Next September will mark the 80th anniversary of the start of the Second World War. On Sept. 1, 1939, the German Army rolled into Poland.
On the exact same day, two scientific papers were published in the prestigious academic journal Physical Review that would change the world and human understanding of the universe.
The first paper, Continued Gravitational Contraction, was written by University of California, Berkeley, physicist Robert Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder. The paper calculated that after exhausting its fuel, a sufficiently large star would collapse onto itself into a stellar object with so much gravitational strength and density that even light couldn't break free.
Due to the outbreak of war, however, the implications of the paper would be ignored for 25 years, until modern astrophysics was ready to explore the strange implication of singularities or - as they became more commonly known - black holes.
The second paper received far more attention because it started the discussion that would eventually lead to the construction of the atomic bomb and the ending of the war six years later. The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission, by Niels Bohr and John Wheeler, was the first thorough explanation why some specific types of nuclei could be split open more easily than others, releasing their energy.
Ironically, Oppenheimer is far more commonly remembered for his work on turning Bohr and Wheeler's calculations into a deadly reality, rather than introducing black holes.
The issue with singularities - then and now - is infinity. As both a mathematical and a physics concept, infinity poses a big problem. How can a black hole (or any other object with mass) be infinitely dense? How can infinity be counted and isn't one plus infinity more than infinity?
In his book The Quantum Labyrinth, physicist Paul Halpern explains how scientists, particularly Wheeler and his hugely influential and Nobel Prize-winning pupil Richard Feynman, eventually came to the startling realization that maybe there's nothing singular about infinity, that infinity possibly surrounds existence so completely that it is the equivalent of standing in the middle of a dense forest and demanding to know where the trees are.
In the past 50 years, black holes have not only been located and identified, they've also been found to be far more common than expected and that supermassive black holes likely lie at the centre of galaxies, including our own.
During the same period, particle and quantum physics have also been unpacking infinity, showing the flexibility of time and how instead of an arrow, it's more like a tree with many branches, including the mind-bending possibility of going backwards in time, down into the roots of the tree.
In other words, infinity has been observed at both the very large and the very small levels.
Wheeler once joked that philosophy might be too important to be left to philosophers, Halpern notes. In the modern world, it is physicists who are now drilling into the deepest of questions like - as Wheeler asked late in his life - why does existence exist.
In A Brief History of Time, the book that made Stephen Hawking famous to the world outside the physics community, he suggested physics was getting increasingly close to revealing the mind of God. He spent the rest of his life explaining that he didn't mean that in a religious sense but rather in a divine way, where tiny, finite creatures like humans could - in their extremely limited lives in the vastness of time and space - not only glimpse the infinite but understand it.
Wheeler was far less optimistic.
"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance," he wrote at the age of 81. "As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."
Yet that didn't stop Wheeler from striking out away from shore and onto an ocean of endless possibilities, where the wormholes (a nickname that, like black holes, he popularized) suggested in Einstein's general theory of relativity might form shortcuts across space-time and where we might all be "it from bit," his clever turn of phrase to explain how existence itself, from the very small to the very large, could be digital information.
The bewildering labyrinth of our lives and our experiences could be the universe itself, writ both large and small. The next turn could be anything at all, up to and including the impossible possibility of another major lottery win for Prince George's Fredrick Greene. To use the popular sports phrase, it doesn't matter who's better on paper, that's why they play the game.
Every day, every moment, every turn in the labyrinth, a new game begins.
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
