Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole
port.ac.uk
port.ac.uk
(I'd also be worried about a world where researchers are evaluated based on the virality of their blog posts, vs. how impactful their work was.)
Being able to effectively communicate to different people on your team, outside your team, managers, business people, etc is not optional and more than once I've seen things get stalled or turn into a mess because communication didn't happen.
STEM is often a haven for neurodivergence but I think communication skills are something that is largely learned and not something that comes naturally for everyone. People who are good at communicating spend a fair amount of effort rewriting, trying different wordings, different introductions, getting feedback from people, etc.
FWIW I see things like being able to sell a proposal, managing expenses, planning, etc as optional - these are good to have, but someone else can do them if you can communicate well, but in the end the only person who can communicate what you're thinking is you.
> I acknowledge that not everyone involved in science has or wishes to acquire the skills needed to write blog-form content.
They should. If your research is publicly funded you should make it as available to be public as possible. Academics should be able to communicate, and I very much doubt they are unable to acquire the skills
> I'd also be worried about a world where researchers are evaluated based on the virality of their blog posts, vs. how impactful their work was
Given how bad the measures of impact and the distorted incentives this produces I am not even sure this would even be a bad thing.
If nothing else it improves transparency about what they are doing, again with public money.
https://www.amazon.com/World-Physics-Library-Literature-Anti...
It still leaves a lot of questions though, especially if you try to marry quantum mechanics to these makroscopic models. Where did the initial black hole come from and should a corresponsing anti matter black hole exist?
What the paper actually proposes is that the Big Bang may have been a gravitational bounce inside a black hole formed in a higher-dimensional parent universe. Quantum degeneracy pressure stops the collapse before a singularity forms. From the outside, it looks like a black hole. From the inside, it evolves as a 13.8 billion year expansion. That is general relativity applied across frames.
Simply put this is a relativistic collapse model with quantum corrections that avoids singularities and produces testable predictions, including small negative curvature and a natural inflation-like phase.
That's incorrect: The parent universe is not higher-dimensional, it's the same good old 3+1 as our universe.
What they propose is: Let's take our good old GR, and start with a (large, dilute) compactly supported spherically collapsing collapsing cloud of matter. During that, you get an event horizon; afterwards, this looks like a normal black hole outside, and you never see the internal evolution again ("frozen star", it's an event horizon). Inside, you have the matter cloud, then a large shell of vacuum, then the event horizon.
Quantum mechanics suggests that degeneracy pressure gives you an equation of state that looks like "dilute = dust" first, and at some point "oh no, incompressible".
They figure out that under various assumptions (and I think approximations), they get a solution where the inside bounces due to the degeneracy pressure. Viewed from inside, they identify that there should be an apparent cosmological constant, with the cosmological horizon somehow (?) corresponding to the BH horizon as viewed from the outside.
All along the article, they plug in various rough numbers, and they claim that our observed universe (with its scale, mass, age, apparent cosmological constant, etc) is compatible with this mechanism, even hand-waving at pertubations and CMB an-isotropies.
This would be super cool if it worked!
But I'm not convinced that the model truly works (internally) yet, too much hand-waving. And the matching to our real observed universe is also not yet convincing (to me). That being said, I'm out of the cosmology game for some years, and I'm a mathematician, not a physicist, so take my view with a generous helping of salt.
(I'm commenting from "reading" the arxiv preprint, but from not following all computations and references)
PS. I think that they also don't comment on stability near the bounce. But I think that regime is known to have BKL-style anisotropic instability. Now it may be that with the right parameters, the bounce occurs before these can rear their heads, and it might even be that I missed that they or one of their references argue that this is the case if you plug in numbers matched to our observed universe.
But the model would still be amazing if it all worked out, even if it was unstable.
That’s not mentioned in the summary. After inflation the event horizon would not exist.
(Emphasis mine)
I haven't read the paper yet, but this sounds like a (good) summary of exactly what the article is saying. It makes me wonder what, if anything, you feel is different from the way you put it and the way it is explained in the article? As a layman they seem the same to me.
It's incredible how big a 4-D universe would have to be to contain our own, even crazier if there are more levels; but our own universe could contain easily uncountable planar universes.
[0]: https://observablehq.com/@tophtucker/theres-plenty-of-room-i...
I would like the article to acknowledge a bit more though that blackhole universe theories and speculation are quite old now, not radical and a striking alternative, as it is natural to think about it once you learn of the concept of event horizons. What differentiates this though is the analytical solution.
1. This theory requires a parent universe that can't have been formed inside a black hole. This means there must a be second "universe creation" mechanism that we can / may never know about from our child universe. For me, this doesn't really answer the true question: "How did our universe begin?" Yeah, it may the "unknown field with strange properties" but instead we get an unknown parent universe with strange properties.
2. The black hole in the parent universe must be much much bigger than anything we see in ours since it has to contain all the matter that we see. How is a black hole supposed to form that is 750 billion times bigger than the largest black hole we know about?
