is my singularity showing again?
Scientific American’s take on the concept of naked singularities doesn’t say anything that wasn’t already circulating in popular science literature for a while now. And that’s not surprising because we really don’t know much about singularities. We just know that the rules of general relativity no longer apply and a singularity becomes less of an object and more of an event that stretches time and space to their maximum. Anything beyond that is pure mathematical conjecture.
Oddly enough, the concept of naked singularities makes me think of the bizarre tale of random web postings under the pseudonym John Titor. Armed with just enough detailed knowledge of time travel and basic quantum mechanics, Titor claimed to be a time traveler from a dystopian future of the year 2036. By his time, he/she claimed, United Sates was divided into five regions after a civil war that started simmering around 2004, escalated in 2008 and ended in 2016 with a nuclear World War 3. Combined with pictures and schematics for a time travel machine and a passable command of quantum mechanics, Titor created a perfect blend of Terminator meets Mad Max meets NOVA.
Ever since his story took off on the web, advocate websites have been going out of their way to justify his failed claims and pretend that the future was really about to turn into a nightmare of war, tyranny and destruction any minute now. Since six years of predictive failure haven’t made them pause and wonder about whether this was just a hoax or not, I wouldn’t be surprised if an apologist for Titor brings up the Scientific American article on naked singularities as proof that the time machine prop mentioned above was real. After all, it did rely on creating singularities to propel someone elsewhere in time. Since the article is recent, that hasn’t happened yet, but I think it’s a safe bet to make.
Of course creating a naked singularity on Earth would require immense amounts of power so any device capable of doing that would be the size of a large particle accelerator, rather than a big toolbox in the back of a Corvette. The singularities would also be tiny, something you’d be measuring on a Planck scale. It would be impossible for a person to pass through it as if it was the mouth of a wormhole. In fact, walking into a microscopic singularity would be like walking through air. Because it’s so immensely dense, it would just pass right though your body while possibly doing who knows what to your internal organs.
A macroscopic singularity would just tear you into subatomic shreds by spaghettification and if it eventually spat out the quadrillions of bits that used to be you back into space, it’s highly unlikely you would recombine into a human or into anything solid for that matter. It might also be in another galaxy, millions of years into the future or the past. Trying to control something like the collapse of space/time into a point of infinite density with technology that’s only a few decades ahead of today’s is like trying to claim mastery over faster than light technology with a toaster and broken microwave oven. Had Titor claimed he came from 2360 and the machine in question was about the size of a small farm, that would’ve been much more believable. Well, in a hoaxey sort of way…
