Wormholes and Time Travel? Not Likely

The `theoretical' existence of traversable Lorentzian wormholes in the classical, macroscopic world is plagued by the violation of the well--known energy conditions of General Relativity. In this brief article we show : (i) how the extent of violation can be quantified using certain volume integrals (ii) whether this `amount of violation' can be minimised for some specific cut--and--paste geometric constructions. Examples and possibilities are also outlined.

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 considerations in this respect.

In this talk I discuss pertinence of the wormholes to the problem of circumventing the light speed barrier and present a specific class of wormholes. The wormholes of this class are static and have arbitrarily wide throats, which makes them traversable. The matter necessary for these spacetimes to be solutions of the Einstein equations is shown to consist of two components, one of which satisfies the Weak energy condition and the other is produced by vacuum fluctuations of ne...

The serious study of such science fiction staples as wormholes, time travel, and the warp drive, as a means of understanding and constraining possible realistic solutions within General Relativity is reviewed.

It has been claimed that wormholes are just as good a prediction of Einstein's theory as black holes, but they are subject to severe restrictions from quantum field theory. The purpose of this paper is to show that the claim can be substantiated in spite of these restrictions.

It is known that traversible wormholes require negative energy density. We here argue how much negative energy is needed for wormholes, using a local analysis which does not assume any symmetry. and in particular allows dynamic (non-stationary) but non-degenerate wormholes. We find that wormholes require two constraints on the energy density, given by two independent components of the Einstein equation.

General relativity does not prohibit the existence of space-times that describe time travel. Consideration of such spaces gives rise to a lot of questions and paradoxes, among which there are thermodynamic ones. This paper considers two situations that describe time travel, and explains why their existence does not mean that time machines are prohibited.

This report is based on the Parallel Session AT3 ``Wormholes, Energy Conditions and Time Machines'' of the Fifteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting - MG15, held at the University of Rome ``La Sapienza'', Rome, in 2018.

The General Theory of Relativity has been an extremely successful theory, with a well established experimental footing, at least for weak gravitational fields. Its predictions range from the existence of black holes, gravitational radiation to the cosmological models, predicting a primordial beginning, namely the big-bang. All these solutions have been obtained by first considering a plausible distribution of matter, and through the Einstein field equation, the spacetime metr...

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 duration of negative energy which put rather severe constraints on its possible macroscopic effects. Such effects might include the construction of wormholes and warp drives for faster-than-light travel, and violations of the second law of th...