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the faster the particles on board it are emitted, the Moscow Professor and his team hit upon the idea of constructing a ‘flying lamp’ that worked by the emission of light instead of red-hot gases. The speeds that can be reached in this way are enormous. As Bergier tells us: 'The passengers in such a flying lamp would not notice anything unusual. Gravity inside the space-ship would be the same as on earth. They would feel that time was passing in the normal way, yet in a few years they would have reached the most distant stars. After twenty-one years (by their time), they would be in the heart of the Milky Way, which is 75,000 light years from the earth. In twenty-eight years they would reach the Andromeda Nebula, our nearest galaxy, which is 2,250,000 light years away.' Professor Bergier, a world-famous scientist, emphasises that these calculations have nothing to do with science-fiction, because Stanyukovich has verified in his laboratory a formula that can be checked by anyone who knows how to use a table of logarithms. According to one of these calculations, only sixty-five years of cosmic time would pass for the crew of the 'flying lamp’, while four and a half million years would go by on our planet! Even in my wildest flights of fancy I cannot imagine the consequences of a development that is brewing in the dark mists of the future. In 1967 Gerald Feinberg, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Columbia University in New York, published his theory of tachyons in the scientific journal Physical Review. (Tachyon comes from the Greek word 'tachys' = fast.) His article was not just the ravings of a visionary; it described a piece of serious scientific research. A course of lectures on it has already been given at the Eidgenossischen Technischen Hochschule in Zurich. The following is a brief description of the tachyon theory. According to Einstein's theory of relativity the mass of a body grows in relation to the increase in its velocity. A mass (= energy) that reached the speed of light would be infinitely large. Feinberg supplied mathematical proof that there was a counterpart to Einsteinian mass, namely particles that move infinitely fast, but become slower when they approach the speed of light. According to Feinberg, tachyons are a billion times faster than light, yet they cease to exist when they are reduced to the speed of light or below it. Just as the theory of relativity (without which present-day physics and mathematics simply could not function) had only a mathematical proof for decades, tachyons are not yet demonstrable experimentally, but only mathematically. However, Feinberg is working on an experimental proof. Believing in the future as I do, my fantasy runs away with me when I hear about research of this kind. Time and again during the last hundred years we have ultimately lived to see things that were considered impossible in the form of industrially manufactured products. So on this occasion I think I am entitled to enlarge upon an idea that, as I have said, is still in its infancy. If it became possible to capture tachyons or produce them artificially, they could also be transformed into the propulsive energy for space sondes. Then, I assume, a space-ship would be brought up to the speed of light using a photon propulsion unit. As soon as it was reached, a computer would automatically switch on the tachyon propulsion unit. How fast would the space-ship travel then? A hundred, a thousand times faster than light? No one knows the answer today. Scientists suspect that What might happen in the future?