Naked Singularities Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 767-8):

This observation should be taken in conjunction with another conjectured feature of spacetime singularities, referred to as cosmic censorship. This is a (currently unproved) assertion that, roughly speaking, in unstoppable gravitational collapse, a black hole will be the result, rather than something worse, known as a naked singularity. A naked singularity would be a spacetime singularity, resulting from a gravitational collapse, which is visible to outside observers, so it is not ‘clothed’ by an event horizon. There are various slightly different technical ways of specifying what is meant by the term ‘naked singularity’, and I do not propose to enter into the distinctions here. Sufficient for our purposes would be to say that a naked singularity is ‘timelike’, in the sense that signals can both enter and leave the singularity. Cosmic censorship would forbid such things (except possibly in certain highly contrived or ‘special’ situations that would not occur in a realistic gravitational collapse).

 

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, according to General Relativity, a singularity is a point with no spatial dimensions, since space intervals have contracted to zero. Importantly, a singularity is not a point in space, but space reduced to a point.

Since a singularity has no spatial dimensions, there is no space that a signal can enter or leave. Moreover, the notion of a naked singularity rests on the possibility that the singularity itself can be its own event horizon.