Hypothesis of an eventual runaway technological growthThe technological singularity—also, simply, the singularity —is a future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, called, an upgradable will eventually enter a 'runaway reaction' of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an 'explosion' in intelligence and resulting in a powerful that qualitatively far surpasses all.The first use of the concept of a 'singularity' in the technological context was. Reports a discussion with von Neumann 'centered on the of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue'.

Subsequent authors have echoed this viewpoint.' S 'intelligence explosion' model predicts that a future superintelligence will trigger a singularity.The concept and the term 'singularity' were popularized by in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity, in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.Public figures such as and have expressed concern that full (AI) could result in human extinction. The consequences of the singularity and its potential benefit or harm to the human race have been intensely debated.Four polls of AI researchers, conducted in 2012 and 2013 by and, suggested a median probability estimate of 50% that (AGI) would be developed by 2040–2050. Contents.Background Although technological progress has been accelerating, it has been limited by the basic intelligence of the human brain, which has not, according to, changed significantly for millennia.

However, with the increasing power of computers and other technologies, it might eventually be possible to build a machine that is significantly more intelligent than humans.If a superhuman intelligence were to be invented—either through the or through artificial intelligence—it would bring to bear greater problem-solving and inventive skills than current humans are capable of. Such an AI is referred to as Seed AI because if an AI were created with engineering capabilities that matched or surpassed those of its human creators, it would have the potential to autonomously improve its own software and hardware or design an even more capable machine. This more capable machine could then go on to design a machine of yet greater capability. These iterations of recursive self-improvement could accelerate, potentially allowing enormous qualitative change before any upper limits imposed by the laws of physics or theoretical computation set in. It is speculated that over many iterations, such an AI.Intelligence explosion Intelligence explosion is a possible outcome of humanity building (AGI).

In Roger Penrose black hole collapses to a singularity, a geometric point in space where mass is compressed to infinite density and zero volume. Penrose also developed a method of mapping the regions of space-time surrounding a black hole. Perhaps the meaning of Singularity, rather than the idea of losing someone and being left alone, is the fusion of the different selves you masquerade as when you step out of the confinement of your home and personal space all while losing your true identity.

AGI would be capable of recursive self-improvement, leading to the rapid emergence of (ASI), the limits of which are unknown, shortly after technological singularity is achieved.speculated in 1965 that artificial general intelligence might bring about an intelligence explosion. He speculated on the effects of superhuman machines, should they ever be invented:Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.

Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.Good's scenario runs as follows: as computers increase in power, it becomes possible for people to build a machine that is more intelligent than humanity; this superhuman intelligence possesses greater problem-solving and inventive skills than current humans are capable of. This superintelligent machine then designs an even more capable machine, or re-writes its own software to become even more intelligent; this (even more capable) machine then goes on to design a machine of yet greater capability, and so on.

These iterations of recursive self-improvement accelerate, allowing enormous qualitative change before any upper limits imposed by the laws of physics or theoretical computation set in. Other manifestations Emergence of superintelligence.

Further information:A superintelligence, hyperintelligence, or superhuman intelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. 'Superintelligence' may also refer to the form or degree of intelligence possessed by such an agent. John von Neumann, and define the concept in terms of the technological creation of super intelligence. They argue that it is difficult or impossible for present-day humans to predict what human beings' lives would be like in a post-singularity world.Technology forecasters and researchers disagree about if or when human intelligence is likely to be surpassed.

Some argue that advances in (AI) will probably result in general reasoning systems that lack human cognitive limitations. Others believe that humans will evolve or directly modify their biology so as to achieve radically greater intelligence. A number of scenarios combine elements from both of these possibilities, suggesting that humans are likely to, or, in a way that enables substantial intelligence amplification.Non-AI singularity Some writers use 'the singularity' in a broader way to refer to any radical changes in our society brought about by new technologies such as, although Vinge and other writers specifically state that without superintelligence, such changes would not qualify as a true singularity. Speed superintelligence A speed superintelligence describes an AI that can do everything that a human can do, where the only difference is that the machine runs faster. For example, with a million-fold increase in the speed of information processing relative to that of humans, a subjective year would pass in 30 physical seconds.

