spacetime – a life. Quantum diagrams and singularity

So this is another diagram of a life…

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in this case it is a life’s trajectory through spacetime toward a blackhole. AS you will see from the wikipedia text I have pilfered below, what happens to ‘a life’ as it approaches the black hole depends on whether the black hole is not moving ( a single point) or rotating (and generating a smear). In the first scenarion ‘a life’ becomes zero voulme but infinitely dense ( I love this – it resonates with the idea of pure immanence for me). In the second scenario, ‘a life’ might travel through/traverse across the smear and in so doing fold back into meeting up with  its own past.

This seems to me to resonate with ideas of the outside folding back into meet the actual ( taken up in both Deleuze’s readings on Foucault’s diagrams and in Sher Doruff’s Diagrammatics). At any rate, if the readings seem difficult, console yourselves with quantum physics, which is soooo conceptually accessible!!

From wikipedia:

At the center of a black hole as described by general relativity lies a gravitational singularity, a region where the spacetime curvature becomes infinite.[52] For a non-rotating black hole this region takes the shape of a single point and for a rotating black hole it is smeared out to form a ring singularity lying in the plane of rotation.[53] In both cases the singular region has zero volume. It can also be shown that the singular region contains all the mass of the black hole solution.[54] The singular region can thus be thought of as having infinite density.

Observers falling into a Schwarzschild black hole (i.e. non-rotating and no charges) cannot avoid being carried into the singularity, once they cross the event horizon. They can prolong the experience by accelerating away to slow their descent, but only up to a point; after attaining a certain ideal velocity, it is best to free fall the rest of the way.[55] When they reach the singularity, they are crushed to infinite density and their mass is added to the total of the black hole. Before that happens, they will have been torn apart by the growing tidal forces in a process sometimes referred to as spaghettification or the noodle effect.[56]

In the case of a charged (Reissner–Nordström) or rotating (Kerr) black hole it is possible to avoid the singularity. Extending these solutions as far as possible reveals the hypothetical possibility of exiting the black hole into a different spacetime with the black hole acting as a wormhole.[57] The possibility of traveling to another universe is however only theoretical, since any perturbation will destroy this possibility.[58] It also appears to be possible to follow closed timelike curves (going back to one’s own past) around the Kerr singularity, which lead to problems with causality like the grandfather paradox.[59] It is expected that none of these peculiar effects would survive in a proper quantum mechanical treatment of rotating and charged black holes

Sonic Electricity and the Diagram

Intensive Thinking has a very nice post on Sonic Electricity … which begins with this quote from Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus):

[A technological] plane is not made up simply of formed substances (aluminium, plastic, electric wire, etc.) or organizing forms (program, prototypes, etc.), but of a composite of unformed matters exhibiting only degrees of intensity (resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed or delay, induction, transduction …) and diagrammatic functions exhibiting only differential equations or, more generally, “tensors”.

A series of great videos follow (Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda etc), so it’s worth following the link above. Here’s one of those videos here, from Ryoji Ikeda’s work (I really love this work, though I’ve never seen it in a gallery).

“it is a system of light before being a figure of stone”

Video

“a visual assemblage and a luminous environment” (Deleuze, Foucault: 32)

“A system of light and a system of language are not the same form, and do not have the same formation.”

“expressing the ‘effects’ of analysis, not in a causal way but through the use of optics and colour: the red on red of the tortured inmates contrasts with the grey on grey of prison.” (24)

“a form that haunted the whole of Foucault’s work: the form of the visible as opposed to the form of whatever can be articulated.” (32)