The Law of Cosmic Censorship

There is an hypothesis, called the "Law of Cosmic Censorship", that all singularities are contained inside event horizons. If this is true, singularities are in principle not observable because no information about the singularity can make it past the event horizon to the outside world. However, this is an hypothesis, not rigorously proven, so it is conceivable that so-called "Naked Singularities" might exist, not clothed by an event horizon. If such were the case, we can only guess what that would imply for physical laws near such an object.

Singularities, Naked and Clothed

The singularity is the point of infinite density that is thought to exist at the center of a black hole. We have no way of understanding what would happen in the vicinity of a singularity, since in essence nature divides our equations by zero at such a point, and you probably learned some time in math class that you cannot divide by zero and get sensible mathematics.

It is believed that all singularities occur inside event horizons (see the adjacent box). If this is so, it is fundamentally impossible to know anything about the singularity without entering the black hole, and then it would not be possible to transmit any information gained to the world outside the black hole because of the event horizon.