🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug10.060505.18204@nuscc.nus.sg> matmcinn@nuscc.nus.sg (Mcinnes B T (Dr)) writes:

>JB: I would not bet any money on cosmic censorship if I were you. There
>was never any reason to believe it, and nowadays there is even less.

Don't worry, I wasn't planning on making bets on that.  I still wish I
could place some bets for more that 1 cent on supersymmetry though --
anyone around REALLY believe there's a >50% chance of it being confirmed
within our lifetimes?

But what reasons are you talking about that make cosmic censorship less
believable "nowadays"?  I know someone who wrote a review paper on it
and it seemed that most of the battle was trying to formulate the
hypothesis precisely in such a manner that there were no counterexamples
known!  The cosmic censorship hypothesis has tended to be a rather
touchy-feely sort of thing.

>To conclude: there is nothing bad about singularities in GR, and this is
>not a good reason to pursue quantum gravity.

My point was that without cosmic censorship there is plenty wrong with
singularities in GR: one can have completely unpredictable junk
(toaster-ovens, llamas) pop out of naked singularities, ruining the
determinism one would hope for in a classical theory.  

The main reason to pursue quantum gravity is that this century has
brought forth two wonderful theories, quantum field theory and general
relativity, which both seem correct in their own domain, but which
appear horribly inconsistent when one tries to put them together.

>Furthermore I predict that
>if quantum gravity ever materialises [so to speak], it will not make the
>singularities go away. Regrettably it seems unlikely that any of us will
>live long enough for that prediction to be tested.

I think we may see a theory of quantum gravity that is
elegant and makes all the singularities go away.  However, I doubt it
will be experimentally tested within our lifetimes.