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“Weak” Cosmic Censorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2023

Robert M. Wald
Robert M. Wald*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

It is known from the singularity theorems of general relativity (see Hawking and Ellis, 1973) that, under a variety of circumstances, solutions to Einstein's equation with physically reasonable matter must develop singularities. In particular, for a sufficiently compacted body, trapped surfaces must be present (Schoen and Yau, 1983), and collapse to a singularity must occur. Of crucial importance for the theory of gravitational collapse is the issue of the nature of the final state resulting from such a coUapse. The idea that physically realistic gravitational collapse always results in a black hole-so that no “naked singularities”, visible to a distant observer, can occur-was first conjectured by Penrose (1969), although it had been implicitly assumed in many discussions and analyses prior to that time.

Type
Part VI: Cosmic Censorship
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1992 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1992 , 1993 , pp. 181 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

This research was supported in part by NSF grant PHY89-18388 and PHY92-20644 to the University of Chicago.

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