Such a difference in information processing speed could drive the singularity. Plausibility Many prominent technologists and academics dispute the plausibility of a technological singularity, including, and, whose is often cited in support of the concept.Most proposed methods for creating superhuman or minds fall into one of two categories: intelligence amplification of human brains and artificial intelligence. The speculated ways to produce intelligence augmentation are many, and include, drugs, AI assistants, direct. Because multiple paths to an intelligence explosion are being explored, it makes a singularity more likely; for a singularity to not occur they would all have to fail.expressed skepticism of human intelligence augmentation, writing that once the 'low-hanging fruit' of easy methods for increasing human intelligence have been exhausted, further improvements will become increasingly difficult to find. Despite all of the speculated ways for amplifying human intelligence, non-human artificial intelligence (specifically seed AI) is the most popular option among the hypotheses that would advance the singularity. Whether or not an intelligence explosion occurs depends on three factors.

The first accelerating factor is the new intelligence enhancements made possible by each previous improvement. Contrariwise, as the intelligences become more advanced, further advances will become more and more complicated, possibly overcoming the advantage of increased intelligence. Each improvement should beget at least one more improvement, on average, for movement towards singularity to continue. Finally, the laws of physics will eventually prevent any further improvements.There are two logically independent, but mutually reinforcing, causes of intelligence improvements: increases in the speed of computation, and improvements to the used. The former is predicted by and the forecasted improvements in hardware, and is comparatively similar to previous technological advances. But there are some AI researchers who believe software is more important than hardware. A 2017 email survey of authors with publications at the 2015 and machine learning conferences asked about the chance of an intelligence explosion.

Of the respondents, 12% said it was 'quite likely', 17% said it was 'likely', 21% said it was 'about even', 24% said it was 'unlikely' and 26% said it was 'quite unlikely'. Speed improvements Both for human and artificial intelligence, hardware improvements increase the rate of future hardware improvements. Simply put, suggests that if the first doubling of speed took 18 months, the second would take 18 subjective months; or 9 external months, whereafter, four months, two months, and so on towards a speed singularity. An upper limit on speed may eventually be reached, although it is unclear how high this would be. Jeff Hawkins has stated that a self-improving computer system would inevitably run into upper limits on computing power: 'in the end there are limits to how big and fast computers can run.

We would end up in the same place; we'd just get there a bit faster. There would be no singularity.'

It is difficult to directly compare -based hardware with. But notes that computer is approaching human capabilities, and that this capability seems to require 0.01% of the volume of the brain. This analogy suggests that modern computer hardware is within a few orders of magnitude of being as powerful as the human brain.Exponential growth. An updated version of Moore's law over 120 Years (based on ). The 7 most recent data points are all.The exponential growth in computing technology suggested by Moore's law is commonly cited as a reason to expect a singularity in the relatively near future, and a number of authors have proposed generalizations of Moore's law. Computer scientist and futurist proposed in a 1998 book that the exponential growth curve could be extended back through earlier computing technologies prior to the.postulates a in which the speed of technological change (and more generally, all evolutionary processes ) increases exponentially, generalizing Moore's law in the same manner as Moravec's proposal, and also including material technology (especially as applied to ), and others.

According to Kurzweil, his of 15 lists of for key events shows an trendSome singularity proponents argue its inevitability through extrapolation of past trends, especially those pertaining to shortening gaps between improvements to technology. In one of the first uses of the term 'singularity' in the context of technological progress, tells of a conversation with about accelerating change:One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.Kurzweil claims that technological progress follows a pattern of, following what he calls the '.

