tacho-, tach-, tachy-
(Greek: fast, speed, swift, rapid)
2. The abbreviated cursive writing used in medieval times for Latin and Greek.
Tachyons seem to break all the rules. If they exist—and no one has yet proven that they do—they would not only travel faster than light, but backwards in time, too. In the 1960's a group of physicists decided that Einstein's speed limit did not apply to particles that were already moving faster than light.
Unlike normal particles, a tachyon is thought to gain speed when it loses energy, so a tachyon with zero energy would have infinite speed. In fact, it would require infinite energy to slow a tachyon to the speed of light, making it impossible for it to travel below the speed of light.
Tachyons have been known about since 1967 and were first proposed by physicist Arnold Sommerfeld and coined by the physicist Gerald Feinberg. At first they were dismissed as non-real-by-products of the relativity equations, but now tachyons are turning up in theories everywhere.
It has been suggested that tachyons are produced in cosmic rays, and even that they could account for that mysterious "dark matter". Tachyons also play a role in "string theory", which has brought them back into the spotlight.
Whose speed was far faster than light.
She went out one day,
In a relative way,
And returned the previous night!
2. Food-grabbing; extreme rapidity of eating. It is commonly seen in regressed, deteriorated schizophrenics, and often such patients will grab any object, edible or not, put it into the mouth, and swallow it.