Closed Timelike Curves—Time and Again

Sixty years ago, in 1949, Kurt Gödel published a paper dedicated to Albert Einstein on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Gödel presented a solution of Einstein’s field equations for a rotating, homogeneous, stationary universe with negative cosmological constant. Among various surprising properties this universe allows closed timelike curves (CTC), i.e. travel into the past and into the future. Until today many papers have been published concerning physical, logical and philosophical consequences of these results and the existence of closed timelike worldlines in the General Theory of Relativity. Starting from a short survey on Gödel’s work we proceed to elucidate more modern interpretations of the existence of CTCs.