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No Naked Black Holes
Science News reports on a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters in which an international team of researchers describes their computer simulation of the most violent collision imaginable: two black holes colliding head-on at nearly light-speed. Even in this extreme scenario, Roger Penrose's weak cosmic censorship hypothesis seems to hold — the resulting black hole (after the gravitational waves have died down) retains its event horizon. "Mathematically, 'naked' singularities, or those without event horizons, can exist, but physicists wouldn't know what to make of them. All known mechanisms for the formation of singularities also create an event horizon, and Penrose conjectured that there must be some physical principle — a 'cosmic censor' — that forbids singularity nakedness ..."
Does anyone else get sad at the thought that there are so many weird things in the universe you may not learn the answers to in your lifetime? What if everyone posting here never finds out the reason for the cosmic censor? Sort of depressing.
Heh... I knew who Roger Penrose was long before I heard of Richard Dawkins, and I suspect that I'll forget who Richard Dawkins soon enough. But I'm biased for being a physicist.
Anything based on a computer simulation is based on our arbitrarily incomplete knowledge. To base even the least significant conclusions upon it seems laughably irresponsible and unscientific.
We eagerly await your analytical solution to the n-body-problem. I mean, it's really simple stuff, right?
Until you're finished, we'll have to calculate all those spacecraft trajectories with computer simulations.