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What is the state-of-the-art on spacelike singularities in string theory?

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What lessons do we have from string theory regarding the fate of singularities in general relativity?

What happens to black hole singularities? What happens to cosmological singularities?

Which points of view on string theory yielded results in this respect? String field theory? AdS/CFT? Matrix theory? I suppose perturbative string theory is not applicable in the vicinity of singularities.

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)

asked Oct 26, 2011 in Phenomenology by Squark (1,725 points) [ revision history ]
recategorized May 7, 2014 by dimension10

Is there a way to narrow this down? The story of timelike singularities (orbifolds, conifolds etc.) is well digested and you are asking for a review of thousands of papers. Are you maybe interested in more specific types of singularities?

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commented Oct 26, 2011 by Moshe (2,405 points) [ no revision ]

Well, I mentioned black hole and cosmological singularities which are spacelike. Indeed I'm interested only in the spacelike case.

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commented Oct 26, 2011 by Squark (1,725 points) [ no revision ]

Excellent, thanks, this does narrow it down quite a bit...

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commented Oct 26, 2011 by Moshe (2,405 points) [ no revision ]

Also, my 1st sentence alludes to the classical problem of singularities in general relativity which a theory of quantum gravity is supposed to solve. Compactification on singular manifolds (which I think you're referring to) is a way to introduce an additional sort of singularities special to string theory (more generally Kaluza-Klein) and unnecessary in classical general relativity.

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commented Oct 26, 2011 by Squark (1,725 points) [ no revision ]

That’s kind of semantics, but spacelike singularities is definitely a well-defined characterization.

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commented Oct 26, 2011 by Moshe (2,405 points) [ no revision ]

Dear @Squark, you may get links to dozens of brave papers but I think that except for the authors, mostly everyone will agree that nothing solid has been derived from string theory about spacelike singularities at all so if you get some "constructive answer", it could already mislead you in a direction that was predetermined by how you formulated your question...

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commented Oct 28, 2011 by Luboš Motl (10,278 points) [ no revision ]

Does it mean we can't answer even the most basic questions? For example: AdS/CFT is supposed to describe quantum gravity on asymptotically anti-De Sitter spacetime. Apparently it includes spacetimes of different topology. Does it include spacetimes with an initial cosmological singularity and asymptotically anti-De Sitter future?

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commented Nov 5, 2011 by Squark (1,725 points) [ no revision ]

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