Live data from Hacker News

Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

port.ac.uk

131–140 of 647 posts

Re: Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

#131
post #51
post #25

> The Big Bang is often described as the explosive birth of the universe – a singular moment when space, time and matter sprang into existence. 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.

Might as well believe in God if you’re going to believe in spontaneous accidental creation…

Anything outside of what we can observe will always be based on faith anyway. We'll probably never understand what's "before" the big bang, wether it make sense to ask that question or why something exists rather than nothing.

Re: Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

#132
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course these are models. And to be able to recognise that entropy increases with time is an example for their usefulness.

Does it increase over time or does it do its thing and in our model we decided that stages of it is called time?

Right, i had the same thought. What we can say is, that the quantities we call t and S are correlated.

Re: Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

#133

I think it's neat that this summary is written by an author of the scientific manuscript. Oversimplification is a risk, but this approach eliminates the possibility that the writer did not understand the underlying science.

It's far preferable to having university PR people write some hype piece. Where they'd spend the whole time gushing about it being a world first, paradigm shifting, blah blah blah, the author focuses on things that actually matter. e.g. Is it testable? Yes, here's what to look for.

Re: Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

#134

If universes can exist in black holes and obviously black holes exist in universes, doesn't that smell like infinite recursion?

What reason do we have to believe that every universe can support black holes? We only have a sample size of 1 here.

Re: Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

#135
Suggested hard sci-fi light reading: "Cosm" by Gregory Benford, 1999. A universe the size of a bowling ball created in a laboratory. The scientist responsible for it, keeping it safe and on the run from gvt spooks. They want to protect it for as long as it lasts, and since its time is as relative as its size, they won't have long to wait.

Re: Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

#136

I'm not a scientist or astrophysicist but i do believe in science, is it ok to believe that we as humans and all our scientific development still very very far from proving anything remotely close to how the universe got created? I feel this subject is for humanity in year 2600 to start discussing it. Scientist still can show their theories and search papers and i can't understand a shit but i don't believe in any th…

Before we can prove, we must first wonder. We proceed by small steps, and if we don't start discussing it now, 2600 will still be too early.

Re: Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

#138
post #112

If this is true it almost literally means black holes are a way for universes to make children. If we apply Darwin’s principles of the strongest survive this must mean that universes that produce the most black holes are the “best”. If correct, what does this actually mean?

Darwinian logic requires a feedback loop. And because those universes are isolated then there’s no “incentive” of a universe to have more “offspring”?

It requires imperfect reproduction where the imperfections alter the probability of further reproduction.

If each black hole in our universe contained a pocket universe with very slightly different laws of physics (to each other and to us), but the same amount of mass-energy on the inside as our universe had when it started, then (1) those pocket universes able to create stars and black holes would also go on to create black holes with pocket universes, but also (2) those pocket universes not able to create black holes, would not create more pocket universes.

I have never seen a reason to think that this could happen, nor why such pocket universes might have more mass on the inside than they appear to have on the outside, but that's the argument.

Re: Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

#139

I've read somewhere an article which posited that our 3D universe might be inside a 4D black hole. When you cross a black hole's event horizon, the radial coordinate becomes timelike, so you lose one degree of spatial freedom. Movement is still possible in the tangential directions however, so what you get is basically an N-1 dimensional universe. So maybe our 3D universe is actually matter that fell into a 4D black…

Yes, and then there's the parlor game of guessing what familiar property of our known universe is actually a spaghetified fourth dimension. I guessed c once. It would be a constant. Maybe all the constants are spaghettified remains of a superior universe.

I don't think c is a good candidate, because it's not really a parameter. It's just a correction factor for our mis-judgment in picking different units for time and space.

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.

Re: Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

#140
post #71

I think it's neat that this summary is written by an author of the scientific manuscript. Oversimplification is a risk, but this approach eliminates the possibility that the writer did not understand the underlying science.

Yea, and it was a great read too. I wish more researchers would publish blog posts alongside their technical whitepapers, although I acknowledge that not everyone involved in science has or wishes to acquire the skills needed to write blog-form content. (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.)

[flagged]
Post reply on HN