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Andrew Svesko, Research Associate of Theoretical Physics, King's College London

Naked singularities: how quantum black holes explain why we don’t see the end of space and time

Vadim Sadovski/Shutterstock

Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity, is famously incomplete. As proven by physics Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, when matter collapses under its own gravitational pull, the result is a “singularity” – a point of infinite density or curvature.

At a singularity, space, time and matter are crushed and stretched into nonexistence. The laws of physics as we know them suffer a complete breakdown. If we could observe singularities, our physical theories couldn’t be used to predict the future from the past. In other words, science would become an impossibility.

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