Published September 26, 1988
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Journal Article
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Wormholes, time machines, and the weak energy condition
Abstract
It is argued that, if the laws of physics permit an advanced civilization to create and maintain a wormhole in space for interstellar travel, then that wormhole can be converted into a time machine with which causality might be violatable. Whether wormholes can be created and maintained entails deep, ill-understood issues about cosmic censorship, quantum gravity, and quantum field theory, including the question of whether field theory enforces an averaged version of the weak energy condition.
Additional Information
©1988 The American Physical Society. Received 21 June 1988. For helpful discussions or correspondence, we thank Bruce Allen, Phillip Candelas, S. Chandrasekhar, Bryce DeWitt, Sam Finn, John Friedman, Robert Geroch, Leonard Parker, Don Page, Nicolas Papastamatiou, Thomas Roman, Carl Sagan, and Robert Wald. One of us (K.S.T.) thanks the Departments of Physics and Astronomy and the Phenomenology Group of the University of Wisconsin at Madison for hospitality during this research. This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant No. AST85-14911.Files
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