Weak and Strong Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis
The weak and the strong cosmic censorship hypothesis are two conjectures concerned with the global geometry of spacetimes.
- The weak cosmic censorship hypothesis asserts there can be no singularity visible from future null infinity. In other words, singularities need to be hidden from an observer at infinity by the event horizon of a black hole.
Mathematically, the conjecture states that, for generic initial data, the maximal Cauchy development possesses a complete future null infinity.
- The strong cosmic censorship hypothesis asserts that, generically, general relativity is a deterministic theory, in the same sense that classical mechanics is a deterministic theory. In other words, the classical fate of all observers should be predictable from the initial data. Mathematically, the conjecture states that the maximal Cauchy development of generic compact or asymptotically flat initial data is locally inextendible as a regular Lorentzian manifold.
The two conjectures are mathematically independent, as there exist spacetimes for which the weak cosmic censorship is valid but the strong cosmic censorship is violated and, conversely, there exist spacetimes for which the weak cosmic censorship is violated but the strong cosmic censorship is valid.
Read more about this topic: Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis
Famous quotes containing the words weak and, weak, strong, cosmic, censorship and/or hypothesis:
“It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In using the strong hand, as now compelled to do, the government has a difficult duty to perform. At the very best, it will by turns do both too little and too much. It can properly have no motive of revenge, no purpose to punish merely for punishment’s sake. While we must, by all available means, prevent the overthrow of the government, we should avoid planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom of society.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory—horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene—and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.”
—William James (1842–1910)