(In)determinism Inside Black Holes

In classical General Relativity, the values of fields on spacetime are uniquely determined by their values on an initial time slice within its `domain of dependence'. However, it may occur that the spacetime under consideration extends beyond this domain, and fields, therefore, are not entirely determined by their initial data. In fact, such a naive failure of determinism occurs inside all rotating or charged black holes.

The boundary of the region determined by the initial data is called the ``Cauchy horizon'. The famous `strong cosmic censorship conjecture' asserts that the Cauchy horizon does not, in fact, exist in practice because the slightest perturbation (of the geometry itself or the matter fields) will become singular there converting the Cauchy horizon to a final singularity.

Recently, however, it has been found that classically this is not the case inside certain charged black holes in deSitter space provided the mass, charge, and cosmological constant are in a certain regime. In this colloquium I ask wheter quantum effects will come to the rescue of strong cosmic censorship.