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I notice that some of the classic results and theorems in black hole physics from the 1960s like the Hawking area theorem use the cosmic censorship hypothesis at some point in the proofs of the theorems.

I was wondering if in theory there is some possibility that one could try to prove one of those theorems without invoking the cosmic censorship hypothesis, or if there is some mathematical reason that it would be impossible to prove them without this hypothesis? No-one yet has any convincing idea of how to go about proving cosmic censorship and so the focus is on slightly smaller conjectures like the Penrose conjecture (still an enormously difficult conjecture in its own right).

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    $\begingroup$ the proofs of Hawking's area theorem that I am aware of do not appear to invoke the cosmic censorship hypothesis, see for example arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0001003 and arxiv.org/abs/1711.06480 $\endgroup$
    – Carlo Beenakker
    Commented Oct 13, 2020 at 19:53
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for letting me know, I will make sure to read these proofs. For some reason I thought they did. Also I think in a lecture Witten stated that one does invoke cosmic censorship, but I think he made a mistake in the lecture or answered a question too hastily. On page 66 of his lecture notes on causality in GR arxiv.org/pdf/1901.03928.pdf, he states that one can prove the black hole area theorem without using cosmic censorship. $\endgroup$
    – Hollis Williams
    Commented Oct 13, 2020 at 20:41

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