Previously it was believed
that the beginning of the universe was a ‘singularity’ – a moment beyond
physics, beyond examination and simply beyond human understanding. But an
international team of researchers have re-written the physics books allowing
cosmologists to see and investigate the very moment of creation – and perhaps
even further.
The implications are
profound. The physics to precisely explain the moment of creation would
effectively render God and world religions redundant in a way which would make
the Copernican revolution (proving the Earth was not the center of the
universe) seem a relatively minor moment in scientific history.
According to current
thinking of scientific giants like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Edwin Hubble
and Alan Guth, post-Einstein physicists dictates that it is impossible to see
or investigate the moment of origin of the universe because physics simply
breaks down.
The same collapse in
understanding applies to black holes where the observer eventually hits a
‘singularity’ – the point at which all attempts to comprehend the math and physics
are doomed. But now an international team of scientists and mathematicians have
turned that notion on its head in a new paper which dispels the notion of the
impossible-to-comprehend ‘singularity’.
Using mind-bogglingly
complex maths and the extraordinary strangeness of the quantum world they claim
the physics of both the origin of the universe and black holes ARE
comprehensible and can be examined using existing, if cutting-edge, physics.
It should then be possible
to not only probe the interior of a black hole but also to investigate and
PROVE the origin of the universe and the creation of everything. The paper,
called Quantum no-singularity theorem from geometric flows, introduces the super-strange
but provable quantum physics to disprove established notions of the
singularity. The paper has been accepted for publication in Int J Mod Phys A,
and is present on arXiv as
arXiv:1705.00977
“It is known that general
relativity predicts that the universe started with a big bang singularity and
the laws are physics cannot be meaningfully applied to a singularity.
“Furthermore, the
Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems demonstrate that the occurrence of these
singularities is an intrinsic property built into the structure of classical
general relativity. It has been argued that such singularities will be removed
by quantum effects, but such work to date has been done using different
approaches to quantum gravity, and all these approaches have problems
associated with them.
“To prove that the
singularities are actually removed by quantum effects, we would need a quantum
version of the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, and this is what we have
obtained in our paper. So, our paper proves quantum effects do remove
singularities from general relativity, just as Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems
proves that singularities are an intrinsic property of classical general
relativity. ''
The paper, co-written by
Salwa Alsaleh, Lina Alasfar and Ahmed Farag Ali, opens by explaining how
Einstein’s General Relativity predicts its own downfall due to singularities.
It also explains that even
though it had been proposed that singularities can be removed by quantum
effects, the previous work relied on specific models. All these models had
their own problems. The absence of singularities had been studied in string
theory, but string theory has its own problems.
It predicts the existence of
supersymmetry, and supersymmetry has not been discovered till date. Another
approach to study quantum effects in general relativity is the loop quantum
gravity, and but it has its own problems too ( for example, no one has been
able to reproduce Einstein equations from loop quantum gravity by neglecting
the quantum effects).
The theorem proven in this
paper does not rely on a specific model of quantum gravity, but is proven by
very general considerations, and is expected to hold no matter which approach
to quantum gravity is the correct one. However, when quantum effects are
neglected, the origin Hawking and Penrose results are reproduced in their
formalism. The paper ends by concluding the center of black holes are not
singularities and thus one day could be scientifically investigated.
The paper states: “The
absence of singularity means the absence of inconsistency in the laws of nature
describing our universe, that shows a particular importance in studying black
holes and cosmology.”