Touching the Naked Singularity

While perusing the magazines at Borders this evening I saw the words NAKED SINGULARITIES emblazoned on the cover of this months Scientific American. Naked singularities represent a sibling of black holes. I think I've always been intrigued by such phenomena. Dwarfed by the vastness of the cosmos, we may appear small and insignificant, but I choose to believe we've been graced with the awareness and the intellect to be the eyes of the universe staring back within itself. For those unfamiliar, singularities are the parts of a black hole where the strength of gravity becomes infinite and all of the mass of the collapsed star and any neighboring matter become compressed into a tiny dot in space. From our perception, they are dimensionless points where space and time have become twisted, pulled, and compressed. They are like the stuff of the Big Bang, a point of non space filled with immense gravitational energy, yet existing in a reality beyond our physics, beyond our technologies, but perhaps not beyond our mathematics and our imaginations. The naked singularity is a black hole without the event horizon. Those spinning vortex's depicted so colorfully in movies, like the whirlpools associated with ancient monsters from the sea, gobbling up all with the misfortune to wander by. It is naked because it is no longer obscured by the distorting effects of the event horizon. It simply sits in space, unadorned, twisting space and time for all that roam too near.

Seeing this headline reminded me of a verse I wrote a very long time ago. It was intended as a celebration of my passion for skiing, and that dance between skier and mountain choreographed by gravity's persistent pull. This is the first time I've shared it in a very long time.

Silently shredding the albescent blanket I touched a naked singularity and found a timeless moment...