THE CHRONOLOGY PROTECTION CONJECTURE

In the original Star Trek series, Dr. McCoy falls through a time portal in a city "on the edge of
forever," and changes the past in a way that erases the Enterprise and her crew, with the
exception of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, who must return to the past to fix what McCoy has
undone. Time travel is a well-worn staple of science fiction writers, but not only does it
violate numerous physical laws, there are fundamental problems of consistency and
causality. The most prominent is the "grandfather paradox," in which you travel back in time
and kill your grandfather before you were born, which means you could not have been born
to then travel back in time to kill your grandfather. In Back to the Future, Marty McFly faces
a related but opposite dilemma, in which he must arrange for his mother to date his father in
order to ensure his conception.
One way around such paradoxes can be found in extremely sophisticated virtual-reality
machines (think of a holodeck), programmed to replicate a past time and place in such detail
that it is indistinguishable from a real past (which one can never know in full in any case).
Another option involves a multiple-universes model of cosmology in which you travel back in
time to a different but closely parallel universe to our own, as portrayed in Michael Crichton's
novel Timeline, where the characters journey to another universe's medieval Europe without
worry of mucking up our own chronology.
Your Past or Someone Else's?
The fundamental shortcoming for both of these time-travel scenarios is that it isn't really
your past. A virtual-reality time machine is simply a museum writ large, and transporting to
some other universe's past would be like going back and meeting someone like your mother,
who marries someone like your father, producing someone like, but not, you--surely a less
appealing trip than one in your own time-line.

To make that trip you need the time machine of Caltech's Kip Thorne, who had his interest
piqued in time travel when he received a phone call one day from Carl Sagan. Sagan was
looking for a way to get the heroine of his novel Contact--Eleanor Arroway (played by Jody
Foster in the film version)--to the star Vega, 26 light-years away. The problem Sagan faced,
as all science fiction writers do in such situations, is that at the speed of, say, the Voyager
spacecraft (the fastest human-made object), it would take about 490,000 years to get to Vega.
That's a long time to sit, even if you are in first class with your seat back and tray table down.
Thorne's solution, adopted by Sagan, was to send Ellie through a wormhole--a hypothetical
space warp similar to a black hole in which you enter the mouth, fall through a short tube in
hyperspace that leads to an exit hole somewhere else in the universe. (Think of a tube
running through the middle of a basketball--instead of going all the way around the surface of
the ball to get to the other side, you tunnel through the middle.) Since, as Einstein showed,
space and time are intimately entangled, Thorne theorized that by warping space one might
also be warping time, and that by falling through a wormhole in one direction it might be
possible to travel backward in time.
Thorne's initial calculations showed that it was theoretically possible for Ellie to travel just
one kilometer down the wormhole tunnel and emerge near Vega moments later--not even
time for a bag of peanuts. After he published his theory in a technical physics journal in 1988,
the media got a hold of the story and branded Thorne as "The Man Who Invented Time
Travel." Not one to encourage such sensationalism, Thorne continued his research and by the
early 1990s began growing skeptical of his own thesis.

Trouble with Time Machines

Whether it is possible to actually travel through a wormhole without being crushed out of
existence, Thorne reasoned, depends on the laws of quantum gravity, which are not fully
understood at this point. What he and his colleagues ultimately discovered is that, as Kip told
me, "all time machines are likely to self-destruct the moment they are activated." Thorne's
colleague Stephen Hawking agreed, only half sardonically calling this conclusion the
"chronology protection conjecture," in which "the laws of physics do not allow time
machines," thus keeping "the world safe for historians." Besides, Hawking wondered, if time
travel were possible, where are all the time tourists from the future?

It's a good question and, in conjunction with the paradoxes and physical law constraints,
makes me skeptical as well. Until much more is known about quantum gravity and
wormholes, virtual-reality machines and multiple universes, I'll do my time traveling through
the chronology projector of the mind.

The chronology protection conjecture is a conjecture by physicist Stephen Hawking that

the laws of physics are such as to prevent time travel on all but submicroscopic scales. The
permissibility of time travel is represented mathematically by the existence of closed timelike
curves. The chronology protection conjecture should be distinguished from chronological
censorship under which every closed timelike curve passes through an event horizon, which
might prevent an observer from detecting the causal violation. [1]

In a 1992 paper, Hawking uses the metaphorical device of a "Chronology Protection Agency"
as a personification of the aspects of physics that make time travel impossible at macroscopic
scales, thus apparently preventing time paradoxes. He says:
It seems that there is a Chronology Protection Agency which prevents the appearance of
closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians.

