Fumfer Physics 47: Are Black Holes Singularities or Collapsed Matter?

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/05/22

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner examine whether black holes are true singularities or ultra-compressed structures retaining geometry. They discuss informational cosmology, baby universes, neutron stars, Hawking radiation, observational limits, and why theory may advance understanding faster than direct detection. Rosner also connects physics to geography, game-show controversies, Shavuot pronunciation, and a future conversation about paint-by-numbers, keeping the exchange speculative, skeptical, and conversational rather than presenting it as peer-reviewed science.

Black Holes, Singularities, and Collapsed Matter

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you can, stick with me on this idea, because you need observational, empirical, repeatable, standardized metrics to come to some clarity about whether a black hole is a singularity or composed of collapsed matter. Both involve extremely dense mass. In one case, it is treated as effectively infinite density in classical descriptions; in the other, it is finite but extremely compressed.

The implication is that, aside from features like the event horizon blocking information from escaping, if you had a true singular point of gravitational focus, the curvature of spacetime would be smooth and continuous as it approaches the center.

In an informational cosmology framework, if you think about it, since the matter is highly dense but not literally infinite, the compactification might be imperfect. That could mean that the geometry of spacetime would not be perfectly smooth, and might instead exhibit gravitational nonlinearities or spacetime curvature irregularities more than a singularity based black hole.

Rick Rosner: I have a couple of things to say about that. Black hole cosmology runs against standard physics in that, once you get to a black hole, there is nothing in classical General Relativity to stop the matter from collapsing into a singularity, complete compression into a point of effectively zero volume and extreme density.

So people have been trying to figure out what could prevent that collapse and allow a black hole to expand into a “baby universe.” That is one issue.

The second point is that if you have a baby universe inside a black hole, the scale of space within it would have to be very small relative to the parent universe. It is a baby universe: a small region containing an entire cosmos. So the scale must be dramatically reduced.

What you were suggesting points to something interesting: if the scale of space itself changes, that could affect the curvature and behavior of spacetime. If matter generates or influences its own effective scale of space, then as it collapses, it could continually create “room” for itself.

In that case, there would be no final collapse into a singularity. Instead, it would be like taking an image of a galaxy and shrinking it, while space itself shrinks proportionally. The structure remains intact, even as the scale changes.

It is effectively pulled away from the rest of the universe, so it has gravitational self-attraction on its own terms rather than continuing to collapse relative to the external universe. It is no longer collapsing into the larger system; it has its own internal dynamics.

Game Show Geography and Physical Analogy

Jacobsen: Well, on Jeopardy!, you were thwarted by someone who may or may not have had a double doctorate and knew more about flags of the world than you. On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, there was the La Paz, Bolivia question, where, in the Errol Morris interview, you described it as something like a city built on a crumpled piece of paper, if I remember correctly.

Rosner: Well, no. What I was talking about is Quito. It is geographically a crazy city. For one thing, it has huge city limits, metropolitan limits. I do not know how many square miles it is, but a lot. They essentially drew a large boundary and called that the city.

That area runs from a river valley at roughly 1,700 feet above sea level up the side of a volcano to something like 20,000 feet. Now, most of the city, the city center, the historical center, is around 2,800 meters, or about 9,200 feet above sea level.

Not that anyone would know that, but it is one more reason the question is questionable. It is like Los Angeles, which runs from the beach all the way to mountains that are around two miles high. You can find points within Los Angeles city or county limits that differ by about two miles in elevation.

In Quito, you can find points that differ by even more. So asking for the altitude of the city is problematic, because there is no single standard reference point. In some places, like Denver, the “mile-high” point is defined, famously, a step on the state capitol, but there is no universal convention for defining a city’s elevation. So it was a flawed question, for multiple reasons.

Jacobsen: You could draw from that game show example back to your physics point in an informational framework. In an informational cosmology framework, the core of collapsed matter in a black-hole-like object might resemble something like a higher-dimensional crumpled surface in geometric terms.

Rosner: What you are saying is that, under that framework, black holes retain geometry.

Jacobsen: Well, anything in the universe has geometry.

Rosner: But under the simplest solutions to the Einstein field equations, once you reach a black hole’s core, you lose classical geometry, it becomes a singularity. It is treated as a point with no dimensions. It lacks structure, including dimensionality. Everything has been compressed to the point that all organization is gone.

The matter does not disappear, but any detail or structure is effectively erased. So, yes, your analogy is reasonable, but the standard picture is that everything has been smoothed out of existence.

Jacobsen: But I am saying that informational pressure… The creation of information creates space and time, and that includes geometry. So it is not a terrible parallel that you drew.

Rosner: Thank you. It is goofy because I have lived a goofy life. You work with goofy material; you are going to reach goofy conclusions. I have one more topic.

Neutron Stars and Black-Hole-Like Objects

Jacobsen: Wait, hold on, I am not finished with you. What separates a simplification of the concept from simply noting that a black-hole-like object essentially amounts to an ultra-dense neutron star, in terms of condensed matter packed into a tight region?

Rosner: What are you asking?

Jacobsen: Could a quick analogy be that a black-hole-like object is essentially an ultra-dense neutron star?

Rosner: Not exactly, because neutrons are still distinct entities. A neutron star is made of neutrons. It is a kind of neutron “soup,” which has relatively little information. But a black hole goes beyond the neutron degeneracy limit, the point at which neutrons can no longer resist further collapse.

