Singularities can be differentiated by their shape – black hole singularities are collapsed in structure, “utterly different” from newly formed Big Bang singularities that are “completely uniform” in shape. Roger Penrose has made a point of drawing this distinction, but I’ve had some difficulty seeing the inspiration behind his point for the troubling tinge of determinism the word “uniformity” signals to me. Unless one takes the word to connote innocence and new beginnings associated with a humanitarian inspired culture of science, and this as opposed to a politics derived from “Original Sin, religion and the Middle Ages” (Longenbach). But my application remains too simplistic. It can easily be turned into its opposite – the science-y language of progress politically appropriated to engineer totalitarian systems. Been there.

A more interesting interpretation, for me at least, follows from Mikhail Epstein’s 2017 book on irony in Russian literature in which he compares madness, defined as the loss of reason, as “characteristic only of beings capable of thought and reason.” The difference turns on loss versus lack, a structural difference he demonstrates by way of analogy. “Madness exists in approximately the same relationship to the mind as that of silence to speech. Although externally, in an acoustic sense, silence is the same thing as quiet and merely signifies a lack of sounds, structurally silence is much closer to conversation: both are about something and have the property of intentionality, in the Husserlian sense.”

Whether newly formed singularities are to be apprehended in this indirect manner doesn’t take away from describing them by appearance, but it would complicate interpretations based on an outwardly determined, truncated uniformity. This might then be contrasted with “collapsed” singularities that share an externally observable shape and whose centers have either been played out or there was nothing there to begin with.

Regardless of this indirection or due all the more to it, Penrose has maintained these relations must represent some measurable capacity. This brings to mind another article concerning the “memory of the future,” in which it’s held that a real memory of the future lacks generality. To correctly imagine the flow of time being reversed to an original state, this could only proceed from one specific future state (“Why We Can’t Remember the Future,” Phillip Ball). In his review of a paper by Mlodinow and Brun posted to APS blog, Ball writes of the “extremely improbable event” of seeing molecules collectively return to their origin in a left-hand chamber after having passed into the right. The “much more probable path” for the molecules to take if changes are made before setting the system in reverse would be in “equalizing the populations” (which incidentally is not the original state of the system). But from what I can tell, the improbability stems from making changes to the “very specific arrangement” that obtains in the right-hand chamber or ‘future state’ before the time is run backwards. So, you’d have to not do that. But none of this is the point.

What authors Mlodinow and Brun seem concerned with is the completeness of one of the key arguments surrounding the ‘meaning of time’ debate. They are pointing up what could complicate and strengthen the argument so that the psychological or perceptual arrow of time is not so well-aligned with the arrow we’re familiar with and have come to expect based on our cultural knowledge of the basic laws of physics. It’s this coinciding of the first and second arrows that tempts politicians to claim a disordered state can be “reversed” into an ordered one. But real reversibility is not possible, according to the present argument, because there is no equivalency between past and future with respect to small changes in position, which will lead to inconsistencies only in the future case. Whereas an equivalency does obtain in principle. In a system that follows “predictable and reversible Newtonian laws,” it may be said that predictions of the future are just as accurate as descriptions of the past. They are equally “knowable” based on the present by which they are measured. But how much of the actual present is knowable in an observable sense and how much of it can only be gotten by way of inference and analogy? How can indirect knowledge be measured?

One of the ways is by disrupting commonly held associations, such as that between “uniformity” and “determinism”, or that which allows for the importing of the concept equivalence from one context into another. This recalls for me the “certain disturbance” Roland Barthes claimed marks the situation of writing, in which earlier readings are subverted, a “shock of meaning lacerated” (Empire of Signs). Concerning knowledge, an “enormous labor” would be necessary, “a thousand things to learn about the Orient,” whose “delay can only be the result of ideological occultation.”

The equalizing of populations Ball describes might be envisioned as a final state, in which the amount of molecules symbolizing past and future are indistinguishable from each other. This takes me to another scene in which Penrose peculiarly words a way to think about relativity, in which “a photon doesn’t get bored because it doesn’t experience the passage of time.” I see an affinity here with Barthes’s “slender thread of light” necessary to “search out…the very fissure of the symbolic.”

Where Barthes writes this fissure “cannot appear on the level of cultural products,” I take the concept reversibility as a cultural product whose incomplete understanding is presently exploited for political gain. This imperfect understanding accelerates rather than corrects against disorder and chaos in the way David Ruelle (1989) states the problem of chaotic time evolution: “…the nonlinearities present in the problem can produce an extreme sensitivity with respect to the initial state of the system, so that even a very small error in its knowledge will be exponentially amplified as the time goes on.”