Quest for Singularity

Actually, this essay is about a quest for what lies inside a black hole.

Current theories about what's inside a black hole are rather diverse. Most call it a singularity, which means we don't know what it is because a gravitational singularity is by definition a point source with infinite mass. Such an object would bend space into an infinite point. None of this makes any sense. Many theorists have tried to imagine even crazier ideas. One theory is that a singularity is the entrance to a wormhole that could end up in either a far distant part of the universe or even in a parallel universe. This is based on the idea that a singularity would be a hole in the fabric of space-time. That leads to another theory that proposes that a singularity leads to a white hole, which is the opposite of a black hole. A white hole is believed to be what the Big Bang started out as. The theorists that propose the white hole concept say that the singularity in a black hole could cause the birth of a new universe.

I don't like the latter 'white hole' theory because when a massive star collapses into a black hole, and even if this black hole is supermassive like the one in the center of our galaxy, it has a finite amount of energy, and this energy is much less than the amount of energy that formed our universe. If it would give birth to new universe the result would be an infantile universe.

My question is: where did the idea of a singularity come from? How did Einstein's relativity theory end up predicting black holes and the absurd idea of a singularity?

The answer to that question lies in the original exact solutions of Einstein's general relativity field equations.

One way to look at this is to understand the Schwarzchild radius. This is defined as an object's radius in the shape of a sphere in which all of the mass of the object has been compressed so that at the surface of the sphere the escape velocity would be the speed of light. This is basically the definition of a black hole's event horizon when the object's radius drops below the schwarzchild radius.

The Schwarzchild radius is calculated by:
r = 2GM/c2  where r is the schwarzchild radius, G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass and c is the speed of light, in this case squared.

For example, the Earth's schwarzchild radius would be 8.87 tines 10 to the -3 power  meters. In other words the Earth would have to be compressed down to a radius of 0.00887 meters. That's tiny!

Where this gets into trouble is when the radius is below the schwarzchild value. No one can understand what that means.

Another way to look at this is to consider the concept of the Chandrasekhar limit. This was named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian astrophysicist who came up with an exact calculation of this limit. Basically, the Chandrasekhar limit is the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star, and its value is 1.39 M (the mass of the sun). The value is 2.765 times 10 to 30th power kilograms. Chandrasekhar determined that a non-rotating body of electron-degenerate matter above a certain limiting mass (his Chandrasekhar limit) has no stable solution in special relativity. Karl Schwarzschild found a solution to the Einstein field equations that describes the gravitational field of a point mass and a spherical mass. He and others found this solution to the field equations breaks down below the Schwarzschild radius because some of the terms in Einstein's equations become infinite and suggests a mathematical singularity. There have been many other attempts to solve this problem. The main thing that comes out of all of them is that a gravitational singularity results when one tries to calculate the properties of black hole mainly because it results in a mathematical singularity.

Needless to say, there are cosmologists that try to categorize singularities and express their properties. The current theories describe the interior singularity in a black hole as a rapidly spinning massive point that literally sucks time-space into a death spiral. The problem is that no one understands what happens to anything that enters this cyclonic devil.

I'm not sure why they don't look at a singularity as a concentration of energy that retains the mass of the material that goes into it. That material is composed of neutrons that are mashed down even further than possible. I believe that this would create a quark pie that would exist in an energy form we don't understand yet, perhaps even something that would result when a quark is compressed and heated to some really high temperature.

In any event, we have a long way to go before we really understand a black hole.

Thanks for reading.