What could the “singularity” of a black hole be really?
Black holes, those mysterious cosmic entities that have fascinated scientists and laypeople alike for decades, are known for their extreme properties. At their core, they are believed to house a 'singularity' - a point of infinite density where our understanding of physics breaks down. But what if our understanding of singularities is not entirely accurate? What if, instead of being infinitely small and dense, they are something else entirely? In this blog post, I will explore an alternative theory that I've been pondering, one that challenges the conventional wisdom and opens up new possibilities for understanding these enigmatic cosmic phenomena.
So. These days black holes are known to be. Yeah, that sounds like a great first blog post and theory indeed haha, just, black holes are known to be, period. Bro I suck ass at this, I have no idea what to even start writing haha. Anyway whatever, yolo.
So, black holes as of our understanding today are known and finally confirmed to be things that actually do exist, as theorized by Albert Einstein way back in 1915 when he published his legendary paper on the theory of general relativity that was one of the core things that gave birth to our understanding of physics as we know it today. Although, unlike like his theory, he was very much against the idea of black holes himself thanks to how extreme the very idea of them is, and it really truly is extreme.
The idea that something can exist out there which is so extreme to the point of being described as “infinite” in various ways, their singularities being “infinitely small”, having “infinite density”, the very concept and our understanding of space and time breaking down in such environments, and of course the classic from where they get their name, light, something that as far as we know is the ultimate speed limit of the universe, not being able to escape black holes past a certain point leading to their iconic look and name.
Every object in existence, according to general relativity, is speculated to have something called a “Schwarzschild Radius”, even you and I, it describes a point in space that were you to take something and crush it down to that incredibly small point, that object would instantly collapse in on itself and become a black hole. For example our planet Earth has a Schwarzschild radius speculated to be about 9 millimeters, try to let that sink in, the insane force you would need to compress everything you have known and experienced, and will know and experience, down to such an insanely small scale, the size of your average pea. That is exactly how black holes from stars form, they run on fusion, which is basically the phenomenon of combining atoms together to form heavier ones, and thus new elements. For most of their lives, stars fuse elemental hydrogen into helium in their cores, and once the hydrogen runs out, they will begin fusing helium into carbon, then carbon into neon, and if the star is massive enough, neon into oxygen, oxygen into silicon, and then finally silicon into iron. Beyond which, the star can no longer generate energy through fusion because iron is too stable of an element and fusing it into heavier ones requires more energy than the star can produce, leading to this iron core building up inside slowly until it reaches a critical point where the fusion of iron no longer produces enough energy to go against the gravitational force of the star above it crushing down on the iron core, which will then cause the outer layers and the rest of the star to get blown out into space in a supernova, while the iron core collapses into a black hole incredibly quickly.
So what really goes on inside of those mind-bending cosmic anomalies? Even the smartest scientists these days don’t know, we have only endless amounts of theories and fantastical speculations, and I intend on adding to it by building upon their theories and our current understanding, at least to the extent of my knowledge.
Believe it or not, those extreme objects of endless theory and speculation are actually very simple, at least their observable “black hole” part, in that they are mainly characterized by only two things: Mass, and spin. There is also debatably a third one, being charge, but black holes remain quite neutral, so the former two are the ones that really matter.
According to our current mathematical models of gravity, that the “cores” of black holes are mathematical points called singularities which are infinitely small and dense, where as mentioned previously, our very understanding of everything breaks down. However, to me, that doesn’t really seem or feel right at all. How can something that is finite, take for example a star, be responsible for making something that is “infinite”? It doesn’t make any sense, especially given that the Law of Conservation of Mass states that matter cannot be created nor destroyed, only changed. First we need to establish that when scientists describe something as being “infinite” or “infinitely something”, it is not a literal statement describing a given property of a given thing, it’s just their way of stating that something is either insignificantly small to the point of it making no difference whether we quantify it or not, or so insanely large that from our perspective and understanding, it may as well be “infinite”, or a given concept simply being so far beyond our current comprehension. It also just kind of sounds cool to say that something is “infinite”.
