"It seems very rude to come to someone's party and tell him that he lost a bet again," said cosmologist Luis Lehner of the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada. Lehner did it anyway.
He was speaking at a meeting to celebrate Stephen Hawking?'s 70th birthday. The bet in question was over whether a point of infinite density and space-time curvature, known as a singularity and usually found at the centre of a black hole, can also exist in a naked form without its black hole. At a singularity, all our existing physical laws go out the window. This doesn't normally matter because the black hole that surrounds the singularity is ringed by a one-way membrane called an event horizon, which lets light and information in, but not out. That means the singularity cannot affect anything beyond the event horizon.
Near a naked singularity, however, things would become bewildering as we would no longer be able to predict the fate of anything in its line of sight. "It might not actually do anything nasty, but we have lost predictive power," says Lehner. "I couldn't tell you if this glass would be sitting on the table tomorrow."
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