The world of tachyons and science fiction

In previous posts in this blog I have mentioned various procedures often used by the authors of science fiction novels to make interstellar travel almost as simple and brief as today's airplane trips to different points on Earth. One of these procedures consists of disintegrating the ship and reintegrating it into the universe of tachyons: hypothetical particles, compatible with the theory of relativity, that would always travel at speeds greater than the speed of light. Thus it would be possible (in principle) to travel very fast to the point we are interested to go to, reintegrate the ship into the world of tardions (in other words, into our world), and presto! We have traveled faster than the speed of light.

In fact, the authors of these novels (of which I am one) don’t usually go into detail about what the world of tachyons would be like. We simply assume three necessary conditions for interstellar travel to be possible:

The abolition of truth

Aquilino Polaino-Lorente

In his book Antropología e investigación en las ciencias humanas (Anthropology and research in human sciences, 2010), Aquilino Polaino-Lorente writes:

The evangelical phrase "truth will set you free" is being replaced by the opposite: "freedom will set you true." (Chapter 6). After scientific relativism, political absolutism almost always appears... only irrational attitudes remain, dominating the person, the world and politics... The truth is a mere hostage of the material world, without admitting any discussion outside of it. The absence of truth has maddened science. (Chapter 10).

Science has as its objective the search for truth. Its purpose is to discover what happens in the world, outside and inside of us. And once discovered, that truth also should set us free, because it makes technology possible, which increases our freedom (or should increase it).

Nine years of Divulciencia-Populscience

Nine years after the creation of the blog Divulciencia (whose English version is named Populscience), I have published more than 400 posts, which is equivalent to about 45 posts a year (in summer I take vacations and do not publish).

These posts are classified into 25 thematic threads, of which the most visited is What is man?, one of whose posts, Is man just an animal? is the most visited post in the blog, with more than 55,000 visits.

The best sci-fi films

As usual, there are lists of the best movies for all tastes. In this article I will focus on three:

• The 100 best films in history, the result of a vote among seven film critics, organized by the newspaper La Vanguardia in 2007.
• The 100 best films in history, the result of a vote among hundreds of thousands of users of IMDb, the largest database on cinema.
• My personal preferences: the 230 movies I have liked best.