{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/warp-drives-rest-frame-transitions-and-closed","title":"Warp Drives and Closed Timelike Curves","arxiv_id":"2309.10072","date":"2023-09-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Barak Shoshany","Ben Snodgrass"],"abstract":"It is commonly accepted that superluminal travel may be used to facilitate time travel. This is a purely special-relativistic argument, using the fact that for observers in two frames of reference, separated by a spacelike interval, the non-causal (spacelike) future of one observer includes part of the causal past of the other. In this paper we provide a concrete realization of this argument in a curved general-relativistic spacetime, using warp drives as the means of faster-than-light travel. By generalizing the usual warp drive metric to allow for a non-unit lapse function, we allow the warp drive to switch between reference frames in a purely geometric way. With an additional modification allowing the warp drive to have compact support, this permits us to glue two warp drives together to construct a closed timelike geodesic, such that a test particle following the geodesics of the two warp drives travels back to its own past. This provides a precise mathematical model for the connection between faster-than-light travel and time travel in general relativity, and the first such model to be explicitly formulated using two warp drives. We also give a detailed discussion of weak energy condition violations in the non-unit-lapse warp drive.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10072v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.10072v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"warp-drives-rest-frame-transitions-and-closed","repo_url":"https://github.com/bshoshany/spacetime-diagrams","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}