I do not know exactly what you get beyond that. You enter regimes of increasingly high-energy physics. You might encounter a range of particles, what people call the particle “zoo”, but current physics does not fully describe conditions beyond that limit. It is not established that everything collapses into a single ultimate particle of unlimited energy.

As you go deeper, you exceed every known configuration of matter. According to physics, particles are defined by fields that determine their behavior and interactions. There are also distinctions between types of particles, for example, fermions, which resist being packed together due to quantum principles, and bosons, which can occupy the same state in large numbers.

A neutron star still consists of neutrons. If the gravitational force becomes strong enough, those neutrons are forced beyond their limits. That is effectively the last well-understood stage of matter before collapse into a black hole, where current physical descriptions become incomplete.

Detecting Structure Inside Black Holes

Jacobsen: How would you detect the difference between a smooth relativistic curvature leading to a singularity and something like a crumpled higher-dimensional structure?

Rosner: You cannot, not directly. One possible approach would be to examine radiation associated with black holes, such as Hawking radiation. According to standard physics, that is the only radiation expected from a black hole.

This radiation arises from quantum effects near the event horizon, where spacetime fluctuations can produce particle pairs, with one escaping as radiation. But in practice, detecting detailed structure from this is extremely difficult, we do not currently have the technology, and known black holes are too distant for such fine measurements.

If you could get close enough to a black hole and the energy coming off it did not match the expected radiation spectrum, that could be evidence that something else is going on. But we cannot do that.

One problem with observing black holes is that they are black. Another problem is that they are small. Another problem is that you do not want them anywhere near you. Fortunately, we have not found any that are close to us.

Jacobsen: So, when it comes to observing black holes, even without specialized expertise, you can see what makes it difficult. My preface to all of this has always been that we are two friends discussing ideas. You have talent, you have thought about this, and you have done a lot of mathematics. We are exchanging ideas; this is not peer-reviewed work.

Rosner: So, to distinguish between a traditional black hole, where everything collapses, and a black hole in something like black hole cosmology, where there might be a “baby universe,” you would need to observe what comes out of a black hole.

If you could see structured matter, something like spacecraft, coming out of a black hole, that would obviously contradict standard expectations. But that is not something we expect to observe. Organized matter emerging from a black hole would be inconsistent with current models.

In general, we cannot observe this because black holes are very far away and relatively small. However, many galaxies appear to contain supermassive black holes at their centers. Perhaps not every galaxy, especially very young or irregular ones, but most well-formed spiral galaxies do.

These central black holes can have masses of millions to billions of stars. But galaxies themselves are extremely distant. We can attempt to observe the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the Sagittarius A*, but even that is difficult.

If you are looking for a radiation signal from that black hole, it is hard to isolate, because matter is constantly falling into it. The environment around it is very active. In addition, our line of sight is obstructed by a vast number of stars. The Milky Way contains on the order of hundreds of billions of stars, and we are located far from the galactic center.

So we are not actually seeing radiation coming out of the black hole. We are seeing radiation from material being pulled into it. If you have matter in unstable orbits around a black hole, it gains gravitational energy as it spirals inward. It collides with other matter, interacts with strong magnetic fields, and emits radiation.

But that radiation does not come from inside the black hole, or even directly from the event horizon. It generally comes from the surrounding material, the so-called accretion disk.

Can we get a clean measurement of radiation coming directly out of a black hole? The answer is essentially what you would expect: no. There is even an article explaining why we will likely never directly detect Hawking radiation from an actual astrophysical black hole.

So, this connects, in a loose way, to what is going on more broadly: we are much more likely to understand what happens in black holes over the next 10, 20, or 50 years through theory rather than direct observation, because it is so difficult to obtain clean observational data from these environments.

There are many reasons for that. So we will have to expand our understanding by developing better theoretical models, not by trying to directly probe black holes. We will keep observing, of course, we will continue looking for black holes in the galaxy and the broader universe, but we are likely to gain at least as much insight through theoretical work.

It is somewhat analogous to the idea that advanced civilizations might study distant systems through simulation rather than direct travel. Interstellar distances are so vast that physically reaching another system would take enormous time and energy. For example, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is about 27,000 light-years away.

Even traveling at 1% of the speed of light, it would take roughly 2.7 million years to get there.

And then we would have to worry about trying to send a signal back across 27,000 light-years. It is just not feasible for us right now. Even if we had the technology to travel at 10% of the speed of light, it would still take more than a quarter of a million years to reach the center of the galaxy.

So we would be much better served, in the near future, by working on theories about black holes. In the same way, a hypothetical alien civilization might decide not to attempt direct exploration of distant planets, but instead to stay home and theorize and simulate.

The main issue with galactic empires, like those in Star Trek or Star Wars, is that they rely on faster-than-light travel. Without the ability to exceed the speed of light, you cannot really have a functional interstellar empire. Or, if you do, it would look very different, because travel between stars would take thousands of years. That is the point.

Shavuot and Tomorrow’s Topic

Rosner: All right, I have tomorrow’s topic. Happy Shavuot.

Jacobsen: You call it Shavuot?

Rosner: When I was a kid, that is how it was spelled, but I did not know how it was pronounced. It is Shavuot. The thing is, when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s and went to Sunday school, many of the sounds that are now pronounced as “t” were pronounced as “s.” So we did not say “Shabbat,” we said “Shabbos.” At some point, that shifted.

Anyway, happy Shavuot. Tomorrow we can talk about paint by numbers, which is having a renaissance. There are a number of interesting issues with it.

Jacobsen: All right. Let us do that, I go to a media event after early Shavuot at a central synagogue here.

Rosner: All right. Thank you. Bye.

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