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Re:A new tool for finding dark matter digs up nothing by wyager on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @03:19PM (#30770268)
Good question. Imaginary mass -> negative 4-momentum -> momentum exceeds energy -> object is moving faster than light (backwards in time in some reference frames).

There are some reasons to suspect/hope such things might not exist, such as protecting causality.

In general, asking "what if <simple field type> was <more complex field type>" can actually produce super fruitful lines of inquiry. You can use "complex numbers", "quaternions", "finite fields", whatever you like. There's plenty of unexplored ground here.

Re:A new tool for finding dark matter digs up nothing by elcritch on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @03:54AM (#30776089)
Given the quantum eraser experiment and general lack of time directionality in particle physics it seems causality as an "axiomatic" physical truth is already broken. At least at a quantum level. My suspicion is that event-based causality falls into the 'its only resolved for >= hbar/2' realm. Then even if you had a bunch "tachyons" it'd be impossible to send a signal back in time more than a few planck constants of time much like its hard to entangle more than a few qbits.
Re:A new tool for finding dark matter digs up nothing by wyager on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @06:15PM (#30784215)
Superluminality isn't required by all interpretations of QM. MW doesn't need it, for example.

I'm not aware of a mechanism by which causality would arise from known QM, so I wouldn't expect a priori planck scale to play into it. There would also need to be an energy term for h to make sense as the relevant constant.

The most compelling source of temporal direction I'm familiar with is that it's a regional cosmological entropy gradient rather than a fundamental aspect of physics, although it strikes me as suspicious that the time direction lies inside the 4-cone generated by the odd-dimension-out in our spacetime metric. That certainly lends some credence to theories which would predict the direction of time as fundamental to physics.