Time zones, hurricanes, black holes and even the Big Bang itself are based on singularities, but what is singularity?
These points are part of equations that describe nature and exist mathematically, in an abstract way, as part of the theory.
A singularity, in short, refers to a physical property that is undefined or tends to infinity, which is impossible to measure.
What is singularity?
What time is it in London? What time is it in Singapore? The answer can be given based on the hours that are different. But if the question is what time is it at the North Pole? What would the answer be?
At the North Pole, as at the South Pole, all the meridians meet. So, it is a very tangible example of a singularity, a place where there is a certain property that is not defined, in this case the time of day ”.
Following this example, one quickly realizes that all time zones coincide at two singular points, the two poles of the planet where no one knows or will know what time it is.
Hurricane and singular winds
We are in July, in the middle of the rainy and hurricane season. These are also understood as phenomena whose origin is singularities.
The Hurricanes are nothing more than airflows rotating with a certain direction tangential to the circumference that they describe in their advance through the oceans.
If a person is located far from the center, that tangential direction of the wind is very well defined, but if he is placed right in the center (eye) of the hurricane, the tangential direction of the wind loses its definition.
With this, it is possible to better understand the foundation of “being in the eye of the hurricane”, a phrase that refers to a space of calm in the midst of problems or, in a scientific sense, an area where natural laws are broken or are undefined .
The unknown of black holes
In outer space there are enormously dense masses with incalculable gravitational power, it is said that it tends to infinity.
It’s about the mysterious black holes, which, by the way, are also singularities.
Their power of attraction is so colossal that they do not even let the light escape. What happens inside them is a secret not yet revealed by physics.
When a very large star gets small, its gravity begins to increase, and as it gets smaller, gravity gets bigger and bigger, until a moment comes when gravity is so great that it tends to infinity.
How, from the decay of stars larger than our Sun, their mass compacted so much that they became singularities.
There the force of gravity is so great that it would explode even the primordial structure of the atoms, in the sense of a nucleus surrounded by electrons. What kind of reality would it be? It is not yet known for sure.
“There are some authors who, to avoid the concept of singularity, say that in black holes there are no atoms, neutrons or quarks, but that they are only full of energy..
The mother of all singularities: the Big Bang
The most amazing singularity in history, curiously enough, was the first of all, the one that exploded and gave rise to the universe about 13,800 million years ago, according to the Big Bang theory, although it was originally called the theory of the primeval atom, formulated in the century XX by Georges Lemaître, French Catholic physicist and priest.
Well, that primal atom was a singularity in which was absolutely all the matter and energy of the universe; yes, what we now see as a myriad of celestial bodies, at some point was compacted at a point of zero radius.
There are 100 billion galaxies and each galaxy has a hundred billion stars, so all that matter was together, and from there the universe arose, from a singularity..
What was that uniqueness like? This question is perhaps the most momentous of all science, because it has to do with the genesis of everything. However, the answer is still a puzzle.
It is often said that in that primal atom, of which Lemaître spoke, all the laws of physics were together, in a single unified law. From a philosophical point of view, it would be like a single will that was not yet manifested in different actions.
This is only a hypothesis, because according to current empirical knowledge, it is not possible to understand what sense a single theory of everything would make.
The birth of the universe was something with gigantic energies and everything took place in a very, very small space. We still have a great ignorance of what that first moment was.
And it is that current physics deals only with the universe since it had already begun to expand, since the phenomena arose separately, because there is no natural science theory that explains them together.
The physics that is known now tries to understand what was the phenomenology that occurred after the big explosion, but the big explosion, in itself, is and will continue to be a mystery.