Related papers: Cosmic Strings and Chronology Protection
As a consequence of the spacetime structure, defined by the tetrad field instead of the metric tensor alone, $f(T)$ gravity seems to harbor its own chronology protection agency. When Gott's pair of moving cosmic strings is considered, it is…
A massless scalar field is quantized in the background of a spinning string with cosmic dislocation. By increasing the spin density toward the dislocation parameter, a region containing closed timelike curves (CTCs) eventually forms around…
In an analysis of the gravitational lensing by two relativistic cosmic strings, we argue that the formation of closed time-like curves proposed by Gott is unstable in the presence of particles (e.g. the cosmic microwave background…
Several recent possible counterexamples to the Chronology Protection Conjecture are critically examined. The ``adapted'' Rindler vacuum state constructed by Li and Gott for a conformal scalar field in Misner space is extended to…
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.…
Cosmic strings are one-dimensional topological defects which could have been formed in the early stages of our Universe. They triggered a lot of interest, mainly for their cosmological implications: they could offer an alternative to…
Cosmic strings, a hot subject in the 1980's and early 1990's, lost its appeal when it was found that it leads to inconsistencies in the power spectrum of the measured cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. However,…
It is known for a long time that the space time around a spinning cylindrical symmetric compact object such as the cosmic string, show un-physical behavior, i.e., they would possess closed time like curves (CTC). This controversy with…
Cosmic strings provide a radically different paradigm for the formation of structure to the prevailing inflationary one. They afford some extra technical complications: for example, the calculation of the power spectrum of matter and…
Cosmic strings are linear concentrations of energy that form whenever phase transitions in the early universe break axial symmetries as originally shown by Kibble. They are the result of frustrated order in the quantum fields responsible…
The recent interest in ``time machines'' has been largely fueled by the apparent ease with which such systems may be formed in general relativity, given relatively benign initial conditions such as the existence of traversable wormholes or…
We conjecture chronology is protected in string theory due to the condensation of light winding strings near closed null curves. This condensation triggers a Hagedorn phase transition, whose end-point target space geometry should be…
Cosmic strings are linear concentrations of energy that may be formed at phase transitions in the very early universe. At one time they were thought to provide a possible origin for the density inhomogeneities from which galaxies eventually…
Cosmic strings are predicted by many field-theory models, and may have been formed at a symmetry-breaking transition early in the history of the universe, such as that associated with grand unification. They could have important…
Enforcing the spacetime of supermassive cosmic strings to satisfy the symmetry of a gravitational topological defect, that is a spacetime kink, it is shown that the energy of these strings becomes quantized so that only defects whose…
We study chronology protection in stationary, rotationally symmetric spacetimes in 2+1 dimensional gravity, focusing especially on the case of negative cosmological constant. We show that in such spacetimes closed timelike curves must…
We extend in two directions our recent investigation of strongly interacting quantum fields in a class of spacetimes with chronology horizons (Misner spacetimes). First, we generalize to arbitrary dimensions the holographic mechanism of…
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…
As shown by Gott, a pair of straight cosmic strings moving in opposite directions, when they have suitable speed and impact parameter, produce closed timelike curves. I argue in this paper that there always is a not-so-frightening…
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…