Closed Timelike Curve - Consequences

Consequences

One feature of a CTC is that it opens the possibility of a worldline which is not connected to earlier times, and so the existence of events that cannot be traced to an earlier cause. Ordinarily, causality demands that each event in spacetime is preceded by its cause in every rest frame. This principle is critical in determinism, which in the language of general relativity states complete knowledge of the universe on a spacelike Cauchy surface can be used to calculate the complete state of the rest of spacetime. However, in a CTC, causality breaks down, because an event can be "simultaneous" with its cause—in some sense an event may be able to cause itself. It is impossible to determine based only on knowledge of the past whether or not something exists in the CTC that can interfere with other objects in spacetime. A CTC therefore results in a Cauchy horizon, and a region of spacetime that cannot be predicted from perfect knowledge of some past time.

No CTC can be continuously deformed as a CTC to a point (that is, a CTC and a point are not timelike homotopic), as the manifold would not be causally well behaved at that point. The topological feature which prevents the CTC from being deformed to a point is known as a timelike topological feature.

Existence of CTCs places restrictions on physically allowable states of matter-energy fields in the universe. Propagating a field configuration along the family of closed timelike worldlines must eventually result in the state that is identical to the original one. This has been explored by some scientists as a possible approach towards disproving the existence of CTCs.

Existence of CTCs implies also equivalence of quantum and classical computation (both in PSPACE).