Stationary spacetimes—sounds fairly simple, unchanging.  Static—even more boring.  But are they?

Steve (also known as Stacey) Harris is a mathematical relativist in the Department of Mathematics at Saint Louis University, mostly working on global structures such as causal boundary, and a notorious campus gadfly and rebel, being active in AAUP and fanatical about shared governance. Off campus there’s hiking and playing flute in concert band.

Consider an experiment of emitting a photon along a closed path—closed either due to a constraining light-tube or due to a topological closure in the spacetime—and finding the time till the photon returns to the starting point.  (Our naive expectation is for the time to be the same as the length of the path, if our clocks and measuring rods are in geometric units, set to show speed of light is unity.)  Now turn around and emit a photon along the same path but in the reverse direction—does it take the same time to Continue reading →