Whenever technology approaches a barrier, Kurzweil writes, new technologies will surmount it. He predicts will become increasingly common, leading to 'technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history'. Kurzweil believes that the singularity will occur by approximately. His predictions differ from Vinge's in that he predicts a gradual ascent to the singularity, rather than Vinge's rapidly self-improving superhuman intelligence.Oft-cited dangers include those commonly associated with molecular nanotechnology. These threats are major issues for both singularity advocates and critics, and were the subject of 's magazine article '. Algorithm improvements Some intelligence technologies, like 'seed AI', may also have the potential to not just make themselves faster, but also more efficient, by modifying their.

These improvements would make further improvements possible, which would make further improvements possible, and so on.The mechanism for a recursively self-improving set of algorithms differs from an increase in raw computation speed in two ways. First, it does not require external influence: machines designing faster hardware would still require humans to create the improved hardware, or to program factories appropriately. An AI rewriting its own source code could do so while contained in an.Second, as with ’s conception of the singularity, it is much harder to predict the outcome. While speed increases seem to be only a quantitative difference from human intelligence, actual algorithm improvements would be qualitatively different. Compares it to the changes that human intelligence brought: humans changed the world thousands of times more rapidly than evolution had done, and in totally different ways. Similarly, the evolution of life was a massive departure and acceleration from the previous geological rates of change, and improved intelligence could cause change to be as different again.There are substantial dangers associated with an intelligence explosion singularity originating from a recursively self-improving set of algorithms.

First, the goal structure of the AI might not be invariant under self-improvement, potentially causing the AI to optimise for something other than what was originally intended. Secondly, AIs could compete for the same scarce resources mankind uses to survive.While not actively malicious, there is no reason to think that AIs would actively promote human goals unless they could be programmed as such, and if not, might use the resources currently used to support mankind to promote its own goals, causing human extinction.and suggest that algorithm improvements may be the limiting factor for a singularity; while hardware efficiency tends to improve at a steady pace, software innovations are more unpredictable and may be bottlenecked by serial, cumulative research. They suggest that in the case of a software-limited singularity, intelligence explosion would actually become more likely than with a hardware-limited singularity, because in the software-limited case, once human-level AI is developed, it could run serially on very fast hardware, and the abundance of cheap hardware would make AI research less constrained. An abundance of accumulated hardware that can be unleashed once the software figures out how to use it has been called 'computing overhang.' Criticisms Some critics, like philosopher, assert that computers or machines cannot achieve, while others, like physicist, hold that the definition of intelligence is irrelevant if the net result is the same.Psychologist stated in 2008. There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity.

The fact that you can visualize a future in your imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible. Look at domed cities, jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high buildings, and nuclear-powered automobiles—all staples of futuristic fantasies when I was a child that have never arrived. Sheer processing power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems., professor writes:Computers have, literally., no, no, no, and no agency.

We design them to behave as if they had certain sorts of, but there is no psychological reality to the corresponding processes or behavior. The machinery has no beliefs, desires, or motivations.in The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future postulates a 'technology paradox' in that before the singularity could occur most routine jobs in the economy would be automated, since this would require a level of technology inferior to that of the singularity. This would cause massive unemployment and plummeting consumer demand, which in turn would destroy the incentive to invest in the technologies that would be required to bring about the Singularity. Job displacement is increasingly no longer limited to work traditionally considered to be 'routine.' And argue that the rate of technological innovation has not only ceased to rise, but is actually now declining.

Evidence for this decline is that the rise in computer is slowing, even while Moore's prediction of exponentially increasing circuit density continues to hold. This is due to excessive heat build-up from the chip, which cannot be dissipated quickly enough to prevent the chip from melting when operating at higher speeds. Advancements in speed may be possible in the future by virtue of more power-efficient CPU designs and multi-cell processors. Further information:The term 'technological singularity' reflects the idea that such change may happen suddenly, and that it is difficult to predict how the resulting new world would operate. It is unclear whether an intelligence explosion resulting in a singularity would be beneficial or harmful, or even an.