There are many models of black holes, such as the Schwarzchild solution, that have an area of "asymptotically flat spacetime" which is, from the viewpoint of our universe, part of the black hole. That something happens around the singularity that creates this new universe doesn't sound that crazy.
If our universe is a child of another universe and that is a child of another universe and so forth it fits into the kind of "multiverse" model that addresses issues such as "why does the universe have the parameters it does?" Either there are a huge amount of universes such that we're lucky to be in one we can live in, or there is some kind of natural selection such that universes that create more black holes have more children.
As for the relative size of the parent black hole, conservation of energy doesn't have to hold for universes in the normal sense. One idea is that the gravitational binding energy of the universe is equal to the opposite of all the mass in the universe such that it all adds up to zero so we could have more or less of it without violating anything.
> requires a parent universe
Does that repeat forever? Does it lose energy in the bounce? If so, to where and how?
> The black hole in the parent universe must be much much bigger than anything we see in ours
Most importantly, you don't need everything all figured out at once to publish. Then no one would always publish. There'd be nothing to improve on. Only one publication that says everything. Till then, everything does have criticisms and is incomplete. It's good to have criticisms! They lead you to the next work!
2. We don’t know whether our universe is big or small compared with other universes. We don’t know whether, or how, it makes sense to compare sizes between universes.
Big Bang is arguably the biggest speculation in modern science.
I guessed c once. It would be a constant. Maybe all the constants are spaghettified remains of a superior universe.
In "natural units", we define the units so that the important conversion factors (c, G, h-bar, etc) work out to exactly 1. You can say that c is one light-year per year and then forget about it.
The true parameters of the universe are the dimensionless constants: the fine structure constant, proton-electron mass ratio, 3+1 dimensions, etc.
Or is that too simplified?
The second half is incorrect. Since the time coordinate becomes spacelike in turn you'll still have 3 spatial degrees of freedom. Dimensions can't just vanish if you believe that spacetime is a 4D Lorentzian manifold (as physicists do).
Moreover, the singularity is not a place you can poke with a stick, once you've entered the black hole. It lies in your future, in the same way as your death.
Can we say that one of the spatial dimensions (the radial dimension) and the time dimension combine into a single dimension? After crossing the event horizon aren't they 1:1 correlated?
--- > | > >> . << < | < ---
I really like this analogy for "what is outside of our universe", thank you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
I don’t think it has a hypothesis for the origin, though
In that sense black holes are areas where our universe has reverted from it's low entropy state all the way back to the initial nearly infinite entropy state.
I do agree that it makes sense, but not because of what quantum mechanics says.
As for where I came from, I gotta admit I feel curious about that too, but mostly I’m just happy to be here. Real excited to see what you do next.
I've often wondered about this. I don't have any direct physics training, but it's something that felt really plausible after I learned that the mass of a black hole is linearly proportional to its swarzschild radius.
As the size of the black hole goes up, its overall density must decrease. Combined with the other observation that our universe has uniform density at large scales, it seemed really obvious to me that there existed some threshold at which the decreasing density of a very large black hole, and the fixed density of our observed universe.. would cross.
I used to muse about this question with some other tech colleagues that liked talking about physics stuff but never really got a clear answer to this.
On a side note - I'm absolutely fascinated by the implications relating to this. I'll post a follow-up thought I'm hoping somebody else has also thought about:
I've seen discussion of dark energy mostly presented as a surrogate for real energy. That there is some underlying energy "accelerating things away from each other".
I always felt uncomfortable with that characterization. It seems more reasonable to me to think of dark energy as _negative energy_ - i.e. a loss of overall energy.
In a classical system, two things moving away from each other stores potential energy that can be recouped at some later time. Dark energy doesn't work this way - things accelerate away from each other the further apart they are. From a global perspective, it's an energy loss.
The energy loss pervades to the quantum world as well - photons that start off high frequency arrive low-frequency.
It somehow feels more appropriate to me to think of dark energy as energy being extracted out of the universe, in some form never to return. Maybe like a black hole evaporating as observed from the inside?
When I asked this of some people in real life, I was pointed to answers that indicated that the "energy" component in dark energy is normalized into the "tension" of space somehow. As I mentioned before I'm not really studied in physics, but that explanation felt unsatisfactory to me.
So time in the void between galaxies is moving quicker than time in the galaxies, but on the grand scale of the universe the differences as up a lot.
I quite liked this theory, think is make sense, at least from my very limited understanding of this stuff.
But in this story the black hole increases in size as matter falls into the horizon and shrinks as it evaporates, so cosmic expansion would be associated with more energy falling into the black hole than leaving it.
Another layman's thoughts: Isn't the energy theoretically lost by black holes so faint it's currently undetectable? And isn't the amount of dark energy theorized to be the major component of the observable universe? It seems like the numbers wouldn't add up?
