It’s easy to think about the idea of a singularity — where a large amount of matter and energy gets compressed into a single spacetime point or event — and dismiss it as a pathology. After all, everything that we know of in physics, at a fundamental level, comes in quantized little bits: particles and antiparticles with a fixed, finite amount of energy inherent to each of them. No matter what tricks you use, there are certain quantum properties that are always conserved and can never be created or destroyed, not in any interaction that’s ever been observed, measured, or even computed. Things like electric charge, momentum, angular momentum, and energy are always conserved, in all circumstances, as are numerous other properties. And yet, inside of a black hole, the math of General Relativity is very clear: all of that matter and energy that goes into forming it, no matter how it’s initially configured, is going to wind up collapsed down to either a single, zero-dimensional point (if there’s no net angular momentum) or stretched …