Bad News on the Brane

There has been substantial interest in obtaining a quantum-gravitational description of de Sitter space. However, any such attempts have encountered formidable obstacles, and new philosophical directions may be in order. One possibility, although somewhat speculative, would be to view the physical universe as a timelike hypersurface evolving in a higher-dimensional bulk spacetime; that is, the renowned brane-world scenario. In this paper, we extend some recent studies along this line, and consider a non-critical 3-brane moving in the background of an anti-de Sitter Reissner-Nordstrom-like black hole. Interestingly, even an arbitrarily small electrostatic charge in the bulk can induce a singularity-free ``bounce'' universe on the brane, whereas a vanishing charge typically implies a singular cosmology. However, under closer examination, from a holographic (dS/CFT) perspective, we demonstrate that the charge-induced bounce cosmologies are not physically viable. This implies the necessity for censoring against charge in a bulk black hole.