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SYCC: Symposium Cosmic Censorship

SYCC 1: Symposium Cosmic Censorship

SYCC 1.4: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 13. März 2017, 18:00–18:30, HS 1010

48 Years of Cosmic Censorship, and Still We Do Not Know What It Is — •Erik Curiel — Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (LMU), Munich, Germany — Black Hole Initiative, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

In 1969, Roger Penrose proposed what has come to be known as the Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis. In his original formulation, Penrose conjectured that naked singularities could not form from physically reasonable initial conditions, but rather all singularities would be "hidden", in an appropriate sense, behind an event horizon. His motivation was to save a prima facie desirable form of determinism in physically reasonable spacetime models. Since then, many attempts of varied form have been made to sharpen and make more precise the conjecture, and to prove it (or, at least, one of its many formulations). In this talk, I will survey the most influential formulations, discussing their similarities and differences, the impetuses behind each, the theoretical evidence for and against them, and their conceptual strengths and weaknesses. I focus attention on the question of the reasons we may have, beyond the brute deliverance of entrenched physical theory, to expect that such a proposition may hold. I conclude by raising a question that I think deserves more attention than it seems to have been paid: if, as is widely and piously hoped, quantum gravity will efface singularities, why do we need to worry about this at all?