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Singularities in Space-Time Prove Hard to Kill
Black hole and Big Bang singularities break our best theory of gravity. A trilogy of theorems hints that physicists must go to the ends of space and time to find a fix.
Rather, singularities are widely seen as “mathematical artifacts,” as Hong Liu, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put it, not objects that “occur in any physical universe.” They are where general relativity malfunctions. The British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose won the Nobel Prize in Physics for proving in the 1960s that singularities would inevitably occur in an empty universe made up entirely of space-time. Physicists who are developing bounce theories often work in the second layer of the onion, using semiclassical physics that exploits negative-energy quantum effects to get around the singularity required by the Penrose and Hawking theorems.
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