Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons have invented the cast of Watchmen to highlight familiar superhero themes that their audience would recognize. Everyone knows that all good superheroes have a secret weakness, so even the godlike Doctor Manhattan had one.
To say it with Superman: Tachyons are his kryptonite. And in the eighth episode of Watchmen, we see how the bug is fixed again.
[Ed. Note: This track contains smaller spoilers for Watchmen’s Eighth Episode “A God goes into Abar.”]
Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons / DC Comics
Tachyons are hypothetical particles that move faster than the speed of light. The word itself was coined in 1967, plenty of time to go into the science fiction lexicon, but still have the hard science when Watchmen was written.
Tachyons play with the most frightening power of Doctor Manhattan: his ability to experience time as nonlinear, enabling him to see the future. In the graphic novel by Watchmen, Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias neutralizes the powers of Doctor Manhattan by wrapping his own retreat into the Antarctic into a tachyon rain and preventing Manhattan from knowing that someday he would discover Ozymandia’s plan, until he actually discovers it.
Doctor Manhattan sees this as a blur in his memory of the future. When he tells Laurie, as he brings her to Mars to discuss whether he should save humanity, “I return to Earth at a later date. There are streets full of corpses. The details are vague. [ .] There is a kind of static charge that obscures the future and prevents a clear impression. [ .] In addition, the events are even more sketchy: I am in the deep snow . I kill someone. Her identity is uncertain. ”
How do Tachyons work?
This will be a brief explanation: Tachyons are theoretical science. Watchmen is a comic. There is no scientific explanation for why they do this for Doctor Manhattan, as there is no scientific explanation for Doctor Manhattan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ugebzq3juE [/ embed]
A wedding ring
The seventh episode of HBO’s guards, “A god goes to Abar,” shows that the network of satellites and generators that caused a tachyon shower in Adrien Veidts hiding place was not his first attempt to develop a tachyon-based weapon, Doctor Manhattan to disable. Veidt uncovers a small box and asks Doctor Manhattan what’s inside. The not surprising man is surprised: he does not know.
This is because the box contains a Tachyon device that resembles the hydrogen atom symbol of Manhattan and whose memory could not propagate backwards over time. Manhattan gave Angela Abar the device so she could use it to restart his memory and erase all memories of his life so that they could live happily and on an equal footing. To bring him back to his full memory and strength, she only had to hit him with a hammer.
