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| Introducing Spacetime Singularities and Acausalities | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Spacetime singularities: In the beginning | |
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| Einstein's intolerance of singularities | |
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| Acausality and time travel | |
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| Singularities and acausalities together | |
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| Defining, Characterizing, and Proving the Existence of Spacetime Singularities | |
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| Introduction | |
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| What is a spacetime singularity? | |
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| Extensions of Spacetimes | |
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| The received definition of singularities | |
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| The missing missing points | |
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| Naked singularities | |
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| What is a spacetime singularity (again)? | |
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| Singularity theorems | |
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| Singularities and quantum effects | |
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| Conclusion | |
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| Cosmic Censorship | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Cozying up to singularities | |
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| Naked singularities and cosmic censorship | |
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| The cosmic censorship hypothesis | |
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| Is the cosmic censorship hypothesis true? | |
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| Black hole evaporation | |
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| What if cosmic censorship should fail? | |
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| A dirty open secret | |
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| Conclusion | |
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| Supertasks | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Pitowsky spacetimes | |
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| Malament-Hogarth spacetimes | |
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| Paradoxes regained? | |
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| Characterization of Malament-Hogarth spacetimes | |
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| Supertasks in Malament-Hogarth spacetimes | |
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| Malament-Hogarth spacetimes and unresolved mathematical conjectures | |
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| Can [gamma subscript 1] carry out the assigned task? | |
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| Conclusion | |
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| Proofs of Lemma 4.2 and Equation 4.4 | |
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| The Big Bang and the Horizon Problem | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Observability and light cones | |
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| What can we predict about the future? | |
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| Event and particle horizons | |
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| What is the horizon problem? | |
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| Reichenbach's principle of common cause | |
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| Particle horizons and common causes | |
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| Diagnosing the bellyache: Electromagnetism | |
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| Diagnosing the bellyache: Cosmic background radiation | |
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| Strategies for solving the horizon problem | |
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| Horizons in standard and inflationary models | |
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| Does inflation solve the horizon problem? | |
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| Conclusion | |
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| Time Travel | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Types of time travel; backward causation | |
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| The causal structure of relativistic spacetimes | |
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| Why take Godelian time travel seriously? | |
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| The paradoxes of time travel | |
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| Consistency constraints | |
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| Therapies for time travel malaise | |
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| Non self-interacting test fields | |
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| Self-interacting test fields | |
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| Can we build and operate a time machine? | |
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| Conclusion | |
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| Godel on the ideality of time | |
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| Eternal Recurrence, Cyclic Time, and All That | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Tolman on eternal recurrence | |
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| Extending through the big bang and the big crunch | |
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| Finding God in the big bang | |
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| No recurrence theorems | |
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| Cyclic time | |
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| Conclusion | |
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| Afterword | |
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| References | |
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| Index | |