The size and density of the Schwarzschild volume is determined only by mass (stationary, non-rotating). It's proportional to the inverse square of mass. Density = 3c⁶/32πG³M².
SMBHs have densities ~0.5 kg/m³ between thin air and water.
Stellar BHs are ~1e19 kg/m³ several orders of magnitude more than a neutron star.
s/has/had at the time of recombination
It is largely an assumption of LCDM that we can treat the universe as practically homogeneous throughout its entire evolution but potentially not a very well-founded at that [0, 1].
> I always felt uncomfortable with that characterization. It seems more reasonable to me to think of dark energy as _negative energy_ - i.e. a loss of overall energy.
Your intuition is correct. If the Lambda term in the Einstein field equations is moved over to the side of the energy momentum tensor, it takes on the role of a negative contribution (provided Lambda > 0, as observations seem to indicate).
> In a classical system, two things moving away from each other stores potential energy that can be recouped at some later time. Dark energy doesn't work this way - things accelerate away from each other the further apart they are. From a global perspective, it's an energy loss.
Note that there is no global energy conservation in General Relativity[2], only at a local scale[3]. Heck, you'll already struggle to define what the energy is of a given piece of spacetime in a meaningful and generic manner[4, 5]. In other words, violations of energy conservation due to spacetime expanding or contracting (a strictly non-local phenomenon), like in the case of the cosmic redshift, are expected and our intuition from classical mechanics only takes you so far.
> It somehow feels more appropriate to me to think of dark energy as energy being extracted out of the universe, in some form never to return.
Dark energy aka the cosmological constant term in the Einstein field equations is a constant term, as the name suggests. Yes, there can be energy loss due to spacetime expanding (see above) but that doesn't change the gravitational constant.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_web
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhomogeneous_cosmology
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy
[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress%E2%80%93energy_tensor
[4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.02931
[5]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_general_relativity
The center of a black hole is infinitely dense. That's why it even exists. The event horizon is not the black hole.
> and the fixed density of our observed universe
Our universe is expanding. It's density is not fixed.
You really want to be thinking about this in terms of entropy and not matter.
Since we don't have a blackboard in front of us to interact with, I can suggest Alan Guth's lecture notes on Newtonian cosmology. (Guth is credited with discovering cosmic inflation.) https://web.mit.edu/8.286/www/lecn18/ln03-euf18.pdf See around eqn (3.3). You could also borrow a copy of Baumann's textbook <https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/cosmology/53...> which studies the Poisson equation for various spacetimes, however a static spacetime gets most of the focus.
A universe which expands forever, or which expands faster in the later universe, makes a mess of this sort of approach to calculating a gravitational potential energy. So does any apparent recession velocity that's a large fraction of c (inducing significant redshift, whatever the recession (pseudo-)"force" might be).
However, the general idea is that there is a relationship between the kinetic energy a receding galaxy (in a system of coordinates -- a "frame" -- in which these kinematics appear) and a gravitational potential energy still occurs in a non-recollapsing universe. It's just that the potential energy climbs forever, and you get an equivalent to gravitational time dilation between galaxies at different gravitational potentials (i.e., between early-universe galaxies and higher-potential modern-times galaxies).
Accelerometers in galaxies will not show a cosmic acceleration for any galaxy; they're all really close to freely-falling (local galaxy-galaxy interactions are real -- collisions and mergers and close-calls happen -- but wash out over cosmological distances; look up "peculiar velocity" for details). Therefore we can conclude that there's no real force imposing acceleration on the galaxies. However that's also true of a cannonball in a ballistic trajectory, including one on an escape trajectory or one that enters into a stable orbit. Consequently one can draw some practical comparisons between a ballistic launch from Earth into deep space and galaxies spreading out from an initially denser early part of an expanding cosmos.
> Dark energy as energy being extracted out of the universe
No, it's just a way of thinking about whatever is driving the expansion, and that doesn't dilute away with the expansion as ordinary matter and radiation does. It's not even a "real" energy in the sense that it is only an energy in the cosmological frame, and is a frame-dependent scalar quantity, whereas in the fuller theory it's just a multiplier of the metric tensor. So it's the full relativistic metric doing the work but we absorb some of that into cosmological coordinates in the cosmological frame of reference, carving up the metric tensor into a set of vectors including an expansion vector identical at every point in spacetime.
The expansion vector can also be thought of in terms of pressure: in a collapsing cosmological frame, a pressure drives galaxies together into a denser configuration. The inverse of pressure is tension, so in an expanding cosmological frame, it's a tension that pulls galaxies apart into a sparser configuration. (The reason one uses pressure or its inverse is that the matter fields are idealized as a set of perfect fluids at rest in the cosmological frame; each such fluid has an associated density and internal pressure which evolve with the expansion or contraction of the cosmos, generally becoming less positive in the time-direction of expansion (i.e., in the future direction in a universe like ours). Another way of thinking about pressure is as a measure of isotropic inflow of energy-momentum into a point; increasing pressure at a point therefore increases the curvature at that point. Tension is an isotropic outflow, and so positive tension is repulsive as opposed to the attraction from positive pressure.)