Because AI is a major factor in singularity risk, a number of organizations pursue a technical theory of aligning AI goal-systems with human values, including the, the, the, and the.Physicist said in 2014 that 'Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.' Hawking believed that in the coming decades, AI could offer 'incalculable benefits and risks' such as 'technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.' Hawking believed more should be done to prepare for the singularity:So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? If a superior alien civilisation sent us a message saying, 'We'll arrive in a few decades,' would we just reply, 'OK, call us when you get here – we'll leave the lights on'?

Probably not – but this is more or less what is happening with AI.claims that there is no direct evolutionary motivation for an AI to be friendly to humans. Evolution has no inherent tendency to produce outcomes valued by humans, and there is little reason to expect an arbitrary optimisation process to promote an outcome desired by mankind, rather than inadvertently leading to an AI behaving in a way not intended by its creators.

Has also elaborated on this scenario, addressing various common counter-arguments. AI researcher suggests that artificial intelligences may simply eliminate the human race, and humans would be powerless to stop them. Alternatively, AIs developed under evolutionary pressure to promote their own survival could outcompete humanity.discusses human extinction scenarios, and lists superintelligence as a possible cause:When we create the first superintelligent entity, we might make a mistake and give it goals that lead it to annihilate humankind, assuming its enormous intellectual advantage gives it the power to do so. For example, we could mistakenly elevate a subgoal to the status of a supergoal. We tell it to solve a mathematical problem, and it complies by turning all the matter in the solar system into a giant calculating device, in the process killing the person who asked the question.According to, a significant problem in AI safety is that unfriendly artificial intelligence is likely to be much easier to create than friendly AI.

While both require large advances in recursive optimisation process design, friendly AI also requires the ability to make goal structures invariant under self-improvement (or the AI could transform itself into something unfriendly) and a goal structure that aligns with human values and does not automatically destroy the human race. An unfriendly AI, on the other hand, can optimize for an arbitrary goal structure, which does not need to be invariant under self-modification. Harvtxt error: no target: CITEREFBillHibbard2014 proposes an AI design that avoids several dangers including self-delusion, unintended instrumental actions, and corruption of the reward generator. He also discusses social impacts of AI and testing AI. His 2001 book advocates the need for public education about AI and public control over AI.

It also proposed a simple design that was vulnerable to corruption of the reward generator.Next step of sociobiological evolution. Amount of digital information worldwide (5x10^21 bytes) versus human genome information worldwide (10^19 bytes) in 2014.While the technological singularity is usually seen as a sudden event, some scholars argue the current speed of change already fits this description. In addition, some argue that we are already in the midst of a that merges technology, biology, and society.

Digital technology has infiltrated the fabric of human society to a degree of indisputable and often life-sustaining dependence.A 2016 article in argues that 'humans already embrace fusions of biology and technology. We spend most of our waking time communicating through digitally mediated channels.

We trust with our lives through and in planes. With one in three marriages in America beginning online, digital algorithms are also taking a role in human pair bonding and reproduction'.The article further argues that from the perspective of the, several previous have transformed life through innovations in information storage and replication (, and and ). In the current stage of life's evolution, the carbon-based biosphere has generated a (humans) capable of creating technology that will result in a comparable.The digital information created by humans has reached a similar magnitude to biological information in the biosphere. Since the 1980s, the quantity of digital information stored has doubled about every 2.5 years, reaching about 5 in 2014 (5 ×10 21 bytes). In biological terms, there are 7.2 billion humans on the planet, each having a genome of 6.2 billion nucleotides. Since one byte can encode four nucleotide pairs, the individual genomes of every human on the planet could be encoded by approximately 1 ×10 19 bytes. The digital realm stored 500 times more information than this in 2014 (see figure).

The total amount of DNA contained in all of the cells on Earth is estimated to be about 5.3 ×10 37 base pairs, equivalent to 1.325 ×10 37 bytes of information.If growth in digital storage continues at its current rate of 30–38% compound annual growth per year, it will rival the total information content contained in all of the DNA in all of the cells on Earth in about 110 years. This would represent a doubling of the amount of information stored in the biosphere across a total time period of just 150 years'. Implications for human society.

