Singularity – A Break-Down of the Ultimate Question

If you want to know about the singularity of the universe, you aren’t alone. There is no introduction of any sort that I am qualified to give – maybe a Nobel laureate could tickle your interests. I can only tell you what baffles me.

As soon as your head hits the pillow, your mind leaves the realm of reality – not entirely though, we still sense but our ‘subconscious’ mind is a bit delusional and attributes them to supernatural, unreal experiences. Your mind has built up a micro-environment that you and only you can float in while it works to fix you up; everybody in that environment is just a version of you talking to you, and somehow the outer, ‘real’ world is connected to the world in your head; nobody is going to catch you naked in a conference, Priya, but you do need to work on your confidence and trust issues.

Singularities have baffled physicists for the longest time. An old friend of mine – a curious, eccentric one – would often think of death and what it meant. What is our place in this universe? I’m a neuroscientist – I tend to graph my graphs with the brain as the parent node. It’s wonderful how we carry such organs of electricity casually, cells that have the potential to encode anything and everything, mysteries hidden in your ‘subconsciousness’, whatever that means, and we don’t pause enough to truly appreciate it. I would be doing no justice to singularity if I didn’t speak about the potential singularity sitting above my shoulders.

My physics folk would disagree and bring up the ‘black hole’ first thing upon mention of singularity or unanswered questions, and maybe this time I will tickle your interests. The origin of a black hole is no more a theoretical mystery – stars die, and stars heavier than the Chandrashekhar limit turn into neutron stars – theoretically the densest substance you can get beyond which is literally vacuum. Black holes are formed when the star approaching death is at least three times heavier than the sun, and inter-atomic and inter-quark repelling forces are no longer strong enough to beat gravity.

What happens then? What happens to all the mass that gets sucked in? In physics, we conserve charge, mass and spin of an object. Does it finally break down there? Maybe there is some sort of radiation that black holes emit – but they’re black? Weird, right? We’d initially come up with the ‘no hair theorem’ (conjecture, really) – charge, mass and spin are the only signatures of a black hole. Well, maybe there might be some more degrees of freedom than we’d initially thought. There’s the famous ‘Hawking Radiation’, which is the radiation emitted by a black hole over large timescales. There’s the ‘soft hair theory’ (conjecture?) of 2016 that I don’t fully understand, but talks about conservation of energy of the particles interacting with the black hole, and maybe some primitive sign of the existence of a wormhole? (not in those exact terms, of course.) I’ve cited the article if any of you guys want a reality check (1).

I don’t think reality checks are ugly anymore – reality holds singularities and brains, and science fiction is not ficticious anymore. We’d probably be wiped out before we uncover the secrets of the universe, just like how we’d seize if we tried to use our brains a hundred percent; it’s scary how psychedelics are the closest thing bringing supernatural revelations to a medically ordinary brain – the secrets do lie in us, but not all of us can ever access it. Seeing your version of God is scary enough – a high-dimensional superbrain floating in outer space, adorned with cosmic dust of various colours, controlling all variables of atoms, and I think absolute truth would shatter beliefs, religions, societal norms and hierarchies and everything we’ve believed into truth. NO sane mind would survive the answers to the singularity question. It’s best kept hidden and pondered over, our truths made up and believed because that’s comfortable. That’s comfortable enough to let oxytocin for a loved one and fear of God take over our fears of the universe.

The oldest of religions talk about gods for multiple forces of nature, personified and humanised. I think the personification brings us comfort, comfort of knowing that one of us controls nature. Otherwise, the universe is scary with no direction to who controls it. What if I said nobody controls it? What if they’re controlled only by forces, and not forces of just one atom or aggregate of atoms, but by all atoms of the universe? Is attaining ‘Nirvana’ or ‘Moksha’ singularity too? Is your molecules attaining peace and breaking the cycle of what it ‘deserves’ singularity?

There’s a theory in Hinduism – more spiritual than religious – called the Advaita Vedanta – you’re the subject and the rest of the world is the external environment that you can merely control by controlling your internal state, which I think, as someone who’s thought over religion and the role of a being for years together, is true. Bear in mind that I’m not religious, nor do I think this theory makes me God: if anything, it tells us how small we are as subjects, and there’s only so much we can do. And I don’t think it’s a theory born in Hinduism alone – I’m sure there’s at least one religion formed by early civilisation somewhere in this world that believes in whatever I’ve described for the last twenty minutes.

Singularities of nature go beyond the physicality of such phenomena – it’s in your mind too, it’s in your beliefs. Singular matrices scare me the most – undergraduate physics tends to assume non existence of such matrices in the math of the universe (I say undergraduate). You can do nothing with a singular matrix, except stare at the information it holds. Google defines singularity as ‘a theoretical point where technological advancement either becomes equivalent to or tops human intelligence’. Just as a black hole sucks you in, singularity in technology will, in my opinion, break humanity.

Neuroscience has come a long way from trying to decode information of orientation of objects from the primary visual cortex to trying to decode what we’re thinking and visualising in our frontal cortices. It’s the beginning of the end, and I think you should rather be thrilled about this than scared – you’re either the subject working in science, bringing about singularity of information and speeding up the end, or you’re the object, learning newer things and watching the end near.

References : (1) Hawking, S. W., Perry, M. J., & Strominger, A. (2016). Soft Hair on Black Holes. In Physical Review Letters (Vol. 116, Issue 23). American Physical Society (APS). https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.116.231301