Hey Bill Nye, 'Do Laws of Math Apply near Black Holes and the Edge of Space?' | Big Think

My name is Thomas and I'm from Los Angeles, California, and I was wondering if mathematics is truly universal? I'm not disputing it; I'm just really wondering if mathematics, such as calculus, really is the same near the edges of the universe? For all that we know, or like near black holes, do mathematical laws break down?

Thanks.

Thomas, that is a great question about mathematics. As far as we know, it works everywhere. Now, if we go to a place, as you suggested, near a black hole or the edge of the universe, and mathematics doesn't work, we would say to ourselves, "Well, there's just mathematics that we don't understand, and we have to add some more math to our canon of mathematical equations."

It's very reasonable that there's math that nobody knows how it works, but just understand that when it comes to the motion of planets, when it comes to how rockets work, when it comes to the paths of comets, asteroids, and meteors, we understand this stuff inside out.

However, it was only in the 1600s that these discoveries were made, and so you'll also hear people talk all the time about the singularity. The singularity. And this, to me, is when you get one over zero.

And one over zero is infinite, or it is unknowable. And I'll give you an example. What's one thousandth? What's bigger: one tenth or one thousandth? A tenth is bigger than a thousandth. Okay.

Then what's bigger, one thousandth or one ten-thousandth? A thousandth is bigger. All right, now what about one over one ten-thousandth? That's the thousand. But one over one millionth is a million. One over a billionth is one billion.

So as the numbers get smaller and smaller, the total, the inverse, the denominator causes the quantity to become bigger. And so if it's over zero, it would become infinity or infinite, and nobody knows what happens at infinity.

No one knows what happens exactly at the singularity. Oh, people speculate, but as near as we can tell, math applies everywhere. That is a great question. Thank you.