Fiat Lux, Ad Curvaturam Infinitam

Fiat Lux, Ad Curvaturam Infinitam

To see what becomes of a confined plasma as its energy density climbs without limit, we go backward in time. The early universe is our model: a cauldron where matter and radiation were a single, incandescent medium, with expansion the only relief valve. Atoms could not exist; there was scarcely a vacuum - just fields and charged particles under pressure so intense that spacetime itself was warped.

Drive a plasma back along that path and it changes quality as temperature rises. At a few billion degrees, photons collide and create electrons and positrons as pair production becomes significant. Additional heating is diverted into mass; the plasma fattens on its own light.

Push harder and structure dissolves. Nucleons themselves - protons and neutrons - unbind into a quark–gluon plasma, a brief recapitulation of the universe’s first microseconds. Beyond that, symmetries once broken are restored; forces we now see as distinct - electroweak, strong - reveal their underlying unity. 

Confinement writes the last act. When energy density drags too much on spacetime geometry, gravity takes command. Curvature deepens until no light can report back. Temperature and density cease to be useful concepts. The system crosses that horizon where thermodynamics collapses to a spacetime singularity.

Thus the plasma limit at ever-increasing energy density is not an explosion but an erasure. From created light to infinite curvature, the arc closes into that final black hole.

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In Frederik Pohl’s Heechee Saga—the series beginning with Gateway and centred on the miner-turned-billionaire Robinette Broadhead—the great revelation is that the vanished Heechee have taken refuge inside the event horizons of black holes. These are not the remnants of dead stars but engineered singularities: collapses of pure energy, the theoretical kugelblitzes of relativistic physics.

In reality, the path to such a construct would not be a clean collapse of light into singularity. The converging radiation would first generate an ultrarelativistic pair plasma, as photon–photon interactions spawned electron–positron pairs. Only when that incandescent plasma’s self-gravity overcame its own radiation pressure would it continue inward, closing the horizon and sealing the Heechee’s refuge.

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