Dustin Lazarovici

Technion

On Gödel's Argument for
 the Unreality of Time

In a 1949 essay dedicated to Einstein, Kurt Gödel argued that the possibility of time travel in General Relativity challenges the intuitive conception of an objective passage of time. More precisely, the argument is based on a cosmological solution to Einstein's field equations that Gödel discovered, and which admits closed timelike curves through every point in spacetime. The talk seeks to clarify where Gödel's argument stands from the point of view of modern physics. This raises subtle questions about the kind of modality involved in Gödel's argument, the relationship between formal solutions of General Relativity and physically possible spacetimes, and the status of Stephen Hawking's "chronology protection conjecture" that seems to rule out the possibility of time travel. By addressing these questions, the talk contends that Gödel's claims stand up in the face of recent physical results.

התכנסות לקפה וכיבוד קל בשעה 17:45, ליד חדר  449

יו"ר: שאול קציר

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