Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Penrose diagram
Summary
In theoretical physics, a Penrose diagram (named after mathematical physicist Roger Penrose) is a two-dimensional diagram capturing the causal relations between different points in spacetime through a conformal treatment of infinity. It is an extension (suitable for the curved spacetimes of e.g. general relativity) of the Minkowski diagram of special relativity where the vertical dimension represents time, and the horizontal dimension represents a space dimension. Using this design, all light rays take a 45° path.. Locally, the metric on a Penrose diagram is conformally equivalent to the metric of the spacetime depicted. The conformal factor is chosen such that the entire infinite spacetime is transformed into a Penrose diagram of finite size, with infinity on the boundary of the diagram. For spherically symmetric spacetimes, every point in the Penrose diagram corresponds to a 2-dimensional sphere .
While Penrose diagrams share the same basic coordinate vector system of other spacetime diagrams for local asymptotically flat spacetime, it introduces a system of representing distant spacetime by shrinking or "crunching" distances that are further away. Straight lines of constant time and straight lines of constant space coordinates therefore become hyperbolae, which appear to converge at points in the corners of the diagram. These points and boundaries represent conformal infinity for spacetime, which was first introduced by Penrose in 1963.
Penrose diagrams are more properly (but less frequently) called Penrose–Carter diagrams (or Carter–Penrose diagrams), acknowledging both Brandon Carter and Roger Penrose, who were the first researchers to employ them. They are also called conformal diagrams, or simply spacetime diagrams (although the latter may refer to Minkowski diagrams).
Two lines drawn at 45° angles should intersect in the diagram only if the corresponding two light rays intersect in the actual spacetime. So, a Penrose diagram can be used as a concise illustration of spacetime regions that are accessible to observation.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.