George Ellis
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George Ellis is the Distinguished Professor of Complex Systems at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics. He co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, published in 1973, and is considered one of the world's leading theorists in cosmology. In 2004 he won the Templeton Prize.
Ellis was a vocal opponent of apartheid during the National Party reign in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is during this period that Ellis' research has focused on the more philosophical aspects of cosmology, for which he won the Templeton Prize.
George Ellis proposed a model universe that contains a naked singularity as a recycling mechanism, which he claims gives almost as good a description of the real universe as the conventional model. The Ellis universe is like a cylinder shape universe, except that the Earth is located on one side and a naked singularity on the other. There is no cosmic inflation, the galaxies are arranged very unevenly, with a great deal of material crowded round the singularity, and very little near the Earth. The effect of such a distribution of matter is to produce a red shift of light that, at the Earth, has the same characteristics as if the galaxies were receding.