> that explanation felt unsatisfactory to me
Hopefully the above helps a bit. Unfortunately there's only so much teaching one might do in a series of HN comments, and ultimately one probably is better served in developing some grounding in the full Einstein Field Equations / Friedmann-Lemaître equations before thinking in quasi-Newtonian ways. Going the other direction tends to lead to misunderstandings and developing false intuitions when running into situations where the quasi-Newtonian picture needs post-Newtonian correction terms.
It's cool that you have all sorts of questions. You could consider signing up for part time / non-business-hours courses in relativity at a nearby community college or the equivalent, depending on where you are, or maybe just bringing a hot lunch to a lecturer there in exchange for a quick informal tutorial. Anything like that is bound to get you to better answers than raising comments on HN threads about astrophysics in the broadest sense, as answers here are often somewhere between non-standard and unreliable.
It is indeed "often described" in the media as such. However, that is _not_ the currently accepted theory. "What if there were no space and time before the Big Bang" is just Stephen Hawking's pet theory.
Thus, anything and everything you've heard about what is there "before the big bang" has always been speculation. I mention this because sometimes people read the science media, which is always reporting on this speculation, and think that the reporting on the speculation constitutes "science" constantly changing its mind, but that's not the case here. Science has consistently not had a justifiable position on this topic, ever. It has always been speculation. It is the press that often fails to make this clear and writes stories in terms of what "science" has "discovered", but any claims of certainty in this area are not the claims of "science".
We went from thinking the Earth was the center of the universe, to the sun being the center of the universe, and the next obvious step is our universe isn't at the center of universes.
Does it also follow that black holes in our universe contain universes internally, beyond their event horizons?! Seems like it should. Mind-blowing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hole#Big_Bang/Supermassi...
It’s holes all the way down
Not necessarily. It's not clear that any are massive enough to cross the threshold required for the "bounce."
Opinions:
A) I love all the scifi book recommendations that cone up on HN
B) i wish you’d all stop recommending great and amazing books. My queue is so backlogged and jammed I'm never going to catch up.
Scientist still can show their theories and search papers and i can't understand a shit but i don't believe in any theory that proves how the universe got created.
The assumption is, you never really know, but if the model in which the theory says X, is able to predict something in the future or some experiment for Y, than that model appears to better approximate reality. Or is that knowledge and model allowing us to now do something we could not before, etc.
Over time, it course corrects to improve its knowledge and models in ways that show better results for prediction or invention.
It can be, but generally the concept of 'belief' isn't attributed to ground truths; it's just 'the truth', you rarely hear the phrase "I believe 2 and 2 is 4." , it's just '2 and 2 is 4.' -- I think that's important.
In fact, a lot of people insert the word 'believe' to insert a concept of self-doubt. "What was our last test results passing rate?" "I believe it was around 95 percent.."
But semantics aside here's the real question : Why do you have some kind of notion that you should 'believe' anything without being able to understand it? Just trust in the world and those around you?
We haven't figured origin yet, so let's get off that, but when a scientist of some sort makes a discovery, they release evidence and methods , and you decide to believe the conclusions without an understanding of the work -- well that's just a display of faith. Faith in the scientist themselves, the system they work within, and the society you're in.
Which leads me to say this : If you make an effort to begin to understand the frameworks and systems which lead to scientific conclusions you can largely remove the faith and belief elements up until you hit the very highest spectrums of each field where speculation comes back into play.
tl;dr : if you 'cant understand a shit', you don't put any leg-work in and make an effort to speak the language, you'll probably end back up in beliefs rather than an ever increasing codex of knowledge -- regardless of the field. That's okay -- but it doesn't offer the same benefits as knowledge -- it just lets one say things like "I don't believe in any theory..."
I stumbled upon this paper [1, 2] last night that challenges the CMB, and thus the underpinning of much of our understanding about the age and evolution of the universe. As a layperson, I don't know the impact factor of the "Nuclear Physics B" journal - if this is just junk or if this is a claim that will pan out.
My point is that it feels like we're building on a lot of observations that are all super indirect. I know I'm just a layperson, but that feels weird when reading assertions about these things.
Our understanding of the universe is relatively new. We don't have a lot of energy or resolution in our observations. The fact that we can sniff the molecular spectra of exoplanets is so amazing and that part feels totally concrete and rock-solid. But I get skeptical when I see claims that we know how the universe began or how it will end. Is our evidence that good? Are our models? Are we basing everything on assumptions?
Recently I saw also a theory that black hole might not, in fact, exist as we thought, and may be instead something called 'gravastars', where large stars do not collapse in an infinite point but instead the mass reaches a maximum density and hardness and become sorts of empty bubbles.
