Development of singularities

The theorems in Chapter 1 are results for small data. The necessity for dealing with small perturbations of the linearized equations is underlined in the sequel by examples which show that, in general, one has to expect the development of singularities in finite time. In particular neither the smallness of the initial data nor the smoothness of data including the coefficients can prevent a solution from blowing up. We shall not go into the details here but we just present an illustration of the typical hyperbolic phenomenon that the solution and/or derivatives of the solution become singular after some time. This will mean in general that norms like the L∞-norm of the local regular solution or of its derivatives become infinite. The only way to avoid a blow-up are smallness of the data in connection with a sufficiently strong vanishing of the nonlinearity near zero and a sufficiently high space dimension. This is the message of the Theorems 1.1 and 1.2. Moreover we have learned from Theorem 1.2 that a solution of the nonlinear wave equation with a quadratic nonlinearity in ℝ3 lives at least exponentially long, although the examples below show that in general a blow-up occurs. Nevertheless this result justifies the notion of “almost global existence” in this case (cf. the paper of John & Klainerman [75]). We mention that for large data a blow-up may occur also in the cases where one has global existence for small data, see Example 1 in Chapter 1 and the remarks below.