Warren Li (Princeton): Progress towards the BKL conjecture in General Relativity

By celebrated theorems of Penrose and Hawking, “singularities” are a robust prediction of Einstein’s theorem of General Relativity. However, it remains an open problem to understand what spacetimes look like near generic singularities. Physicists Belinski, Khalatnikov and Lifshitz conjectured that for generic singularities, (a) dynamics near distinct points on the singularity “decouple” and (b) these dynamics are well-approximated by a chaotic system of ODEs governed by “BKL bounces”. In this talk, we discuss recent mathematical progress towards BKL’s proposal.