Temporal Paradoxes Talk at NASA

I’ve been asked to do a talk, Temporal Paradoxes, at NASA.  This will be on the 21st of this month, at 3:30pm.  This is a NASA-fied version of my previous Physics of Paradox talk, meaning more animations & less science fiction, and perhaps a few equations in a grayish font.  Abstract:

ABSTRACT — Einstein’s general relativity is the leading theory of gravity. Simple and elegant, it has passed all available experimental tests including: deflection of light by gravity, precession of orbital apsides, gravitational time dilation (used in GPS), and frame-dragging.

However, general relativity makes a number of counter-intuitive predictions. In particular, trajectories looping around massive, rapidly rotating stars or passing through a wormhole can close on themselves in time, creating closed timelike curves (CTCs).

This creates the possibility of “grandfather” and “bootstrap” paradoxes. Recent work by Greenberger & Svozil, and others, however, questions this conclusion. That work suggests that when quantum mechanical effects are included, the paradoxes become self-canceling, eliminated by destructive interference within the wave function. If the paradoxes are self-canceling, then closed time-like curves are possible. If they are possible, can we create or detect them?

Several authors have suggested that we look for evanescent wormholes with the Large Hadron Collider. If we find them, we may be at the edge of temporal paradox. While the only safe prediction in this area is that there are no safe predictions, we look at the implications of this for general relativity, quantum mechanics, & causality.