Related papers: From wormhole to time machine: Comments on Hawking…
This is a brief survey of the current status of Stephen Hawking's ``chronology protection conjecture''. That is: ``Why does nature abhor a time machine?'' I'll discuss a few examples of spacetimes containing ``time machines'' (closed causal…
Calculating the van Vleck determinant in traversable wormhole spacetimes is an important ingredient in understanding the physical basis behind Hawking's chronology protection conjecture. This paper presents extensive computations of this…
The recent renaissance of wormhole physics has led to a very disturbing observation: If traversable wormholes exist then it appears to be rather easy to to transform such wormholes into time machines. This extremely disturbing state of…
Wormholes have been advanced as both a method for circumventing the limitations of the speed of light as well as a means for building a time machine (to travel to the past). Thus it is argued that General Relativity may allow both of these…
In principe, General Relativity seems to allow the existence of closed timelike curves (CTC). However, when quantum effects are considered, it is likely that their existence is prevented by some kind of chronological protection mechanism,…
I give a historical survey of the discussions about the existence of closed timelike curves in general relativistic models of the universe, opening the physical possibility of time travel in the past, as first recognized by K. G\"odel in…
The idea of constructing a time machine is not new and even received a boost thanks to the realization that a traversable wormhole could be converted to a time machine. It was shown in a recent paper that the time-travel paradoxes can be…
While General Relativity ranks undoubtedly among the best physics theories ever developed, it is also among those with the most striking implications. In particular, General Relativity admits solutions which allow faster than light motion…
A space consisting of two rapidly moving cosmic strings has recently been constructed by Gott that contains closed timelike curves. The global structure of this space is analysed and is found that, away from the strings, the space is…
Introducing his Chronology Protection Conjecture Stephen Hawking said that it seems that there exists a Chronology Protection Agency making the Universe safe for historians. Without taking sides about such a conjecture we show that the…
Analogue gravity systems offer many insights into gravitational phenomena, both at the classical and at the semiclassical level. The existence of an underlying Minkowskian structure (or Galilean in the non-relativistic limit) in the…
Recently introduced toy surface plasmon "black holes" and "wormholes" (New Journal of Physics 5, 147.1-147.8 (2003), and gr-qc/0306089) can be used to create a toy "time machine" according to a number of published designs (see for example…
We review recent work on wormhole geometries in the context of modified theories of gravity, in particular, in f(R) gravity and with a nonminimal curvature-matter coupling, and in the recently proposed hybrid metric-Palatini theory. In…
We consider two approaches to evading paradoxes in quantum mechanics with closed timelike curves (CTCs). In a model similar to Politzer's, assuming pure states and using path integrals, we show that the problems of paradoxes and of…
In the appearance of absorption material, the quantum vacuum fluctuations of all kinds of fields may be smoothed out and the spacetime with time machine may be stable against vacuum fluctuations. The chronology protection conjecture might…
Recently, black hole and brane production at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been widely discussed. We suggest that there is a possibility to test causality at the LHC. We argue that if the scale of quantum gravity is of the order of…
The Chronology Protection Conjecture (CPC) was first introduced by Hawking after his semi-classical investigation to the behaviour of a spacetime with closed timelike curves (CTCs) in response to scalar perturbation. It is argued that there…
It has been proposed that wormholes can be made to function as time-machines. This opens up the question of whether this can be accomodated within a self-consistent physics or not. In this contribution we present some quantum mechanical…
Spacetime wormholes are evidently an essential component of the construction of a time machine. Within the context of general relativity, such objects require, for their formation, exotic matter -- matter that violates at least one of the…
Many solutions of General Relativity appear to allow the possibility of time travel. This was initially a fascinating discovery, but geometries of this type violate causality, a basic physical law which is believed to be fundamental.…