A Little Quantum Help for Cosmic Censorship and a Step Beyond All That

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.