Warp Drives and Closed Timelike Curves
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2023
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| _version_ | 1866916396846284800 |
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| author | Shoshany, Barak Snodgrass, Ben |
| author_facet | Shoshany, Barak Snodgrass, Ben |
| contents | 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 non-causal (spacelike) future of one observer includes part of the causal past of the other. In this paper we provide a concrete realization of this argument in a curved general-relativistic spacetime, using warp drives as the means of faster-than-light travel. By generalizing the usual warp drive metric to allow for a non-unit lapse function, we allow the warp drive to switch between reference frames in a purely geometric way. With an additional modification allowing the warp drive to have compact support, this permits us to glue two warp drives together to construct a closed timelike geodesic, such that a test particle following the geodesics of the two warp drives travels back to its own past. This provides a precise mathematical model for the connection between faster-than-light travel and time travel in general relativity, and the first such model to be explicitly formulated using two warp drives. We also give a detailed discussion of weak energy condition violations in the non-unit-lapse warp drive. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_10072 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Warp Drives and Closed Timelike Curves Shoshany, Barak Snodgrass, Ben General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 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 non-causal (spacelike) future of one observer includes part of the causal past of the other. In this paper we provide a concrete realization of this argument in a curved general-relativistic spacetime, using warp drives as the means of faster-than-light travel. By generalizing the usual warp drive metric to allow for a non-unit lapse function, we allow the warp drive to switch between reference frames in a purely geometric way. With an additional modification allowing the warp drive to have compact support, this permits us to glue two warp drives together to construct a closed timelike geodesic, such that a test particle following the geodesics of the two warp drives travels back to its own past. This provides a precise mathematical model for the connection between faster-than-light travel and time travel in general relativity, and the first such model to be explicitly formulated using two warp drives. We also give a detailed discussion of weak energy condition violations in the non-unit-lapse warp drive. |
| title | Warp Drives and Closed Timelike Curves |
| topic | General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10072 |