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Cosmic Censorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2023

John Earman
John Earman*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Extract

In 1978 Roger Penrose opined that cosrnic censorship was “possibly the most important unsolved problem in classical general relativity theory” (1978, p. 230). Today the problem remains unsolved, but in the intervening years Penrose's sentiment about the importance of the problem has been shared by many leading researchers in relativistic gravitation (see, for example, Eardley 1987, Israel 1984, and Wald 1984a). This sentiment can be traced to several considerations. First, if a suitable form of cosrnic censorship obtains, then one can appeal to various “no hair” theorems for black holes to obtain a characterization of the final state of gravitationally collapsed bodies. The now Standard black hole thermodynarnics makes use of Hawking's area theorems, which in turn presuppose a form of cosmic censorship.

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. 170 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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