Space-like Singularities of General Relativity: A Phantom menace?

Understand

The big bang and the Schwarzschild singularities are space-like.

• They are generally regarded as the "final frontiers" at which space-time ends and general relativity breaks down.
• We review the status of such space-like singularities from three increasingly more general perspectives.
• They are provided by (i) A reformulation of classical general relativity motivated by the Belinskii, Khalatnikov, Lifshitz conjecture on the behavior of the gravitational field near space-like singularities; (ii) The use of test quantum fields to probe the nature of these singularities; and, (iii) An analysis of the fate of these singularities in loop quantum gravity due to quantum geometry effects.