09:00, Wed 2nd – Fri 4th December 2015 Venue to be confirmed
Michaelmas Week 8

Tachyon is a new science-fiction short film, written and directed by Mark Danciger.

Tachyon asks a simple question- what would happen if you could send messages back in time to your former self? Lewis, a former post-graduate student at Cambridge University, has discovered a way to do precisely that. In his garage, he creates a machine that can send simple messages, encoded in binary, back in time to his former self. He recruits a deadbeat amateur filmmaker, Paul, to film the first test of his machine. But when the machine starts sending back strange, unexpected messages, Lewis and Paul are caught in a paradox that they cannot escape.

Like all the best sci-fi, Tachyon is rooted in real physics. As explained in the film, Lewis’ machine is scientifically plausible- a similar device was suggested in a thought experiment by Einstein, and labelled the ‘tachyonic anti-telephone’. And tachyons themselves, particles that travel backwards in time have been proposed by many eminent scientists as being consistent with current models of particle physics, though they are still a controversial proposition.