Talk abstract details

Global hyperbolicity is a classical and well-known concept, which lies in the core of General Relativity. Nevertheless, some questions related to the smoothability of globally hyperbolic splittings as well as on the consistency of the full causal hierarchy of spacetimes had remained open until the recent work by A.N. Bernal and the speaker.

These questions lead to some remarkable conclusions; notably, globally hyperbolic spacetimes can be defined as “causal” instead of “strongly causal” (see Class. Quant. Grav., 24 (2007) 745-750).

In the talk, a brief summary of these questions will be presented.