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Further information:In February 2009, under the auspices of the (AAAI), chaired a meeting of leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, California. The goal was to discuss the potential impact of the hypothetical possibility that robots could become self-sufficient and able to make their own decisions.

They discussed the extent to which computers and robots might be able to acquire, and to what degree they could use such abilities to pose threats or hazards.Some machines are programmed with various forms of semi-autonomy, including the ability to locate their own power sources and choose targets to attack with weapons. Also, some can evade elimination and, according to scientists in attendance, could therefore be said to have reached a 'cockroach' stage of machine intelligence. The conference attendees noted that self-awareness as depicted in science-fiction is probably unlikely, but that other potential hazards and pitfalls exist.Frank S. Robinson predicts that once humans achieve a machine with the intelligence of a human, scientific and technological problems will be tackled and solved with brainpower far superior to that of humans. He notes that artificial systems are able to share data, like sharing minds, and predicts that with this explosion of intelligence there would be a global network of super-intelligence that would dwarf human capability.

Robinson also discusses how vastly different the future would potentially look after such an intelligence explosion. One example of this is solar energy, where the Earth receives vastly more solar energy than humanity captures, so capturing more of that solar energy would hold vast promise for civilizational growth.Hard vs. Soft takeoff. In this sample recursive self-improvement scenario, humans modifying an AI's architecture would be able to double its performance every three years through, for example, 30 generations before exhausting all feasible improvements (left). If instead the AI is smart enough to modify its own architecture as well as human researchers can, its time required to complete a redesign halves with each generation, and it progresses all 30 feasible generations in six years (right).In a hard takeoff scenario, an AGI rapidly self-improves, 'taking control' of the world (perhaps in a matter of hours), too quickly for significant human-initiated error correction or for a gradual tuning of the AGI's goals.

In a soft takeoff scenario, AGI still becomes far more powerful than humanity, but at a human-like pace (perhaps on the order of decades), on a timescale where ongoing human interaction and correction can effectively steer the AGI's development.argues against a hard takeoff by pointing out that we already see recursive self-improvement by superintelligences, such as corporations. For instance, Intel has 'the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of humans and probably millions of CPU cores to. Design better CPUs!' However, this has not led to a hard takeoff; rather, it has led to a soft takeoff in the form of.

Naam further points out that the computational complexity of higher intelligence may be much greater than linear, such that 'creating a mind of intelligence 2 is probably more than twice as hard as creating a mind of intelligence 1.' Believes that 'many of the more commonly seen scenarios for overnight hard takeoff are circular – they seem to assume hyperhuman capabilities at the starting point of the self-improvement process' in order for an AI to be able to make the dramatic, domain-general improvements required for takeoff.

Hall suggests that rather than recursively self-improving its hardware, software, and infrastructure all on its own, a fledgling AI would be better off specializing in one area where it was most effective and then buying the remaining components on the marketplace, because the quality of products on the marketplace continually improves, and the AI would have a hard time keeping up with the cutting-edge technology used by the rest of the world.agrees with Hall's suggestion that a new human-level AI would do well to use its intelligence to accumulate wealth. The AI's talents might inspire companies and governments to disperse its software throughout society. Goertzel is skeptical of a very hard, 5-minute takeoff but thinks a takeoff from human to superhuman level on the order of 5 years is reasonable. He calls this a 'semihard takeoff'.disagrees, arguing that if there were only a few superfast human-level AIs, they wouldn't radically change the world, because they would still depend on other people to get things done and would still have human cognitive constraints. Even if all superfast AIs worked on intelligence augmentation, it's not clear why they would do better in a discontinuous way than existing human cognitive scientists at producing super-human intelligence, although the rate of progress would increase. More also argues that a superintelligence would not transform the world overnight, because a superintelligence would need to engage with existing, slow human systems to accomplish physical impacts on the world. 'The need for collaboration, for organization, and for putting ideas into physical changes will ensure that all the old rules are not thrown out overnight or even within years.'

