Historical research guide · 0935 · 1996
Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking
Matt Visser
In one minute
Wormholes, spacewarps, timewarps, time machines: the words come from science fiction, but they have serious theoretical origins, and this is the book that assembled them into one technical subject. Matt Visser writes for physicists — equations throughout, four hundred pages, sixteen pages of bibliography — and organises the field the way a field ought to be organised. First the background, general relativity and quantum field theory set out from scratch. Then the history: the Einstein–Rosen bridge of 1935, Wheeler’s spacetime foam, the wormhole hidden inside a rotating black hole, and a taxonomy sorting one kind of wormhole from another. Then the renaissance that Morris and Thorne started in 1988 — traversable wormholes, the energy conditions that stand in their way, the engineering you would actually have to do, and the thin-shell constructions that make the mathematics tractable. Then time machines and the paradoxes. Then the quantum effects. Then, plainly titled, where we stand.
Connection
Chapter 4 works through wormholes and the metric one primary paper at a time; this is the book that puts those papers in order and supplies the machinery — energy conditions, thin shells, topological censorship — that every later paper assumes. Chapter 13 gets its model for an honest closing ledger from Visser’s final chapter, which does exactly that job for the wormhole literature.
From the source
The vocabulary of science fiction — wormholes, spacewarps, timewarps, time machines — has serious theoretical origins inside general relativity, and the subject can be set out as ordinary technical physics, with the general relativity and quantum field theory it needs developed from the start rather than assumed.Part I, Background, chapters 1 to 4; library catalogue summary
Wormholes are not a modern invention. The line runs from the Einstein–Rosen bridge through Wheeler’s spacetime foam and the wormhole structure inside the rotating Kerr solution to the cosmological constant, and the varieties are different enough that the book needs a taxonomy chapter to sort them.Part II, History, chapters 5 to 10
The modern subject is the traversable wormhole, and its governing obstacle is the energy conditions — which is why the book gives energy conditions, engineering considerations, the thin-shell formalism, thin-shell wormholes and topological censorship a chapter each rather than a remark each.Part III, Renaissance, chapters 11 to 16
A traversable wormhole can be turned into a time machine, and the conversion is a specific construction rather than a loose analogy; the book treats it as such, sets out the basic notions of chronology first, and then answers the paradoxes in a chapter of its own.Part IV, Time Travel, chapters 17 to 19
The quantum side is worked with semiclassical quantum gravity and van Vleck determinants, developed as formalism and then applied to wormholes, to singularity structure and to minisuperspace models — the tools you need if the throat is to be held open by quantum field effects rather than by assumed exotic matter.Part V, Quantum Effects, chapters 20 to 24
The book ends with a stock-take rather than a flourish: a closing part titled Reprise whose single chapter is Where We Stand, separating what the mathematics has established from what remains open.Part VI, Reprise, chapter 25
The way in
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8646144M/Lorentzian_WormholesHow to cite it
Matt Visser (1996) Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8646144M/Lorentzian_Wormholes