What is a Singularity?

"A singularity is a point where a mathematical function is not defined. It either evaluates to infinity, 0/0, etc."

I might mention here that many of these are apparent singularities brought on by a particular choice of coordinates. They're artefacts of that choice and not true singularities in the sense that they can be mitigated by a different choice. The poles of a spherical coordinate system, for example. Where a function 'blows up' at the pole, the problem can be resolved by a simple transformation.

The singularity at the centre of a black hole, however, is different. It's a type of 'essential' singularity, that is, one that cannot be removed by any choice of coordinates. Essential singularities are where the shite really hits the fan.

Seems like the main thing that fails is our ability to identify it mathematically.

Isn't it sort of like an asymptote, but with an actual (astronomical) limit, like Warp 9?...

It certainly is probable that there are forces and conditions that we as humans are not aware of, they exist beyond what the 5 senses can detect, and therefore must be theoretically presumed by thought...These conditions and forces are given names because we know something is happening, just not exactly sure what...We call them dark energy, dark matter, singularity and others...There have been theories of dimensions of many shapes and properties and there certainly is the possibility that an interaction with unseen dimensions of some sort, play some role in these unknown phenomena...The trick as I see it is to develop tools and methods to detect and measure these unknown forces and phenomena....So how do you go about developing tools and methods of detecting some force or alternate reality when you don't know what it's properties are....? That to me is the big question that faces us all...We can come up with theories till doomsday, but without a way to test or prove them, we will still be in the dark.....

Thank you.

JD.

"Singularity" is one of those words that has migrated out of the technical domain into common usage and in the process morphed to mean a lot of different things. Another example is "Quantum Jump" which has acquired totally different meanings from the original.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_electron_transition

Verner Vinge helped push the term into common usage with his book The Coming Technological Singularity. Ray Kurzweil furthered the idea in his follow-up The Singularity is Near (neither of which have anything to do with mathematical/physical singularities). We can thank these guys for diluting the meaning.

Meanwhile - and true to form - the metaphysicists/tinfoil hats/pseudoscience gits have gotten hold of it and now it means whatever they bluddy want it to mean (cuz it sounds nice and 'scientific'), what with other buzzwords like 'quantum <insert favourite noun here>' having become so passé these days and fallen out-of-vogue.

Along with negative (and sometimes positive) feedback.

In science, a singularity can be any system where the rate of change of property approaches +/- infinity. This includes such things as phase transitions of materials.

Well, to some, its actually keeping single for the rest of your life, though pushing things is not excluded.

testing your limits again are we gut?

Yeah, probably.

How the big bang looked before it happened depends which theory you hold to be true at this point (ie "believe") the Cylical Model or the more traditional model or something else

The notion that before the 4 or 10 or 11 or 26 dimensions appeared there must be something that the dimensions spread across is appealing but not required.

I recommend you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_spacetime and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistor_theory

My head will not wrap around the Twistor theory, sorry. I get torqued off when reading such abstract ideas. The older I get, I am afraid things will not improve.