Now this. It's not exactly a new idea, I remember reading about black hole cosmology 10 years ago.
Sooo... My uneducated, pop-sci fueled imagination now sees the universe as a mathematical function of a fractal looking like a shell with patterns on it, and those patterns interact or 'fold' in a way where the patterns themselves can be thought of as shells with patterns on them, and each shell creates something that, from the inside, looks like a new dimension of space or time, and what we think of as black holes are the next fold. Does that make sense?
There’s of course a line between simply coming up with ideas that are quickly provably wrong or inconsistent vs generating ideas that are consistent and not quickly falsified. It’s especially valuable the ideas are falsifiable and it seems like this is the case here.
As such, theory finds patterns in existing knowns, makes some leaps and tries to connect them. Then empirical evidence can help solidify or falsify those ideas. But we tend not to just connect dots of empirical data without attempting to know the casual relationship, otherwise the connections can be rather nonsensical or may have weak predictive power.
With all that said I didn’t read the paper in detail nor am I qualified in this domain to say if it’s quackery or a reasonable shot a developing some new theory. It is peer reviewed and published in APS so I suspect it’s not complete quackery: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.111.1...
If the universe is curved dark energy is still a problem because the expansion is getting faster and overcomes the current curvature bounds.
https://www.pbs.org/video/could-the-universe-be-inside-a-bla...
Love PBS space time !
You'd see EVERYTHING that EVER crossed the event horizon. But critically, you'd see it EXACTLY as it was at the monent it crossed.
Sounds a bit crowded to me. Sounds a bit like I'd expect the big bang to look.
What specifically is meant by interior? Does this mean “within the event horizon” or something else?
What is preventing the collapse in this case and results in a bounce?
> And we show that this rule prevents the particles in the collapsing matter from being squeezed indefinitely. As a result, the collapse halts and reverses. The bounce is not only possible – it’s inevitable under the right conditions.
Do I understand right, that this would mean that every formation of a black hole would result in a bounce?
> And we show that this rule prevents the particles in the collapsing matter from being squeezed indefinitely. As a result, the collapse halts and reverses. The bounce is not only possible – it’s inevitable under the right conditions.
Then how comes the neutron stars collapse into black holes despite obeying the exclusion principle?
Different exclusion principle. For neutron stars, it is the Pauli exclusion principle (IIRC) which creates neutron degeneracy pressure. Enough mass and gravity can overcome it forming a black hole. The article is talking about quantum exclusion which happens at a much smaller scale. I don't know much about it because that exceeds the limits of my degree.
One of the ways to overcome one of the levels of this degeneracy pressure is electron capture which is the opposite of a kind of beta decay. Squeeze hard enough and a proton combines with an electron to form a neutron and a neutrino.
But there are several proposed levels of degenerate matter in neutron stars, the idea being that one (final?) level of this degenerate matter is dense enough to make an object smaller than its schwarzschild radius. Uncertainty is high because we have no current methods to observe any of this kind of matter.
What goes on inside the schwarzschild radius is another mystery we don't have answers from, but there are lots of ideas with various levels of legitimacy.
Quantum physics in and around singularities or things we think are singularities is not understood.
https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.111.1...
Well, at least it does make for interesting conversations. Someone will surely milk it for Youtube content.
(the basic idea was fecund universes/cosmological natural selection[1], such that we should expect to find ourselves, if the theory were true, very near to a local maxima of values such that they approximately maximize the number of black holes produced... but most of the book is really taken up with a fascinating look at the history of physics and ideas...)
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_the_Cosmos [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
The title's use of the word "research," and the paper's content, suggest the idea resembles science more than speculation. But in fact, the paper has no observational evidence, nor a proposal for acquiring evidence, to distinguish it from other similar speculations.
To put it simply, at the center of a black hole is a singularity, a domain where existing theories can offer no guidance. So a new idea about singularities -- about black holes -- should suggest a testable property, to distinguish it from other similar ideas.
I say "idea" here to avoid use of the term "theory," which in science requires observational evidence to move past the realm of speculation.
Don't get me wrong -- speculations have an important role to play in science. But tendentious phrases like "research suggests" wrongly imply the presence of something more than speculation.
There are many many reasons why this is a dumb idea and it's just as much of a paradox as any other naturalistic creation theory.
- Gravity "slows" the time down, gravitational singularity should bring the time to a halt
- Suppose there is a quantum process that makes the true singularity impossible, so all black holes immediately expand right back
- Looking at it from our time scales, even if the singularity existed for a moment, it would appear that "infinite" time has passed while from the black hole's perspective, the expansion was instantaneous.
- From earth's perspective, if the singularity ever existed in a black hole, it stands to reason that when the time "resumes" from a black hole expansion, it won't fall into any of our known timelines since infinite time would have passed.
