Advances in High Energy Physics
Volume 2013, Article ID 236974, 4 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/236974
A Little Quantum Help for Cosmic Censorship and a Step Beyond All That
Division of Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics, University of Ioannina, 451 10 Ioannina, Greece
Received 27 September 2013; Revised 26 November 2013; Accepted 29 November 2013
Academic Editor: Christian Corda
Copyright © 2013 Nikolaos Pappas. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
The hypothesis of cosmic censorship (CCH) plays a crucial role in classical general relativity, namely, to ensure that naked singularities would never emerge, since it predicts that whenever a singularity is formed an event horizon would always develop around it as well, to prevent the former from interacting directly with the rest of the Universe. Should this not be so, naked singularities could eventually form, in which case phenomena beyond our understanding and ability to predict could occur, since at the vicinity of the singularity both predictability and determinism break down even at the classical (e.g., nonquantum) level. More than 40 years after it was proposed, the validity of the hypothesis remains an open question. We reconsider CCH in both its weak and strong versions, concerning point-like singularities, with respect to the provisions of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. We argue that the shielding of the singularities from observers at infinity by an event horizon is also quantum mechanically favored, but ultimately it seems more appropriate to accept that singularities never actually form in the usual sense; thus no naked singularity danger exists in the first place.