Being the armchair quantum physicist I am, the name of Aral Balkan’s secret new project is rather intriguing. But who am I kidding – curiousity has taken hold and I am dying to know what it is. So much in fact, I’ve thrown all principle out the window and am now advertising on my blog. It better not suck.
Many theories in physics have mathematical singularities of one kind or another. Equations for these physical theories predict that the rate of change of some quantity becomes infinite or increases without limit. This is generally a sign for a missing piece in the theory, as in the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and in renormalization.
In supersymmetry, a singularity in the moduli space happens usually when there are additional massless degrees of freedom in that certain point. Similarly, it is thought that singularities in spacetime often mean that there are additional degrees of freedom that exist only within the vicinity of the singularity. The same, fields related to the whole spacetime also exist; for example, the electromagnetic field. In known examples of string theory, the latter degrees of freedom are related to closed strings, while the degrees of freedom are “stuck” to the singularity and related either to open strings or to the twisted sector of an orbifold.