Assuming our universe eventually collapses into a few black holes, perhaps the spawn of a new universe is simply all the matter and energy of our universe arriving at a new point in... time? an infinite amount of time in the future.
Also, really mind bending to think the universe may just be an infinite series of black hole explosions with no beginning. It is because it always was.
It is the same for 'multiverse' where that is used to explain literally anything 'it's like that in this universe but not the others'.
Sure, we can get creative and explain the Anthropic Principle by mentioning the multiverse.
But none of this answers how something comes from nothing.
Not the vacuum of space and its 'quantum foam' where particles jump in from nowhere.
Because that's not 'nothing'.
One of these nothings ... such as level 9. No possibilities.
https://closertotruth.com/news/levels-of-nothing-by-robert-l...
Why do you assume there was nothing?
I definitely didn’t understand whether this is suggesting that expanding universes can be contained within black holes that look like fixed-size finite objects from the outside.
And what happens to the inner universe when the parent black hole evaporates through Hawking radiation?
Edit: I hasten to add that I'm not asking to undermine the research. Seems the more the merrier, there. Genuinely curious on what some of this could lead to.
1. You can have black holes inside black holes.
2. Potentially each black hole is a universe - although some are much smaller and less interesting than others.
"This is not just a technical glitch; it’s a deep theoretical problem that suggests we don’t really understand the beginning at all."
"The bounce is not only possible – it’s inevitable under the right conditions."
ugh
Glad to hear that. I'm looking forward to any theories how to convert time to space (and back) ..with orthogonal universes/singularities ?
I'd love the idea that we are living inside a black hole, which is inside a black hole, which is inside a ...
Anyone else think this is what happened?
I can hear Sean Carrol saying, though, that:
1. We know general relativity isn’t complete, because it doesn’t take quantum mechanics into account.
2. We can’t say whether this is right because we don’t know the quantum theory of gravity.
But I don’t actually know what I’m talking about.
It was featured on Event Horizon (john Michael godier)?
Yes, it produces a testable prediction, but seemingly based on a mathematical assumption derived from our observed cosmic radiation background.
> This lower bound follows from the requirement of χk≥χ∗≃15.9 Gpc to address the cosmic microwave background low quadrupole anomaly
As a lay reader, can I assume that no scientist would publish a theory with mathematical circularity (at the heart of the prediction)? I sure can't verify it myself.
In my view, there is one universe. We are in it. It cycles from maximum to minimum condition endlessly. This cycle is much longer than any entity lifespan and for any entity, the current state is THE state for them, and all they will know and become.
What does it expand into?
Nothing. Space itself just gets bigger and smaller over time.
No beginning, no end. It all just is.
Consciousness has the property to render infinite universes and theories.
But we have no clue how universe creates consciousness.
There's no reason to think that consciousness is an important question in the objective sense; it just matters to people. (and rightfully so) People wondering about consciousness in the universe might be akin to dogs wondering what the big bang smelled like.
{..insert here a statement...} maybe yes but also maybe not {...clickbait things here...}
Is this OnlyFans ?
Wow - like this anti-humanist prejudice is totally 1993. And not in a good way.
two-photon collision experiment has permitted humans to hypothesize a simpler explanation to the beginning of the creation of more electromagnetic forces, which obviously behave differently than how are bodies were designed to receive them i.e. evolutionary biological bandwidth...
1. Motivation: The Crisis in Fundamental Physics
Modern physics, despite its immense successes, faces deep unresolved problems:
The incompatibility between General Relativity (GR) and Quantum Field Theory (QFT)—the so-called "quantum gravity problem."
The mystery of singularities (in black holes and at the Big Bang), the nature of time, and the unexplained phenomena of dark matter and dark energy.
The lack of a unifying principle that can reconcile the fragmented domains of current theories.
TARS responds to these challenges by proposing a radical ontological shift: relations, not entities, are fundamental. This shift is not just a new model, but a new grammar for describing reality.
2. Ontological Foundations: Radical Relationalism
Core Postulate:
"All that exists is relation."
There are no absolute, isolated objects. The very identity of any "entity" (particle, field, law) is defined by its pattern of relations with all others.
The universe is fundamentally non-separable: no part can be fully understood in isolation.
This principle generalizes quantum entanglement to a universal ontological status.
Realism and Symbiosis
Symbiotic Realism: Entities and their properties are co-constituted through mutual relations. There are no intrinsic properties, only extrinsic, dynamically co-created ones.
The observer is not external, but an active node in the relational web. Knowledge itself is a process of coherent participation in this network.
3. Mathematical Formalism
3.1. From Discrete Relations to Emergent Fields
At the most fundamental level, reality consists of discrete coherence relations, denoted ξ_{ij} (or quantum operators ξ̂_{ij}), between abstract nodes.
At emergent scales, these relations manifest as a continuous coherence field ϕ_{μν}(x), a symmetric tensor field encoding the density and structure of relational coherence at each emergent spacetime point.
