graph function singularities exist as physical features in our world
Do they, though…?
As I (mis?)understand it, as a massive star begins to collapse, getting denser and denser, the gravitational gradient gets steeper and steeper… and time (from the perspective of an outside observer) gets slower and slower… to the point that, from our point of view, the full collapse (or maybe even any collapse below the Schwarzschild radius?) hasn’t happened yet, and won’t happen until the extremely distant future, beyond the end of the universe…
So, in that sense, from the point of view of “our world”, no singularities (except possibly the big bang) would ever exist (yet), all of them being censored not only by event horizons, but by being shoved into the perpetually far future, beyond time itself…
And, speaking about event horizons, isn’t the whole “light isn’t fast enough to escape” concept a misinterpretation of sorts…? As I (again mis?)understand it, it’s not a matter of speed, but of geometry… The way space-time is twisted in such a gravitational gradient, once you get past the event horizon there are no longer any directions pointing towards the outside.
Which is another from of cosmic censorship (or a different effect or interpretation of the above), preventing anything inside the event horizon from causally interacting with the outside universe…
So, if these singularities are hidden beyond sight, causally, visually, and geometrically isolated from the rest of the universe, and perpetually shoved into the far future… can they really be said to exist in our world…?
(Of course there’s always the big bang, but we can’t really observe that one, only its effects, and it’s not necessarily exactly what the original post was talking about anyway…)
Fun fact: the big bang was not a singularity.
I think you explain it pretty well, but one thing to add. Due to the General Relativity and thus spacetime it is actually not directions that all point toward the singularity, but as soon as you cross the event horizon all of your future becomes the Singularity, not as a point in space, but a point in time
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-singularities/lightcone.html
This points at that, you would also need to be able to travel faster than light and that would make you time travel backwards in time
Why is nobody talking about how
marauding black death wrapped in a spherical gradient of tortured spacetime
is such a fucking cool sentence
I suppose cosmic horror elder gods like Cthulhu and such are not all that far removed from the idea of a black hole. Particularly the ones that are less involved with Earth than Cthulhu is. Nobody is ramming a black hole with a fishing boat. But the early writing on them was done at about the same time as a lot of the foundational theoretical work on black holes (not the earliest stuff but I can believe that the writers didn’t know about it)
Also, extremely pedantic note - black holes were predicted by looking at what happens in the math at extreme densities, long before black holes were actually observed in space
He bathes in the black sun
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They really drive home the point that we can’t understand time