The idea of the Chronology Protection Agency appears to be drawn playfully from the Time
Patrol or Time Police concept, which has been used in many works of science fiction[2]such
as Poul Anderson's series of Time Patrol stories or Isaac Asimov's novel The End of
Eternity (though in Asimov's novel the time travelers were constantly trying to make small
changes to history to improve it, while preserving some broad features like a lack of atomic
wars).

General relativity and quantum corrections

Many attempts to generate scenarios for closed timelike curves have been suggested, and the
theory of general relativity does allow them in certain circumstances. Some theoretical
solutions in general relativity that contain closed timelike curves would require an infinite
universe with certain features that our universe does not appear to have, such as the
universal rotation of the Gdel metric or the rotating cylinder of infinite length known as
a Tipler cylinder. However, some solutions allow for the creation of closed timelike curves in
a bounded region of spacetime, with the Cauchy horizon being the boundary between the
region of spacetime where closed timelike curves can exist and the rest of spacetime where
they can't.[3] One of the first such bounded time travel solutions found was constructed from
a traversable wormhole, based on the idea of taking one of the two "mouths" of the wormhole
on a round-trip journey at relativistic speed to create a time difference between it and the
other mouth.

General relativity does not include quantum effects on its own, and a full integration of
general relativity and quantum mechanics would require a theory of quantum gravity, but
there is an approximate method for modeling quantum fields in the curved spacetime of
general relativity, known as semiclassical gravity. Initial attempts to apply semiclassical
gravity to the traversable wormhole time machine indicated that at exactly the moment that
wormhole would first allow for closed timelike curves, quantum vacuum fluctuations build up
and drive the energy density to infinity in the region of the wormholes. This occurs when the
two wormhole mouths, call them A and B, have been moved in such a way that it becomes
possible for a particle or wave moving at the speed of light to enter mouth B at some time
T2 and exit through mouth A at an earlier time T1, then travel back towards mouth B through
ordinary space, and arrive at mouth B at the same time T2 that it entered B on the previous
loop; in this way the same particle or wave can make a potentially infinite number of loops
through the same regions of spacetime, piling up on itself. [4] Calculations showed that this
effect would not occur for an ordinary beam of radiation, because it would be "defocused" by
the wormhole so that most of a beam emerging from mouth A would spread out and miss
mouth B.[5] But when the calculation was done for vacuum fluctuations, it was found that they
would spontaneously refocus on the trip between the mouths, indicating that the pileup effect
might become large enough to destroy the wormhole in this case.[6]

Uncertainty about this conclusion remained, because the semiclassical calculations indicated
that the pileup would only drive the energy density to infinity for an infinitesimal moment of
time, after which the energy density would die down. [7] But semiclassical gravity is considered
unreliable for large energy densities or short time periods that reach the Planck scale; at
these scales, a complete theory of quantum gravity is needed for accurate predictions. So, it
remains uncertain whether quantum-gravitational effects might prevent the energy density
from growing large enough to destroy the wormhole.[8] Stephen Hawking conjectured that
not only would the pileup of vacuum fluctuations still succeed in destroying the wormhole in
quantum gravity, but also that the laws of physics would ultimately prevent any type of time
machine from forming; this is the chronology protection conjecture. [9]

Subsequent work in semiclassical gravity provided examples of spacetimes with closed

timelike curves where the energy density due to vacuum fluctuations does not approach
infinity in the region of spacetime outside the Cauchy horizon. [9] However, in 1997 a general
proof was found demonstrating that according to semiclassical gravity, the energy of the
quantum field (more precisely, the expectation value of the quantum stress-energy tensor)
must always be either infinite or undefined on the horizon itself.[10] Both cases indicate that
semiclassical methods become unreliable at the horizon and quantum gravity effects would
be important there, consistent with the possibility that such effects would always intervene to
prevent time machines from forming.

A definite theoretical decision on the status of the chronology protection conjecture would
require a full theory of quantum gravity as opposed to semiclassical methods (there are also
some arguments from string theory that seem to support chronology protection, but string
theory is not yet a complete theory of quantum gravity). Experimental observation of closed
timelike curves would of course demonstrate this conjecture to be false, but short of that, if
physicists had a theory of quantum gravity whose predictions had been well-confirmed in
other areas, this would give them a significant degree of confidence in the theory's
predictions about the possibility or impossibility of time travel.

Other proposals that allow for backwards time travel but prevent time paradoxes, such as
the Novikov self-consistency principle, which would ensure the timeline stays consistent, or
the idea that a time traveler is taken to a parallel universe while his original timeline remains
intact, do not qualify as "chronology protection".