Aristotle used to say that nature abhors a vacuum. So, he conjectured, there is no such thing. His model accounted for that absence by filling up space with an imponderable substance: the ether.
As students and researchers know, physics abhors singularities. Where we find a singularity, it usually means that the model we are using to describe a physical system or a phenomenon breaks down. “Breaking down” is a filler expression for “something is happening here and we don’t know what it is.” Figuring out how to avoid singularities opens new possibilities in physics.
Indeed, behind every singularity in physics hides a secret door to a new understanding of the world.
Love and hate for singularities
The reader knows that physics is the art of modeling. We describe complex natural systems, such as the sun and the planets orbiting around it — that’s an easy one — in terms of mathematical equations. The equations describe how functions of a variable or a set of variables change in time. In the case of planetary orbits, the equations describe how planets move in space along their orbits.
