Cosmic Censorship and the Strengths of Singularities

Abstract

One says, loosely speaking, that a singularity is naked if light rays emanate from it in both future and past directions. (With this understanding, the Big Bang is not naked.) Censorship conditions are restrictions on the occurrence of naked singularities. The censorship conjectures of Penrose1, 2 state that space-times which are stable with respect to changes in the initial data and equation of state do not admit naked singularities. Unfortunately, stability theory in general relativity remains largely uncharted territory so it is expeditious to investigate alternative approaches to censorship. In particular, one can consider the conjecture that naked singularities are, in some sense, gravitationally weak. Research into this problem is feasible for two reasons. Firstly, there are various simple definitions of curvature strength which can be studied. And secondly, one can compute the strengths of known examples of naked singularities and thereby narrow the choice of tenable conjectures.