Hawking pays off cosmology bet

17 Jun 2002

Naked singularities could exist, concedes cosmologist Stephen Hawking. In 1991 Hawking bet Caltech physicists Kip Thorne and John Preskill that such singularities must always be thus imprisoned within a black hole. But a computer study has since shown that singularities unencumbered with any event horizon could, at least in principle, exist.

In cosmological terms, a singularity is a place of incalculably large---essentially infinite---mass density. Singularities are thought to reside inside black holes but cannot be observed because light is forever bottled up within the black hole's event horizon. Although he still doubts whether a naked singularity could actually form, Hawking paid up based on the study, a Caltech press release reports.