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Phys. Rev. D 55, 3427–3430 (1997)

Causality violation and paradoxes

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S. V. Krasnikov
The Central Astronomical Observatory at Pulkovo, St. Petersburg, 196140, Russia

Received 6 September 1996; published in the issue dated 15 March 1997

Paradoxes that can supposedly occur if causality is violated are discussed. It is shown that the existence of “trajectories of multiplicity zero” (i.e., trajectories that describe, say, a ball hitting its younger self so that the latter cannot fall into the time machine) is not paradoxical by itself. This apparent paradox can be resolved (at least sometimes) without any harm to local physics or to the time machine. Also a simple model is adduced for which the absence of true paradoxes caused by self-interaction in an acausal world is proved. The conclusion is made that the paradoxes appear if and (within this model) only if the fact is neglected that no conditions fixed to the past of a time machine guarantee that a system remains isolated after it intersects the Cauchy horizon.

© 1997 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.55.3427
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.55.3427
PACS:
04.20.Gz