford, "Old Legends", 1995, p. 276, as quoted in Milburn's 2019 essay). The result was Feinberg 1967, Phys. Rev. 159, 1089, which at p. 1090 presents a description "for noninteracting faster than light particles, which we call tachyons" [HIGH] S2 (paper quoted by Milburn; the paper itself is paywalled), and which Feinberg glossed three years later: "I named them tachyons, from the Greek word tachys, meaning swift" [HIGH] S2 (Scientific American, February 1970, p. 70, as quoted by Milburn). The physics behind the name is a Lorentz-invariant field with imaginary mass, no rest frame, energy that falls as speed rises and a vacuum that observers disagree about; the catalogue grades it K0, because the field turned out to describe an instability rather than a particle (LOR-2).
The word went back out almost at once, and it went out without the physics. Bob Shaw's The Palace of Eternity (1969) has "a million-ton tachyonic spaceship" at thirty thousand times light speed [MED] S3 (Wikipedia, "Tachyons in fiction"), which is a use of the name for a starship drive that Feinberg's paper, a theory of particles that cannot slow down and cannot be ridden, does not license. Robert Silverberg's Tower of Glass (1970) has "tachyon-beam ultrawave communications equipment", and Joe Haldeman in 1973 has a "tachyon-torch shuttle" [HIGH] S2 (Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, entries "ultrawave" and "torch"). The one work that took the physics with the word is Timescape (1980), written by Feinberg's fellow physicist Benford on the back of his own antitelephone paper; that descent has its own page, tolman-benford-timescape, and this page only notes that Benford set part of the novel at Columbia "because of Feinberg" [HIGH] S1 (Timescape dossier, from "Old Legends").
Everywhere after that the word is a label. In Watchmen (1986 to 1987) Ozymandias floods his Antarctic base with tachyons so that Doctor Manhattan cannot see the future, "presumably because tachyons scramble cause and effect" [MED] S3 (Wikipedia, "Tachyons in fiction"; issue 11 is cover-dated August 1987). Star Trek first says the word on screen in The Next Generation's "Deja Q" (5 February 1990): "We're being hit by a field of energetic tachyons" [HIGH] S1 (shooting script 40273-161, Worf's line; a scan of every earlier TNG transcript, every original-series transcript and the first five films found no earlier use). From "Redemption II" (1991) on, the tachyon detection grid, tachyon eddies and tachyon pulses are the franchise's stock word for anything faster than light, and the subspace radio and warp drive dossiers record that the shows keep the name and drop the theory: nothing in the scripts has imaginary mass, no rest frame or a message to the past unless the plot wants one. Space Battleship Yamato (1974) is often said to run its wave motion engine on tachyons, but that gloss comes from later companion writing and fan wikis, not from anything the catalogue has traced to the 1974 broadcast (Yamato) [LOW] S3. The plain finding of this line is that in most fiction the word travelled and the physics stayed home.
The links
| From | To | Year | Evidence | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blish, "Beep" (Galaxy, 1954) | Feinberg's tachyon work | 1954–1967 | Benford's report of what Feinberg told him, "Old Legends" (1995) p. 276, quoted in Milburn (2019) with footnote; Milburn notes Feinberg's paper cites Bilaniuk et al. and Tanaka in its first footnote | [HIGH] S2 |
| Bilaniuk, Deshpande and Sudarshan 1962 | Feinberg 1967 | 1967 | Feinberg's first footnote (per Milburn); the reinterpretation principle is inherited, as the tachyon dossier records | [HIGH] S2 |
| Feinberg 1967, the coinage | The word "tachyon" | 1967 | Phys. Rev. 159, 1089, at p. 1090: "which we call tachyons"; Scientific American February 1970, p. 70: "from the Greek word tachys, meaning swift" | [HIGH] S2 |
| Feinberg 1967 | Shaw, The Palace of Eternity | 1969 | Earliest fiction use named by Wikipedia's survey; a starship, not a particle | [MED] S3 |
| Feinberg 1967 | Silverberg, Tower of Glass; Haldeman, "tachyon-torch" | 1970–1973 | Historical Dictionary citations under "ultrawave" and "torch". The dictionary has no "tachyon" entry of its own that could be found | [HIGH] S2 |
| Feinberg 1967 and Benford, Book and Newcomb 1970 | Benford, Timescape | 1980 | Benford's own essays; see the sibling page. Columbia setting "because of Feinberg" | [HIGH] S1 |
| Feinberg 1967 | Moore and Gibbons, Watchmen | 1986–1987 | Tachyons blind Doctor Manhattan's foresight; the mechanism is gestured at, not stated | [MED] S3 |
| Feinberg 1967 | Star Trek: TNG "Deja Q" | 1990 | Script 40273-161: "a field of energetic tachyons"; earliest on-screen use found by transcript scan | [HIGH] S1 |
| "Deja Q" | Star Trek's tachyon vocabulary (detection grid, eddies, pulses) | 1991 onward | TNG "Redemption II" (1991) and Memory Alpha's list of later uses; the subspace radio dossier's transcripts | [HIGH] S1 |
| Feinberg 1967 | Space Battleship Yamato wave motion engine | 1974 (claimed) | Fan wikis and a CosmoDNA translation of Rikao Yanagita's science-of-anime writing say the engine converts "cosmic energy into tachyon particles"; no 1974 script line found | [LOW] S3 |
What is not sourced
- The paper's own words. Feinberg's coinage is here at second hand, through Milburn's quotation of p. 1090 and of the 1970 Scientific American piece. Milburn is a peer-reviewed historian citing page numbers, which earns S2, but the paper is paywalled and was not opened; the catalogue's tachyon dossier has the same gap. A library copy of Phys. Rev. 159 would close it.
