Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking
Matt Visser
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In one page
Wormholes, spacewarps, timewarps, time machines: the words come from science fiction, but they have serious theoretical origins, and this is the book that assembled them into one technical subject. Matt Visser writes for physicists — equations throughout, four hundred pages, sixteen pages of bibliography — and organises the field the way a field ought to be organised. First the background, general relativity and quantum field theory set out from scratch. Then the history: the Einstein–Rosen bridge of 1935, Wheeler’s spacetime foam, the wormhole hidden inside a rotating black hole, and a taxonomy sorting one kind of wormhole from another. Then the renaissance that Morris and Thorne started in 1988 — traversable wormholes, the energy conditions that stand in their way, the engineering you would actually have to do, and the thin-shell constructions that make the mathematics tractable. Then time machines and the paradoxes. Then the quantum effects. Then, plainly titled, where we stand.
Why it matters hereChapter 4 works through wormholes and the metric one primary paper at a time; this is the book that puts those papers in order and supplies the machinery — energy conditions, thin shells, topological censorship — that every later paper assumes. Chapter 13 gets its model for an honest closing ledger from Visser’s final chapter, which does exactly that job for the wormhole literature.
What it claims
01The vocabulary of science fiction — wormholes, spacewarps, timewarps, time machines — has serious theoretical origins inside general relativity, and the subject can be set out as ordinary technical physics, with the general relativity and quantum field theory it needs developed from the start rather than assumed.Part I, Background, chapters 1 to 4; library catalogue summary
Settled physics02Wormholes are not a modern invention. The line runs from the Einstein–Rosen bridge through Wheeler’s spacetime foam and the wormhole structure inside the rotating Kerr solution to the cosmological constant, and the varieties are different enough that the book needs a taxonomy chapter to sort them.Part II, History, chapters 5 to 10
Settled physics03The modern subject is the traversable wormhole, and its governing obstacle is the energy conditions — which is why the book gives energy conditions, engineering considerations, the thin-shell formalism, thin-shell wormholes and topological censorship a chapter each rather than a remark each.Part III, Renaissance, chapters 11 to 16
Published and peer-reviewed04A traversable wormhole can be turned into a time machine, and the conversion is a specific construction rather than a loose analogy; the book treats it as such, sets out the basic notions of chronology first, and then answers the paradoxes in a chapter of its own.Part IV, Time Travel, chapters 17 to 19
Published and peer-reviewed05The quantum side is worked with semiclassical quantum gravity and van Vleck determinants, developed as formalism and then applied to wormholes, to singularity structure and to minisuperspace models — the tools you need if the throat is to be held open by quantum field effects rather than by assumed exotic matter.Part V, Quantum Effects, chapters 20 to 24
Published and peer-reviewed06The book ends with a stock-take rather than a flourish: a closing part titled Reprise whose single chapter is Where We Stand, separating what the mathematics has established from what remains open.Part VI, Reprise, chapter 25
What to watch
The way in
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8646144M/Lorentzian_WormholesWHICH RECORD IS WHICH. The identifier the corpus recorded, 10.5860/choice.33-5168, is not the book. It is a review record: Choice Reviews Online, volume 33, issue 09, review number 33-5168, published 1 May 1996 by the American Library Association, whose Crossref deposit carries the book’s table of contents in place of an abstract — which is why the corpus fetch looked like a paper with a very long abstract. The book itself is cited here by ISBN. PUBLICATION. Matt Visser, Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking, AIP Press, American Institute of Physics, Woodbury, New York, in the AIP Series in Computational and Applied Mathematical Physics; ISBN 1-56396-653-0, ISBN 978-1-56396-653-8, OCLC 36141202; xxv plus 412 pages, with a bibliography at pages 377 to 392 and an index. Later reissued by Springer, which now carries the title. DATE. The batch brief gave 1995, and the book is often cited with that year; every catalogue record actually retrieved for this page gives 1996 — the Library of Congress cataloguing carried by the Internet Archive reads Woodbury, N.Y.: American Institute of Physics, 1996, Open Library records the printing as 9 August 1996, and the Choice review appeared on 1 May 1996 — so 1996 is used here and the discrepancy is recorded rather than resolved. WHAT WAS READ. The book itself was not read for this page, and no text of it is reproduced anywhere on this page. Springer’s own catalogue page answers automated retrieval with a JavaScript challenge rather than content, so the description below was written from the library catalogue summary and the complete table of contents carried by the Choice deposit, together with the primary wormhole papers already held on this site. Part and chapter numbers used as locators are the book’s own, from that table of contents. CHAPTERS. The corpus skeleton listed ch04 and ch05; ch05 has been replaced by ch13, since the book’s closing stock-take is what this site draws on. RELATED PAGES: see the cross-links at the foot of this page.
How to cite it
Matt Visser (1996) Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8646144M/Lorentzian_Wormholes
Where it sits in the curriculum