Abstract:
It is often stated that topology change is impossible in classical general relativity. In particular, it appears to be widely believed that the pleasure of topology change comes at a fixed price: topology – changing space times must be singular. This perception is wrong. I discuss here both the kinematics and the dynamics of topology change, in order to clarify what precisely the obstacles are, and (with luck) to dispel a few of the more widespread misconceptions about this process. Some of the work presented here extends the work of Geroch and Tipler to a wider class of spacetimes, and some of it offers novelties – such as an explicit example of non-singular 2-dimensional topology change that have been claimed in the literature to be impossible