The emergent metric is given by: g_{μν}(ϕ) = e^{2αϕ} η_{μν}
The Symbiotic Action is:
S[ϕ]=∫d4x−g(ϕ)[12gμν(ϕ)(∂μϕ)(∂νϕ)−V(ϕ)]S[ϕ]=∫d4x−g(ϕ)[21gμν(ϕ)(∂μϕ)(∂νϕ)−V(ϕ)]
where V(ϕ) is the relational potential.
3.2. Dynamics: Coherence, Dissonance, and Self-Organization
Local coherence (ξ_l) and global coherence (ξ_c) quantify the degree of relational compatibility.
The difference Δξ = |ξ_c − ξ_l| acts as a "relational tension," driving the system toward higher global coherence.
When Δξ exceeds a threshold, critical reorganizations occur (mediated by an operator F₀), leading to emergent order, the arrow of time, and the formation of physical laws.
3.3. Quantization and Emergence
TARS aspires to a quantum theory of relational fields, where quantization applies to the relations themselves, not to fields on a pre-existing spacetime.
The challenge is to mathematically derive how spacetime, matter, and interactions emerge from the dynamics of ξ̂_{ij}.
4. Phenomenological Implications
TARS provides new perspectives and solutions to major physical puzzles:
Singularity Resolution: The regularization of black hole and cosmological singularities emerges naturally from the relational dynamics.
Dark Matter/Energy: Gravitational anomalies are interpreted as regions of relational coherence deficit, not as unseen particles.
Inflation and Cosmology: The early universe's rapid expansion is modeled as a phase transition in the global coherence field.
Black Hole Evaporation: Predicts a slower, non-singular evaporation process, leaving stable remnants.
Consciousness and Life: Interpreted as high-order reflexivity in relational networks—consciousness is a self-referential coherence loop.
5. Scientific Achievements to Date
Full mathematical formalism: Action, field equations, emergent metric, and relational potentials.
Analytical derivations: For black hole interiors, dark matter effects, and cosmic inflation.
Numerical simulations: Demonstrating the propagation of coherence fronts and self-organization.
Distinct predictions: Such as black hole evaporation profiles and singularity avoidance, differentiating TARS from standard models.
White paper and technical documentation: Comprehensive and available for peer review.
6. Meta-Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Reach
TARS is not just a new physical theory; it is a meta-framework for understanding emergence, organization, and knowledge itself. Its principles can be applied to biology, neuroscience, social systems, and artificial intelligence, wherever complex relational networks give rise to emergent phenomena.
7. Conclusion
TARS offers a radical, mathematically grounded, and phenomenologically rich alternative to current foundational physics. By shifting the focus from entities to relations, it provides a unified language for the emergence of space, time, matter, and law. Its predictions are testable, its formalism is rigorous, and its implications reach far beyond physics, offering a new way to organize scientific and philosophical knowledge.
If the Big Bang was just a moment in someone else’s universe, then maybe everything we know is just one chapter in a book far larger than we can imagine.
Is it the same universal every time? If so, see you later alligator.
TARS is a new theoretical framework that fundamentally reimagines the foundations of physics. Instead of assuming that reality is made of pre-existing entities (particles, fields, or spacetime itself), TARS posits that everything that exists is, at root, a relation. In this view, the universe is a dynamic network of coherence relations, and what we perceive as space, time, matter, and even physical laws, are emergent phenomena arising from this underlying relational web.
1. Motivation: The Crisis in Fundamental Physics
Modern physics, despite its immense successes, faces deep unresolved problems:
The incompatibility between General Relativity (GR) and Quantum Field Theory (QFT)—the so-called "quantum gravity problem."
The mystery of singularities (in black holes and at the Big Bang), the nature of time, and the unexplained phenomena of dark matter and dark energy.
The lack of a unifying principle that can reconcile the fragmented domains of current theories.
TARS responds to these challenges by proposing a radical ontological shift: relations, not entities, are fundamental. This shift is not just a new model, but a new grammar for describing reality.
2. Ontological Foundations: Radical Relationalism
Core Postulate:
"All that exists is relation."
There are no absolute, isolated objects. The very identity of any "entity" (particle, field, law) is defined by its pattern of relations with all others.
The universe is fundamentally non-separable: no part can be fully understood in isolation.
This principle generalizes quantum entanglement to a universal ontological status.
Realism and Symbiosis
Symbiotic Realism: Entities and their properties are co-constituted through mutual relations. There are no intrinsic properties, only extrinsic, dynamically co-created ones.
The observer is not external, but an active node in the relational web. Knowledge itself is a process of coherent participation in this network.
3. Mathematical Formalism
3.1. From Discrete Relations to Emergent Fields
At the most fundamental level, reality consists of discrete coherence relations, denoted ξ_{ij} (or quantum operators ξ̂_{ij}), between abstract nodes.
