Time Travel and Consistency Constraints.

The possibility of time travel, as permitted in General Relativity, is responsible for constraining physical fields beyond what laws of nature would otherwise require. In the special case where time travel is limited to a single object returning to the past and interacting with itself, consistency c...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Philosophy of Science Vol. 70; no. 5; pp. 1098 - 1114
Autor principal: Kutach, Douglas N.
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Cambridge University Press Dec2003
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:The possibility of time travel, as permitted in General Relativity, is responsible for constraining physical fields beyond what laws of nature would otherwise require. In the special case where time travel is limited to a single object returning to the past and interacting with itself, consistency constraints can be avoided if the dynamics is continuous and the object's state space satisfies a certain topological requirement: that all null-homotopic mappings from the state-space to itself have some fixed point. Where consistency constraints do exist, no new physics is needed to enforce them. One needs only to accept certain global topological constraints as laws, something that is reasonable in any case.