Immortality In his 2005 book, suggests that medical advances would allow people to protect their bodies from the effects of aging, making the. Kurzweil argues that the technological advances in medicine would allow us to continuously repair and replace defective components in our bodies, prolonging life to an undetermined age. Kurzweil further buttresses his argument by discussing current bio-engineering advances. Kurzweil suggests; after synthetic viruses with specific genetic information, the next step would be to apply this technology to gene therapy, replacing human DNA with synthesized genes., one of the founders of, postulated cell repair devices, including ones operating within cells and utilizing as yet hypothetical, in his 1986 book.According to, it was his former graduate student and collaborator who originally suggested to him (circa 1959) the idea of a medical use for Feynman's theoretical micromachines. Hibbs suggested that certain repair machines might one day be reduced in size to the point that it would, in theory, be possible to (as Feynman put it) '. The idea was incorporated into Feynman's 1959 essay.Beyond merely extending the operational life of the physical body, argues for a form of immortality called 'Digital Ascension' that involves 'people dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious'.

Kurzweil, Ray (2005). The Singularity is Near.

New York, NY: Penguin Group., 'Why Growth Will Fall' (a review of, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, Princeton University Press, 2016, 762 pp., $39.95), vol. 13 (August 18, 2016), pp. 64, 66, 68., “What Your Computer Can’t Know” (review of, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality, Oxford University Press, 2014; and, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford University Press, 2014), vol. 15 (October 9, 2014), pp. 52–55. (1965), in Franz L.

Alt; Morris Rubinoff (eds.), Advances in Computers Volume 6, Advances in Computers, 6, pp. 31–88,:,:, archived from on 2001-05-27, retrieved 2007-08-07. (1998), Robin Hanson, archived from on 2009-08-28, retrieved 2009-06-19. Berglas, Anthony (2008), retrieved 2008-06-13. (2002), 9, retrieved 2007-08-07. (5 November 2014). 'Ethical Artificial Intelligence'.:.

CS1 maint: ref=harv Further reading., 'Am I Human?: Researchers need new ways to distinguish from the natural kind', vol. 3 (March 2017), pp. 58–63. Luftrausers sfmt. Multiple tests of efficacy are needed because, 'just as there is no single test of prowess, there cannot be one ultimate test of intelligence.' One such test, a 'Construction Challenge', would test perception and physical action—'two important elements of intelligent behavior that were entirely absent from the original.' Another proposal has been to give machines the same standardized tests of science and other disciplines that schoolchildren take. A so far insuperable stumbling block to artificial intelligence is an incapacity for reliable. 'Virtually every sentence that people generate is, often in multiple ways.'

A prominent example is known as the 'pronoun disambiguation problem': a machine has no way of determining to whom or what a in a sentence—such as 'he', 'she' or 'it'—refers., 'Intelligence is not Artificial' (2016) for a critique of the singularity movement and its similarities to religious cults., (2009) for an essay on the singularity movement and its scientific validity.External links.

Ever since scientists first discovered the existence of black holes in our universe, we have all wondered: what could possibly exist beyond the veil of that terrible void? In addition, ever since the theory of General Relativity was first proposed, scientists have been forced to wonder, what could have existed before the birth of the Universe – i.e.

Before the Big Bang?Interestingly enough, these two questions have come to be resolved (after a fashion) with the theoretical existence of something known as a Gravitational Singularity – a point in space-time where the laws of physics as we know them break down. And while there remain challenges and unresolved issues about this theory, many scientists believe that beneath veil of an event horizon, and at the beginning of the Universe, this was what existed. Definition:In scientific terms, a gravitational singularity (or space-time singularity) is a location where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system. In other words, it is a point in which all physical laws are indistinguishable from one another, where space and time are no longer interrelated realities, but merge indistinguishably and cease to have any independent meaning. This artist’s impression depicts a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disc. Credit: ESA/Hubble, ESO, M.

