In the Marvel Cinematic Universe the
Infinity stones are six immensely
powerful objects tied to different
aspects of the universe. Here's how The
Collector described them: "Before creation
itself there were 6 singularities. Then the
universe exploded into existence and the
remnants of these systems were forged
into concentrated ingots, infinity stones"/ They comprise of the power stone, which
allows energy manipulation; time stone,
time travel and the speeding up or
slowing down of time; space stone,
teleportation; reality stone, which alters
reality itself; the mind stone, psychic
and psionic abilities; and the soul stone,
which harvests souls. But could something
that immensely powerful exist within
the actual laws of physics? I think it
can and the key word to look into is one
The Collector used, singularity. Now
singularities are mathematically where
a function is not well behaved or undefined,
an example being where a function
describing some quantity blows up to
infinity - so calling them at infinity
stones is actually really quite apt. While
there are loads of examples of
singularities within physics the one
that usually springs to mind is those of
gravitational singularity, where the
gravitational field and therefore the
curvature of space-time itself is
actually infinite - with a great example
being at the heart of a black hole,
according to general relativity. It was
actually some of Stephen Hawking's early
work that proposed that the universe
itself may have been born from an
initial singularity,
a point of infinite density containing
all the mass and space time of the
universe, before quantum fluctuations
caused it to rapidly expand in the Big
Bang and through inflation. So that part
of the collectors story sort of checks
out. One pesky problem with the Infinity
stones being singularities though is
that they tend to be surrounded by event
horizons. In the case of a black hole you
often think of this as its surface or
the point from which light can no longer
escape, hence why they're black. More
generally though an event horizon is a
boundary beyond which events cannot
affect an outside observer or in other
words passed the event horizon all
possible paths in space-time lead inwards
and not outwards. The event horizon
sort of hides that singularity away from
us so that we don't see it. One of
Stephen Hawking's often collaborators
Roger Penrose proposed that all
singularities apart from that initial
one before the Big Bang have to be
surrounded and hidden away by event
horizons, the so-called cosmic censorship
hypothesis. Now not everyone agrees with
this and some in fact think that naked
singularities, singularities not hidden
away by event horizons, might in fact be
possible. If they are they're likely
unstable though meaning they wouldn't
last for very long, but there are ideas
that a sort of collapse of very fast
spinning stars or black holes might
leave a naked singularity behind. This is
something we can actually look for with
the gravitational wave observatory LIGO
but so far the events we've detected
show no evidence of naked singularities.
So how could singularities grant the
powers of the six infinity stones? Well
let's go through them one by one. First
up the Power Stone. Releasing huge
amounts of energy is its deal, which is
also exactly what black holes do.
Apart from matter/antimatter reactions,
which are rare because the universe
barely has a natural antimatter, black
holes are the most efficient way of
converting mass into energy.
Einstein's famous equation E equals m c
squared introduced the idea that mass
and energy are equivalent. But that c
squared factor tells you that you can
get huge amounts of energy out of
absolutely tiny changes in mass. Black
holes can release up to 42% of massive
objects mass-energy as the object
spirals and plummets towards the event
horizon, colliding with gas and dust
causing it to heat up and radiate away
that energy. Onto the time stone. Its
property of speeding up or slowing down
the passage of time could be explained
by gravitational time dilation. The
immense gravitational field surrounding a
singularity would cause clocks at
different points in space to tick at
very different rates. So depending on
your point of view that could look like
time running fast or slow. But what about
time travel? Well we're still not sure
whether that's even possible. If allowed
there are whole loads of potential
paradoxes which could break causality,
which makes theoretical physicists' heads
hurt. For that reason Stephen Hawking
proposed the chronology protection
conjecture and he showed that if time
travel were allowed you'd basically need
some weird negative energy matter which
we have no idea what on earth that even
is. However, there is a caveat -
the proof says that there can't be any
singularities present. So potentially
naked singularities could allow time
travel. For the space stone you might be
thinking oh well that's just a wormhole
and one way to think about a wormhole is
connecting a black hole to it's
theorized opposite of white hole, linking
the two together at their singularities.
But when physicists play around with
wormholes they usually don't have any
singularities at all,
that is except for one toy wormhole
known as a ringularity.
It's a singularity that's ring shaped
which results from a fast rotating black
hole and this is what the journey
through one would look like. Now to the
reality stone. Well singularities are
points at which the laws of physics, as we
know them, break down - so they do indeed
mess with reality. Of course to really
understand what's happening in the
vicinity of a singularity we need a quantum
theory of gravity, something which has
eluded us for the best part of a century.
Only once we have that and know that
it's right would we be able to know the
reality altering powers of a singularity
on quantum scales. Scales which warp our
perception of reality anyway with its
inherent weirdness! And as to the mind
and soul stones, well yeah I have no idea
how you can link them to singularities.
Quite frankly we don't understand how
consciousness and life emerge from their
constituent parts so until we do I'm
gonna leave that while either to you for
the comments below or to Stan the man
himself. Excelsior!
Thanks so much for watching
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See you.
