The disadvantage of all the definitions mentioned so far is that they are defined only at (null or spatial) infinity; since the 1970s, physicists and mathematicians have worked on the more ambitious endeavor of defining suitable quasi-local quantities, such as the mass of an isolated system defined using only quantities defined within a finite region of space containing that system. However, while there is a variety of proposed definitions such as the Hawking energy, the Geroch energy or Penrose's quasi-local energy–momentum based on twistor methods, the field is still in flux. Eventually, the hope is to use a suitable defined quasi-local mass to give a more precise formulation of the hoop conjecture, prove the so-called Penrose inequality for black holes (relating the black hole's mass to the horizon area) and find a quasi-local version of the laws of black hole mechanics.