Kornmesse Origin of Theory:Singularities were first predicated as a result of Einstein’s, which resulted in the theoretical existence of black holes. In essence, the theory predicted that any star reaching beyond a certain point in its mass (aka. The ) would exert a gravitational force so intense that it would collapse.At this point, nothing would be capable of escaping its surface, including light. This is due to the fact the gravitational force would exceed the speed of light in vacuum – 299,792,458 meters per second (1,079,252,848.8 km/h; 670,616,629 mph).This phenomena is known as the, named after the Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who proposed it in 1930. At present, the accepted value of this limit is believed to be 1.39 Solar Masses (i.e.

1.39 times the mass of our Sun), which works out to a whopping 2.765 x 10 30 kg (or 2,765 trillion trillion metric tons). Another aspect of modern General Relativity is that at the time of the Big Bang (i.e. The initial state of the Universe) was a singularity.

Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking both developed theories that attempted to answer how gravitation could produce singularities, which eventually merged together to be known as the Penrose–Hawking Singularity Theorems. The Big Bang Theory: A history of the Universe starting from a singularity and expanding ever since. Credit: grandunificationtheory.comAccording to the, which he proposed in 1965, a time-like singularity will occur within a black hole whenever matter reaches certain energy conditions. At this point, the curvature of space-time within the black hole becomes infinite, thus turning it into a trapped surface where time ceases to function.The added to this by stating that a space-like singularity can occur when matter is forcibly compressed to a point, causing the rules that govern matter to break down. Hawking traced this back in time to the Big Bang, which he claimed was a point of infinite density. However, Hawking later revised this to claim that general relativity breaks down at times prior to the Big Bang, and hence no singularity could be predicted by it.

Some more recent proposals also suggest that the Universe did not begin as a singularity. These includes theories like, which attempts to unify the laws of quantum physics with gravity. This theory states that, due to quantum gravity effects, there is a minimum distance beyond which gravity no longer continues to increase, or that interpenetrating particle waves mask gravitational effects that would be felt at a distance. Types of Singularities:The two most important types of space-time singularities are known as Curvature Singularities and Conical Singularities.

Singularities can also be divided according to whether they are covered by an event horizon or not. In the case of the former, you have the Curvature and Conical; whereas in the latter, you have what are known as Naked Singularities.A Curvature Singularity is best exemplified by a black hole. At the center of a black hole, space-time becomes a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass.

As a result, gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and the laws of physics as we know them cease to function. Conical singularities occur when there is a point where the limit of every general covariance quantity is finite. In this case, space-time looks like a cone around this point, where the singularity is located at the tip of the cone. An example of such a conical singularity is a cosmic string, a type of hypothetical one-dimensional point that is believed to have formed during the early Universe.And, as mentioned, there is the Naked Singularity, a type of singularity which is not hidden behind an event horizon. These were first discovered in 1991 by Shapiro and Teukolsky using computer simulations of a rotating plane of dust that indicated that General Relativity might allow for “naked” singularities.In this case, what actually transpires within a black hole (i.e. Its singularity) would be visible.

Such a singularity would theoretically be what existed prior to the Big Bang. The key word here is theoretical, as it remains a mystery what these objects would look like. For the moment, singularities and what actually lies beneath the veil of a black hole remains a mystery. As time goes on, it is hoped that astronomers will be able to study black holes in greater detail. It is also hoped that in the coming decades, scientists will find a way to merge the principles of quantum mechanics with gravity, and that this will shed further light on how this mysterious force operates.We have many interesting articles about gravitational singularities here at Universe Today. Here is, andIf you’d like more info on singularity, check out these articles from. Professor Brian Keating returns to Open Space to talk about the big concepts in cosmology, from inflation to the largest scale structures.

Keating was the Principal Investigator of the BICEP2 experiment, and now he's the Director of the Simons Observatory in Chile.Book is out!Podcast version:ITunes: Fraser's Watching Playlist:email newsletter:Space Hangout:Cast:us at: stories at: us on Twitter: @universetodayLike us on Facebook: - Fraser Cain - @fcain /Karla Thompson - @karlaii / Weber -Support Universe Today podcasts with Fraser Cain.