Black Hole Singularity: The End of Time Revealed

[00:00:00]What are we picturing? [music] It's this thing called the singularity. You might think of it as an infinitely dense point [music] to which this massive star collapses.

[00:00:08]It's kind of the natural way to think of it. But actually, just even in pure general relativity, when you look at a nice map of a black hole, the so-called Penrose diagram named after Roger Penrose, what you see is that the singularity is not really a place in space at all.

[00:00:26]It's a moment in time. And actually, it's the end of time. So, one way of picturing what's happened when a star collapses to form a black [music] hole is that space and time is so distorted that, in a sense, [music] their roles swap.

[00:00:41]And so, what we thought of as an infinitely dense point, a place in space, at the center, at the center of the collapse of the star, [music] if you like, actually becomes a moment in time, and the end of [music] time, the singularity.