Audio / Video

What prevents negative energy from violating causality?

  • 01:09:56

Description

Quantum fields can sometimes have negative energy density. In gravitational contexts, this threatens to permit exotic phenomena such as traversable wormholes, warp drives, and time machines. I will discuss a new thermodynamics principle that can help to rule out such pathological situations. Despite the gravitational motivation, this principle has led us to an interesting lower bound on the energy, even for field theories in flat spacetime! This bound has since been shown to hold in several kinds of field theories.

Details

Title

What prevents negative energy from violating causality?

Creator

University of California, Berkeley. Dept. of Physics

Published

Berkeley, CA, University of California, Berkeley, Dept. of Physics, October 24, 2016

Full Collection Name

Physics Colloquia

Type

Video

Format

Lecture.

Extent

1 streaming video file

Other Physical Details

digital, sd., col.

Archive

Physics Library

Note

Recorded at a colloquium held on October 24, 2016, sponsored by the Dept. of Physics, University of California, Berkeley.

originally produced as an .mts file in 2016

Speakers: Aron Wall.

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Collection

Physics Colloquia

Tracks

colloquia/10-24-16Wall.mp4 01:09:56

Linked Resources

View record in Digital Collections.