Can 1 Be Divided by 0? From children to undergraduate mathematics students, everyone would answer that it was impossible. Not only was it impossible in practical terms, but it was logically impossible as well.
Within the axiomatic system we used, zero could not have a multiplicative inverse. But one day, someone on Earth suddenly thought: “It seems that there’s a phenomenon in the laws of physics where something is divided by zero.” That someone was Karl Schwarzschild. He had predicted the existence of black holes.
His equations contained two singularities—in other words, two points where “something was divided by zero.” One was the boundary where a black hole’s escape velocity exceeded the speed of light. The other was the black hole’s central point.
Dean Magarta had realized this and pointed out the limitations of the Theory of Relativity by showing that “such celestial bodies were impossible.” Even Einstein had thought that there was no way such celestial bodies could actually exist, so it was difficult to call this a serious mistake in itself.
And so, she had forcibly created a black hole inside my isolated system… Yet rather than collapsing because of the contradiction, my isolated system had instead managed to conceptualize a black hole. Because black holes were, undeniably, celestial bodies that existed in reality.