[4] CTCs are associated, in Lorentzian manifolds which are interpreted physically as spacetimes, with the possibility of causal anomalies such as a person going back in time and potentially shooting their own grandfather, although paradoxes might be avoided using some constraint such as the Novikov self-consistency principle.
An objection to the practicality of building a Tipler cylinder was discovered by Stephen Hawking, who argued that according to general relativity it is impossible to build a time machine in any finite region that satisfies the weak energy condition, meaning that the region contains no exotic matter with negative energy.
"[7] Hawking's argument appears in his 1992 paper on the chronology protection conjecture (though the argument is distinct from the conjecture itself, since the argument asserts that classical general relativity predicts a finite region containing closed timelike curves can only be created if there is a violation of the weak energy condition in that region, whereas the conjecture predicts that closed timelike curves will prove to be impossible in a future theory of quantum gravity which replaces general relativity).
In the paper, he examines "the case that the causality violations appear in a finite region of spacetime without curvature singularities" and proves that "[t]here will be a Cauchy horizon that is compactly generated and that in general contains one or more closed null geodesics which will be incomplete.
One can define geometrical quantities that measure the Lorentz boost and area increase on going round these closed null geodesics.