Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 1486 - 1489 (1993)Topological censorship |
PRL Celebrates 50 Years
This Week's Milestone Letters are from 1984: |
John L. Friedman
Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California–Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California 93106
Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201
Kristin Schleich and Donald M. Witt
Department of Physics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z1
See Also: Erratum
Received 21 May 1993
All three-manifolds are known to occur as Cauchy surfaces of asymptotically flat vacuum spacetimes and of spacetimes with positive-energy sources. We prove here the conjecture that general relativity does not allow an observer to probe the topology of spacetime: Any topological structure collapses too quickly to allow light to traverse it. More precisely, in a globally hyperbolic, asymptotically flat spacetime satisfying the null energy condition, every causal curve from scrI- to scrI+ is homotopic to a topologically trivial curve from scrI- to scrI+.
©1993 The American Physical Society
URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v71/p1486
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.71.1486
PACS: 04.20.Cv
See Also
Erratum: John L. Friedman, Kristin Schleich, and Donald M. Witt, Topological Censorship[Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 1486 (1993)], Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 1872 (1995)
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