Mahdi Haghshenas — Penrose’s cosmic censorship conjectures (Junior Geometry Seminar)

Abstract: Einstein’s general theory of relativity has led to many exotic predictions about the universe, such as black holes and spacetime singularities. Excitingly, they can be formulated and studied rigorously and mathematically. The cosmic censorship conjectures, roughly speaking, say that general relativity is a deterministic theory and the singularities in reasonable spacetimes are hidden from distant observers. In this talk, we will introduce Schwarzschild black holes, the simplest nontrivial solution to Einstein’s equations, and use it as an example to explain various concepts that lead us to the cosmic censorship conjecture. Finally, we will briefly discuss known results regarding these conjectures. Note that this presentation is nearly self-contained, and no prior knowledge of PDE and GR is required.