Benjamin Tippett

University of New Brunswick · Department of Mathematics and Statistics

We examine the causal and geometric horizons of dynamical black holes in Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi collapsing dust spacetimes. Marginally trapped tubes in these spacetimes may be spacelike, timelike or null and may also be sourced from or disappear into shell-crossing singularities which we resolve with (timelike) shockwaves. The event horizon kinks wh...

This white paper is an explanation of Ben and Dave's TARDIS time machine, written for laypeople who are interested in time travel, but have no technical knowledge of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. The first part of this paper is an introduction to the pertinent ideas from Einstein's theory of curved spacetime, followed by a review of othe...

There are many spacetime geometries in general relativity which contain closed timelike curves. A layperson might say that retrograde time travel is possible in such spacetimes. To date no one has discovered a spacetime geometry which emulates what a layperson would describe as a time machine. The purpose of this paper is to propose such a space-ti...

In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an extraordinary island. Johansen`s descriptions of...

In light of the surge in popularity of electromagnetic cloaking devices, we consider whether it is possible to use general relativity to cloak a volume of spacetime through gravitational lensing. We explore the cloaking properties of a spacetime through a ray-tracing procedure, wherein we plot the spatial trajectories of a congruence of initially p...

We describe a class of exactly soluble models for gravitational collapse in spherical symmetry obtained by patching dynamical spherically symmetric exterior spacetimes with cosmological interior spacetimes. These are generalizations of the Oppenheimer-Snyder type models to include classical and quantum scalar fields as sources for the interior metr...

We analyze the $\delta=2$ Tomimatsu-Sato spacetime in the context of the proposed Kerr/CFT correspondence. This 4-dimensional vacuum spacetime is asymptotically flat and has a well-defined ADM mass and angular momentum, but also involves several exotic features including a naked ring singularity, and two disjoint Killing horizons separated by a reg...

The Penrose inequality has so far been proven in cases of spherical symmetry and in cases of zero extrinsic curvature. The next simplest case worth exploring would be non-spherical, non-rotating black holes with non-zero extrinsic curvature. Following Karkowski et al.'s construction of prolate black holes, we define initial data on an asymptoticall...

The aim of this thesis is to discuss the existence of cosmological bounces, since little rigorous work has been done on them in the past. The inclusion of a geometric cosmological constant in the Einstein equation, as Lovelock suggests, will dramatically alter the implications of the classical energy conditions, since there will exist a source of c...

Exploiting the existence of two "cosmological" constants, one associated with the classical Lovelock theorem and one with the vacuum energy density, we argue, in a model independent way, that in spatially closed FLRW cosmologies with a positive definite effective cosmological constant there exists a range in this constant that serves as a sufficien...

This poster discusses scalar fields in spacetimes containing closed timelike curves. A family of spacetimes with closed timelike curves is constructed. These spacetimes are solutions to the Einstein equation for physical arrangements of mass. The evolution of scalar fields in these spacetimes is analysed, showing that they contain unstable solution...