Sunday/Singularity

In the Catholic Church, today is designated as a specific feast day: Christ , the King of the Universe. Such a phrase in history might be so gigantic and vague as to be glossed over  and not thought about too hard. In modern times, we are beginning to comes to grips with the universe, if not in specifics at least in general.

For example:

As many stars as there are in our galaxy, 100 – 400 billion--, there are roughly an equal number of galaxies in the observable universe. So for every star in the colossal Milky Way, there’s a whole galaxy out there. All together, that comes out to the typically quoted range of between 10^22 and 10^24 total stars, which means that for every grain of sand on Earth, there are 10,000 stars out there.

The black hole NGC1365 has the mass of 2 million suns with the energy that is given off by a billion stars burning for a billion years. 

Thomas Nagel, in his book Mind and Cosmos comments on the development of consciousness, “It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.” (The Guardian awarded Mind and Cosmos its prize for the Most Despised Science Book of 2012.)

But Nagel is no fool. Nor is he a theist.
What we know of the natural world and the universe has become, in the original sense of the word, awesome.

The word "singularity" originates in Middle English, derived from the French meaning "unique." In the modern world its meaning has undergone, if you will excuse the expression, an expansion. It retains its "singular" meaning--individual and unity--but also has a complex application in both physics and artificial intelligence that fulfills its other meaning, "remarkable  and unusual."
 

The artificial intelligence application first. Singularity refers to a point in time when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, become independent and so be able to self-replicate and improve itself autonomously. There are some wonderful ideas here that could facilitate such an event but one disturbing possibility is corruption of data--essentially an accidental change in programming, as is done purposely with a computer virus--which would allow programming to change autonomously--the definition of "evolution." One particularly creepy idea is the evolution in machines of non-human powers, like telepathy.

The second application is in physics, particular astronomy. A singularity means a point where some property is infinite. So, for example in a black hole, density is infinite; a finite mass is compressed to a zero volume. Matter has infinite density and an infinitesimal volumes and spacetime is infinite.

At this point the laws of physics do not exist--or are being formed.

Infinite density, the laws of physics not applying, 400 billion stars in our galaxy, 400 billion galaxies in the observable universe, a black hole with the density of 2 million suns and the energy of a billion stars burning for a billion years, the possible failure of evolutionary creation of consciousness--being King of the Universe should be a lot easier to imagine.