TWILIGHT FOR THE ENERGY CONDITIONS

By C. Barceló, Matt Visser. 2002

267 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The tension, if not outright inconsistency, between quantum physics and general relativity is one of the great problems facing physics at the turn of the millennium. Most often, the problems arising in merging Einstein gravity and quantum physics are viewed as Planck scale issues (1019GeV, 10-34m, 10-45s), and so safely beyond the reach of experiment. However, over the last few years it has become increasingly obvious that the difficulties are more widespread: There are already serious problems of deep and fundamental principle at the semi-classical level, and worse, certain classical systems (inspired by quantum physics, but in no sense quantum themselves) exhibit seriously pathological behaviour. One manifestation of these pathologies is in the so-called "energy conditions" of general relativity. Patching things up in the gravity sector opens gaping holes elsewhere; and some "fixes" are more radical than the problems they are supposed to cure.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f391bf498b0cee7f6d66e7632c2a7492664aa35d

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Citations in the corpus

The dS/CFT Correspondence and the Big Smash (2001, background): “cal models with w<−1 are known as “Phantom cosmologies” [3].] Theoreticaleﬀortsto come to termswith this possibility have largely focusedon scalar ﬁelds, particularly non-minimally coupled scalars [2][5][6][7]. Particularly striking, because it is founded on string theory, is the DEC-violating co”
A Primer on Energy Conditions (2014, background): “27The only physicists I know of to express similar concerns are Visser and Barceló [6, 199]; indeed they seem to be of the opinion that it is difficult to think of all energy conditions, not just the impressionist ones, as anything more than pragmatically convenient tools whose formulation is driven”
Energy conditions in general relativity and quantum field theory (2020, methodology): “The lack of a single preferred energy condition is an important point of criticism [4, 5], especially when the desire to prove strong results leads physicists to invoke energy conditions that appear ad hoc and tailored towards speci c proofs.”
Regular Black Holes with Asymptotically Minkowski Cores (2019, background): “Let us now analyse the various energy conditions [49–60] and see whether they are violated in our spacetime.”
Exotic solutions in General Relativity: Traversable wormholes and 'warp drive' spacetimes (2007, background): “Thus, gradually the weak and null energy conditions, and with it the other energy conditions, are losing their status of a kind of law [35].”
Jerk, snap, and the cosmological equation of state (2003, background): “Exotic matter is powerful stuff: Apart from possibly destroying the universe in a future “big rip” singularity [7], if the exotic matter clumps to any extent there is real risk of even more seriously bizarre behaviour — everything from violations of the positive mass condition (that is, objects with”