Related papers: From Wormholes to the Warp Drive: Using theoretica…
It is shown how, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local…
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…
"Warp drive" spacetimes and wormhole geometries are useful as "gedanken-experiments" that force us to confront the foundations of general relativity, and among other issues, to precisely formulate the notion of "superluminal" travel and…
We critically examine proposals for the so-called warp-drive spacetimes and classify these models based on their various restrictions within the framework of General Relativity. We then provide a summary of general formalism for each class,…
Over the last decade, there has been a respectable level of scientific interest regarding the concept of a warp drive. This is a hypothetical propulsion device that could theoretically circumvent the traditional limitations of special…
Wormholes are hypothetical topologically-non-trivial structures of the spacetime. From the theoretical point of view, the possibility of their existence is challenging but cannot be ruled out. This article is a compact and non-exhaustive…
Looking at current proposals of so-called `warp drive spacetimes', they appear to employ General Relativity only at an elementary level. A number of strong restrictions are imposed such as flow-orthogonality of the spacetime foliation,…
Both traversable wormholes and warp drives, concepts originally developed within the context of science fiction, have now (for some 30 odd years) been studied, debated, and carefully analyzed within the framework of general relativity. An…
Prior to 1988, traversable wormholes were just science fiction. Prior to 1994, warp drives were just fiction. Since then, these notions matured into published scientific discourse, where key issues and unknowns continue to be raised and…
We discuss different arguments that have been raised against the viability of the big trip process, reaching the conclusions that this process can actually occur by accretion of phantom energy onto the wormholes and that it is stable and…
The question of whether it is possible or not to surpass the speed of light is already centennial. The special theory of relativity took the existence of a speed limit as a principle, the light postulate, which has proven to be enormously…
In general relativity, there is a class of solutions that currently do not have observed analogues, but on which the theory is shaped, giving an understanding what is fundamentally possible within its framework. Such solutions include…
It is commonly accepted that superluminal travel may be used to facilitate time travel. This is a purely special-relativistic argument, using the fact that for observers in two frames of reference, separated by a spacelike interval, the…
The science fiction film, Interstellar, tells the story of a team of astronauts searching a distant galaxy for habitable planets to colonize. Interstellar's story draws heavily from contemporary science. The film makes reference to a range…
Wormholes are extremely attractive objects for research, and although many mathematical and physical properties of these objects have been discovered and studied in the recent decades, there remain many unsolved problems and opportunities…
Entertaining the possibility of time travel will invariably challenge dearly held concepts of fundamental physics. It becomes relatively easy to construct multiple logical contradictions using differing starting points from various…
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…
''Warp drive'' spacetimes are useful as ''gedanken-experiments'' and as a theoretician's probe of the foundations of general relativity. Applying linearized gravity to the weak-field warp drive, i.e., for non-relativistic warp-bubble…
Wormholes are hypothetical shortcuts in spacetime that in General Relativity unavoidably violate all of the pointwise energy conditions. In this paper, we consider several wormhole spacetimes that, as opposed to the standard \emph{designer}…
This essay reviews some of the recent progress in the area of energy conditions and wormholes. Most of the discussion centers on the subject of ``quantum inequality'' restrictions on negative energy. These are bounds on the magnitude and…