At emergent scales, these relations manifest as a continuous coherence field ϕ_{μν}(x), a symmetric tensor field encoding the density and structure of relational coherence at each emergent spacetime point.
The emergent metric is given by: g_{μν}(ϕ) = e^{2αϕ} η_{μν}
The Symbiotic Action is:
S[ϕ]=∫d4x−g(ϕ)[12gμν(ϕ)(∂μϕ)(∂νϕ)−V(ϕ)]S[ϕ]=∫d4x−g(ϕ)[21gμν(ϕ)(∂μϕ)(∂νϕ)−V(ϕ)]
where V(ϕ) is the relational potential.
3.2. Dynamics: Coherence, Dissonance, and Self-Organization
Local coherence (ξ_l) and global coherence (ξ_c) quantify the degree of relational compatibility.
The difference Δξ = |ξ_c − ξ_l| acts as a "relational tension," driving the system toward higher global coherence.
When Δξ exceeds a threshold, critical reorganizations occur (mediated by an operator F₀), leading to emergent order, the arrow of time, and the formation of physical laws.
3.3. Quantization and Emergence
TARS aspires to a quantum theory of relational fields, where quantization applies to the relations themselves, not to fields on a pre-existing spacetime.
The challenge is to mathematically derive how spacetime, matter, and interactions emerge from the dynamics of ξ̂_{ij}.
4. Phenomenological Implications
TARS provides new perspectives and solutions to major physical puzzles:
Singularity Resolution: The regularization of black hole and cosmological singularities emerges naturally from the relational dynamics.
Dark Matter/Energy: Gravitational anomalies are interpreted as regions of relational coherence deficit, not as unseen particles.
Inflation and Cosmology: The early universe's rapid expansion is modeled as a phase transition in the global coherence field.
Black Hole Evaporation: Predicts a slower, non-singular evaporation process, leaving stable remnants.
Consciousness and Life: Interpreted as high-order reflexivity in relational networks—consciousness is a self-referential coherence loop.
5. Scientific Achievements to Date
Full mathematical formalism: Action, field equations, emergent metric, and relational potentials.
Analytical derivations: For black hole interiors, dark matter effects, and cosmic inflation.
Numerical simulations: Demonstrating the propagation of coherence fronts and self-organization.
Distinct predictions: Such as black hole evaporation profiles and singularity avoidance, differentiating TARS from standard models.
White paper and technical documentation: Comprehensive and available for peer review.
6. Meta-Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Reach
TARS is not just a new physical theory; it is a meta-framework for understanding emergence, organization, and knowledge itself. Its principles can be applied to biology, neuroscience, social systems, and artificial intelligence, wherever complex relational networks give rise to emergent phenomena.
7. Conclusion
TARS offers a radical, mathematically grounded, and phenomenologically rich alternative to current foundational physics. By shifting the focus from entities to relations, it provides a unified language for the emergence of space, time, matter, and law. Its predictions are testable, its formalism is rigorous, and its implications reach far beyond physics, offering a new way to organize scientific and philosophical knowledge.
- Earl Sweatshirt
At the time I couldn't understand why my dad laughed about that particular phone call from the principal.
I don't have the Ph.D physics/maths skills to work out the plausibility of any of that (or variations on that) but I've always felt I've been good at coming up with ideas.
Any physicist wants to work with me, I'm https://purpleidea.com/contact/
So IRL there's no time, there's no need to have a beginning or an end. Whatever happened when all the matter was close together isn't the beginning of anything, just a phase.
There may be other universes out there, with their own big bangs, but that has no effect on ours.
Reading this article, I think they are simply disputing the necessity of singularity inside a black hole, and hypothesize a universe which expands from non-singularity black hole, while staying inside its own event-horizon.
That is how I understood it at least, somebody please correct me if I misunderstood it.
There's a reason some of the most famous mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and philosophers of all time believe(d) in God.
The Hebrew name of God, YHWH, literally means "He Who Is." In other words, the Self-Existent One. The father and originator of all things that were, are, and will be, who exists outside of spacetime.
There are countless other religions that believe in a deity who created the universe. These deities either created themselves, or had always existed outside of space and time. To that end, any one of those deities would be on equal footing with YHWH. I don't think that it is appropriate to axiomatically claim that a certain deity exists because only that deity could have caused the universe to exist.
Why Christianity then, over Hinduism? Why any human religion at all?
Who Created God? No one? Why does the universe need a creator if God does not?
Where does free will and evil come from if God is "originator of all things that were, are, and will be". For true free will to exist it must have a source of entropy which denotes something outside of Gods control and design otherwise everything is deterministic as set forth by God.
That reason being that for much of Western history if you didn't believe in God the Church would burn your research in a big fire and probably you on top of it.
I like to think he was referring to computation. There's a reality to the constant pi, its computation, and ourselves and the representation being part of that same universe.