What actually happens when you approach a gravitational singularity?

Abstract

Roger Penrose’s 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes that his identification of the concepts of “gravitational singularity” and an “incomplete, inextendible, null geodesic” is physically very important. The existence of an incomplete, inextendible, null geodesic does not say much, however, if anything, about curvature divergence, nor is it a helpful definition for performing actual calculations. Physicists have long sought for a coordinate independent method of defining where a singularity is located, given an incomplete, inextendible, null geodesic, that also allows for standard analytic techniques to be implemented. In this essay, we present a solution to this issue. It is now possible to give a concrete relationship between an incomplete, inextendible, null geodesic and a gravitational singularity, and to study any possible curvature divergence using standard techniques.