Re: Proof of Singularities

"John (Liberty) Bell" <john.bell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]
Interesting that, as confirmed by jacques.f...@xxxxxxx, the originator
was Roger Penrose (which kind of ties in with my own prior
understanding of their relative merits). Equally interesting that many
respondents merely quoted Hawking and Ellis, thus apparently leaving
Roger out of the equation entirely.

Hawking and Ellis is a textbook -- it gives a digested and (somewhat)
pedagogical demonstration of the results, which was what you seemed
to be asking for -- you asked for a proof, not a history. In the
same way, if you ask for an explanation of general relativity, you're
more likely to get a reference to a text like Carroll's than to Einstein's
original papers.

(Of course, if you read Carroll's text, you will immediately learn
that the theory was due to Einstein. But if you read Hawking and
Ellis, you'll immediately find that the first singularity theorem
was due to Penrose -- it's discussed at the beginning of the section
on singularity theorems, and the first result is described explicitly
as "Penrose's theorem.")

Steve Carlip

.

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