Cosmic Censorship in Quarantine

Lucy James

Abstract: An entailment of strong cosmic censorship is that models of spacetime are to be globally hyperbolic. This talk challenges the motivation for imposing such a constraint in a 'top-down' manner. From a functionalist point of view, it is argued, our understanding of the global structure of spacetime at cosmological scales ought to arise from careful generalisations of dynamical laws that apply locally. A link is shown between partial differential equations of the hyperbolic type (the form of many dynamical laws) and hyperbolic manifolds, providing some reason to regard spacetime as being hyperbolic at cosmological scales. However, if the analysis includes approaches to quantum gravity whose laws may not be of the hyperbolic form, such as Euclidean approaches, this link breaks down. Strong cosmic censorship, therefore, is relevant only to a restricted set of regimes.

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