It also really doesn’t make sense to me in that if something is “infinite”, it doesn’t really have to obey the finite laws of physics, take for example black holes being spherical in shape, with spheres being the polygons that are known for their smallest surface area for any given volume. And black holes remain spherical no matter what the shape of the object that they formed from. Which again, does not sound like something with the power of “infinity”, obeying the basic laws of the universe.
That is why I think that the centers of black holes are not “infinitely small and dense” points, but rather, incredibly tiny, incredibly dense hyper-condensed objects that can can retain all of that matter and information, to the point where if the black hole consumes more matter, it expands and grows in size, and having it fall down into an infinitely small and dense one-dimensional point does not really resonate with me in retaining that information to expand the black hole. I theorize that there might be some undiscovered force in the universe, like for example the strong force, that dictates that matter cannot be crushed and condensed past a certain point, no matter what.
If you take a big star for example, and are able to observe its atoms directly, you would notice that there's actually quite a ton of unused and empty space between them. Scratch that, atoms THEMSELVES are like what was the figure, 99% empty space? Maybe my proposed undiscovered force lies somewhere there, if you were to take an atom, and crush its electrons, neutrons, protons, even quarks, gluons, etc. all together, and by extension the star, you would naturally get something that is insanely small and dense to the point of instantly forming a black hole.
We know already that the realm of the quantum and its physics transcends even between multiple dimensions and is a very high governing concept, and one of our very fundamental, and candidate theories of that, and for our theory of everything is the string theory and its more advanced iterations. Strings basically and briefly being speculated to be the thing our space “fabric” is built out of, and elementary particles like protons, electrons, neutrons, or smaller ones are made from simply vibrating those strings in certain ways, take for example a guitar string making different notes depending on how it vibrates. With those strings themselves being the size of the Planck length, which again, is quantum physically, at least currently as of our understanding, the smallest possible point in space-time, a sort of "reality pixel". Maybe my proposed "hyper-condensed “singularity” of some type of exotic matter" is exactly the diameter of the Planck length. That is formed from combining all of the elementary particles that initially were present like electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, gluons, and so on down the line. Just like how in neutron stars and their cores especially, matter is forced together so hard that electrons literally combine with protons, turning them into neutrons. Maybe that exotic matter is formed when the cosmic string reaches its maximum entropy in its vibration and spin, which is the only way such matter is formed. And that object is simply small and thus dense enough to the point where its gravitational pull overcomes light’s ability to escape past a certain point, creating an event horizon, which is the “black hole” part of a black hole. I am proposing a kind of quantum limit to density, similar to how the Pauli exclusion principle sets a limit on how closely identical fermions can occupy the same quantum state.
To expand on my "Planck size exotic matter" theory, to make it seem less non-sensical, you could say that it follows the same exact basic principle that stars follow when collapsing into black holes, big planetary or stellar objects can, and easily do go through vast changes in their size and thus resulting density, who's to say that elementary particles don't follow the same principles? Because they do. And to further add, we already know that there are many elementary particles and they are all different sizes, who's to say that there's no way for them to collapse and combine down into even smaller ones either? A kind of their version of "collapsing into a black hole", so to speak. So to summarize I think that during the formation of a black hole, neutrons are compressed down so hard to the point where the particles that they are made of, quarks and gluons, start fusing together into even smaller particles, and so on down the line until you get a type of exotic matter that is the “singularity” of a black hole. It satisfies both sides, it’s insanely small and dense, but doesn’t sound so illogical as to being described as an “infinitely small and dense one-dimensional point”. Matter can also fall on top of that “singularity” of exotic matter, where it is stored, increasing the mass of the black hole and growing it.
So, these are all just wild theories that my brain came up with today regarding that topic, and I wanted to write them down because for some reason they really resonated with me and I really would like to know what other people think about it. I am also curious to know how I did with this blog post in general given that it is my first one ever, and what I could improve. Thank you for reading!