- A dictionary entry for "tachyon". The brief asked for the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction's entry. A scan of the site's forty-nine index pages on 2026-09-13 found no headword "tachyon"; the word appears only inside citations for other entries. Either the entry does not exist yet or the index missed it. The SF Encyclopedia's entry "Tachyons" says only that the word "became an item of sf Terminology in the 1970s".
- Shaw 1969 as first. Wikipedia's survey gives The Palace of Eternity as the earliest fiction use; no dictionary citation backs it and the novel was not opened. An earlier 1968 magazine use would not be surprising.
- Watchmen at issue level. The Watchmen wiki and DC database could not be opened (paywalled fetch). The issue number and cover date come from search summaries of those pages and are marked accordingly.
- Yamato and 1974. Whether the word "tachyon" (takion) was spoken in the 1974 series or printed in its settings material, or whether later writers added it, is not established. The CosmoDNA page that carries the tachyon explanation is a translation of Yanagita's popular-science writing of unstated date. A 1974 script or the Roman Album would settle it.
- Star Trek before 1990. The transcript scan covered TNG seasons one to three up to "Deja Q", all seventy-nine original-series episodes and films one to five. The animated series and tie-in novels were not checked, so "first on screen" is stated for live action only.
Sources
- Feinberg, G., "Possibility of faster-than-light particles", Phys. Rev. 159, 1089 (1967). S1. Not opened; p. 1090 quoted via Milburn.
- Feinberg, G., "Particles that go faster than light", Scientific American 223, 69 (February 1970). S1. Not opened; p. 70 quoted via Milburn.
- Milburn, C., "Ahead of time: Gerald Feinberg and the governance of futurity", Osiris 34, 216–237 (2019), open copy at escholarship.org (qt1nk4s500). Read in full 2026-09-13. S2.
- Benford, G., "Old Legends", in New Legends, ed. Bear and Greenberg (Tor, 1995), pp. 270–284, on p. 276. S1, via Milburn's quotation and the Timescape dossier's reading.
- Bilaniuk, Deshpande and Sudarshan, "'Meta' relativity", Am. J. Phys. 30, 718 (1962). S1.
- Sheidlower, J. (ed.), Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, entries "ultrawave" (Silverberg 1970 citation) and "torch" (Haldeman 1973 citation), via search summaries; index pages 0 to 48 scanned for a "tachyon" headword, none found. S2.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Deja Q", production 40273-161 (first aired 5 February 1990), shooting script at st-minutiae.com, read for the three "tachyon" lines; chakoteya.net transcripts for TNG 101 to 160, TOS 1 to 79 and films 1 to 5, scanned for the word. S1.
- Memory Alpha, "Tachyon", wikitext read via the site API 2026-09-13. S3.
- Wikipedia, "Tachyons in fiction" (Shaw 1969, Watchmen, Star Trek as technobabble, Westfahl's remark); "Tachyon" (Feinberg's coinage and the Greek). S3.
- CosmoDNA (ourstarblazers.com), "The Science of Warping", text by Rikao Yanagita, for the Yamato tachyon gloss. S3.
- SF Encyclopedia, "Tachyons". Read. S3.