Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface to 50th Anniversary Edition
- Preface
- 1 The role of gravity
- 2 Differential geometry
- 3 General relativity
- 4 The physical significance of curvature
- 5 Exact solutions
- 6 Causal structure
- 7 The Cauchy problem in General Relativity
- 8 Space-time singularities
- 9 Gravitational collapse and black holes
- 10 The initial singularity in the universe
- Appendix A: Translation of an essay by Peter Simon Laplace
- Appendix B: Spherically symmetric solutions and Birkhoff’s theorem
- References
- Notation
- Index
6 - Causal structure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface to 50th Anniversary Edition
- Preface
- 1 The role of gravity
- 2 Differential geometry
- 3 General relativity
- 4 The physical significance of curvature
- 5 Exact solutions
- 6 Causal structure
- 7 The Cauchy problem in General Relativity
- 8 Space-time singularities
- 9 Gravitational collapse and black holes
- 10 The initial singularity in the universe
- Appendix A: Translation of an essay by Peter Simon Laplace
- Appendix B: Spherically symmetric solutions and Birkhoff’s theorem
- References
- Notation
- Index
Summary
§6.1 deals with the question of the orientability of timelike and spacelike bases. In §6.2 basic causal relations are defined and the definition of a non-spacelike curve is extended from piecewise differentiable to continuous. The properties of the boundary of the future of a set are derived in §6.3. In §6.4a number of conditions which rule out violations or near violations of causality are discussed. The closely related concepts of Cauchy developments and global hyperbolicity are introduced in §6.5 and §6.6, and are used in §6.7 to prove the existence of non-spacelike geodesies of maximum length between certain pairs of points.
In §6.8 we describe the construction of Geroch, Kronheimer, and Penrose for attaching a causal boundary to spacetime. A particular example of such a boundary is provided by a class of asymptotically flat spacetimes which are studied in § 6.9
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time50th Anniversary Edition, pp. 180 - 225Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023