$295 bounty for new Singularity Institute logo design (crowd-sourced competition)

Louie

$295 bounty for new Singularity Institute logo design (crowd-sourced competition) — LessWrong

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Somebody should point out that TheOtherDave's comment was a joke. (At least, I'm 95% confident it was so intended, and also I found it amusing.)

The Singularity is more analogous to the event horizon of a black hole; that used to be called the Schwarzschild singularity, but since its singular behaviour was an artifact of co-ordinate systems (as was first clearly shown by David Finkelstein), this terminology has fallen out of use. One imagines that eventually historical Singularities (which are really just prediction horizons) cease to be so called after they are past.

The singularity at the center of a black hole is presumably equally illusory; general relativity simply breaks down there, giving nonsensical answers (infinities). Singularities are in the map, not the territory. (Am I the first to say that?)

timtyler15y10

The Singularity is more analogous to the event horizon of a black hole; that used to be called the Schwartzschild singularity, but since its singular behaviour was an artifact of co-ordinate systems (as was first clearly shown by David Finkelstein), this terminology has fallen out of use.

Calling an "event horizon" a "singularity" would be pretty bonkers.

No - the commonly-cited justification is that so our model of the spacetime supposedly breaks down in the middle of black holes, so the model of the future breaks down when contemplat... (read more)

3TheOtherDave15y

Well, it was intended to be amusing, yes. (In retrospect, perhaps "if there was more than one of it, it would be a multiplicity" might have worked better. Perhaps not.) That said, I do think there's an actual point buried in there somewhere. The sorts of people who use the term "Singularity" to describe an event are deliberately using a term that isn't commonly used to describe transition points, precisely in order to convey the inadequacy of former transition points as a reference class for thinking about that event. If "singularity" were a word in common usage to refer to other transition points in history, singularitarians would choose a different word.

0JoshuaZ15y

You might be the first to say it that way although the idea has certainly been expressed before. However, we don't actually know this for sure. We don't what happens at the singularity in a black hole. It seems likely that are models really are giving something wrong, and there are a handful of suggestions about what might be actually happening, but none of them are completely mathematically satisfying, and the lack of observational evidence is also an issue. We might be able to answer this if we a) had a theory of quantum gravity or b) had some naked singularities we could observe. Neither looks very likely at the moment, with the first probably more promising.

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$295 bounty for new Singularity Institute logo design (crowd-sourced competition)

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$295 bounty for new Singularity Institute logo design (crowd-sourced competition)

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