The Moonshine Memoranda: THE BLACK HOLE - A severe cosmological ‘castration’ complex!

The following is the abbreviated version of a topic currently featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman (see below):

Whereas many a physicist will argue that to make current theories work, much of the universe must be made up of dark matter, or particles which do not interact, Bill Bryson’s reaction to this exciting observation is interesting. “It’s everywhere. It’s here with us right now, but we just can’t see or measure it, in much the same way that we can’t see or measure thought.”

Well, I’ve always believed it’s the thought that counts! Nor is it a mere matter of

neural synapses and variable protein molecules. We are, I accept, in uncharted territory, in the presence of a force without a face. Unlike electromagnetic polarities which are an important characterization of the forces involved, dark matter represents nothing that can be visualized. And if the cause of conscious animation is universal polarity, and its catalyst the dynamic tension between verbal and logical opposites, then thought is the issue upon which all others turn. A particle’s energy may be proportional to the frequency of the wave, but one must never forget that its polarity is relative while energy is ‘absolute’. Nor, that such polarity is by nature dialectical and that, with little on which to base precise definition, the meaning of both, dark matter and dark energy, should have become so opaque to research. Or is it really surprising that, whilst one cannot discern something having only primary qualities - such as solidity or extension in space - nor visualize anything that lacks secondary qualities - as perceived by the senses, such as colour or temperature - meaning should become so rarefied as to be imperceptible?

There are, in other words, no functions in the standard model that account for it.

Still, it is hard to see how something can be both invisible and insensible at the same time while bestowing upon the universe both energy and measure, and the discovery of the invisible nature of both dark energy and dark matter has occasioned a great deal of puzzlement. As the imperceptible cause of a perceptible idea, dark matter can be detected solely by its gravitational effect. Nor can we ignore the testimony of dark energy itself. A kind of cosmological constant which defies known natural laws but nevertheless accounts for some 73% of the energy in the Universe. Hence, as conceived under the attribute of thought - the sole method of approach to the ever more inaccessible riddles of creation - the dark energy of nothing dominates everything. Like an ageless, dark shadow, some sort of amorphous ectoplasm - if not a property of spacetime itself – it thus embodies the unfathomable in the form of intense space- and time-warps; something on a par with the proto-Freudian idea - an idea upon which more than one puzzle has pivoted - that such incubi as black holes, to name yet another example, are the ‘repressed’ manifestation of unconscious mental states.

Confused? You ought to be! But nothing reasonable shields the Black Hole from the crushing force of this logic. This is a work as much of experimental psychology as of cognitive philosophy, and for anyone who subscribes to a relativistic view of the universe, the Continuum is essentially the super-ego, embodying the anthropomorphous conscience - or Cosmic Censorship - of mathematical sense and symmetry. Breaking the symmetry has interfered with the four-dimensional geometry of conventional spacetime, invoking all the mathematical consequences inherent in that ‘neurotic’ condition. For here it is, we have the mutation: a mathematical incubus that has literally been twisted out of existence and returned as a severe cosmological ‘castration’ complex, or whatever the clinical term for this phenomenon may be. The Singularity reborn as a functional disorder - void of structure and geometry, yet central to a reality long overdue for definition.

Failure of cosmic censorship leads to the breakdown of determinism. The cosmic mind refuses to function. The concept of infinite density is ‘unthinkable.’ What is more, the respective viewpoints of an observer plunging into a star which has shrunk to the size of its event horizon, the limit defined by its Schwarzschild radius, and of another observing it from afar, are perfectly irreconcilable. Nor is it any the less surprising that there should be two different realities for a given region of the event horizon of a Black Hole - the infinitely curved regions surrounding black holes which are but a product of the dysfunction itself. Or that the simultaneity of two spatially separate events may be entirely relative. Not if one considers that the event horizon has no localised significance, so that the progress of time at one point bears no relation to the perception of time at another. Or suppose a star collapses into a black hole and - as an event determinate in time - explodes some billions of years later. For if you were inside that black hole it wouldn’t be billions of years, it would be all over in seconds. So you think this is all nonsense? Well, you're right, the relativity is otherwise and nobody is correct. Our determination of simultaneity depends on the velocity of light. But because we have no means of identifying the horizon as an edge or a boundary in space, and the division into future and past as a feature of chronology is forever on the margin, the black hole has neither beginning nor end. Facing a reductio ad absurdum which stretches improbably and infinitely into the night, only the perceptions change.

Stalled on the edge of an intellectual precipice, the Black Hole is the symptom of conceptual conflict, a clash between two mutually exclusive frames of reference whose central discord, conceptually and materially extemporized, produces an astronomical singularity. A rent in the spacetime continuum, or an exit to infinity, the ultimate portal to the outside world.

The Singularity, then, is neither space or time, nor anything that can possibly be understood. Weird, counterintuitive and seemingly paradoxical, it is a psychological riddle in the form of an infinite time warp - if nonetheless a true creation. The tormented image of mind itself face to face with the a priori. It is a star that man begat...