History
As mentioned above, the term "tachyon" was coined by Gerald Feinberg in a 1967 paper titled "Possibility of Faster-Than-Light Particles". Feinberg studied the kinematics of such particles according to special relativity. In his paper he also introduced fields with imaginary mass (now also referred to as "tachyons") in an attempt to understand the microphysical origin such particles might have.
The first hypothesis regarding faster-than-light particles is sometimes attributed to German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld in 1904, and more recent discussions happened in 1962 and 1969.
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