Abstract
The hypothesis of cosmic censorship (CCH) plays a crucial role in classical general relativity, namely, to ensure that naked singularities would never emerge, since it predicts that whenever a singularity is formed an event horizon would always develop around it as well, to prevent the former from interacting directly with the rest of the Universe. Should this not be so, naked singularities could eventually form, in which case phenomena beyond our understanding and ability to predict could occur, since at the vicinity of the singularity both predictability and determinism break down even at the classical (e.g., nonquantum) level. More than 40 years after it was proposed, the validity of the hypothesis remains an open question. We reconsider CCH in both its weak and strong versions, concerning point-like singularities, with respect to the provisions of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. We argue that the shielding of the singularities from observers at infinity by an event horizon is also quantum mechanically favored, but ultimately it seems more appropriate to accept that singularities never actually form in the usual sense; thus no naked singularity danger exists in the first place.
Highlights
Singularities, conceived as spacetime regions, where curvature blows up to exceed any possible upper bound, are one of the most problematic notions in Physics
Even worse, Hawking and Penrose have shown that the emergence of singularities is inevitable in a very large class of universe types, where sufficiently reasonable conditions are satisfied (the theorem goes as follows: let M, gab be a time-oriented spacetime satisfying the following conditions. (A) RabVaVb ≥ 0 for any nonspace-like Va. (B) The timelike and null generic conditions are fulfilled. (C) There is no closed time-like curve. (D) At least one of the following holds: (Da) there exists a compact achronal set without edge; (Db) there exists a trapped surface; (Dc) there is a p ∈ M such that the expansion of the future directed null geodesics through p becomes negative along each geodesic
In order to deal with these “monsters,” Penrose proposed the famous cosmic censorship hypothesis (CCH) [2]
Summary
The hypothesis of cosmic censorship (CCH) plays a crucial role in classical general relativity, namely, to ensure that naked singularities would never emerge, since it predicts that whenever a singularity is formed an event horizon would always develop around it as well, to prevent the former from interacting directly with the rest of the Universe. Should this not be so, naked singularities could eventually form, in which case phenomena beyond our understanding and ability to predict could occur, since at the vicinity of the singularity both predictability and determinism break down even at the classical (e.g., nonquantum) level. We argue that the shielding of the singularities from observers at infinity by an event horizon is quantum mechanically favored, but it seems more appropriate to accept that singularities never form in the usual sense; no naked singularity danger exists in the first place
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