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

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

#621

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Atheists are people that don't bleieve there is a God. Agnostics are people who don't know they are atheists. -- Aron Ra

In practice, atheists are people who think they know there is no god. Agnostics are people who realize they don’t know much at all about anything related to the origins of things and realize they don’t want to hold unprovable dogmatic beliefs like the religious people do. I considered myself an atheist for most of my life. As I got older and learned more, this shifted. These days I consider myself agnostic. If atheis…

You’re mixing theism/atheism with gnosticism/agnosticism. They’re two separate axes.

> In practice, atheists are people who think they know there is no god.

This is generally labeled “gnostic atheism” or “strong atheism”, and only a teeny tiny fraction of people who identify as atheists take this view.

The way the vast majority of atheists use the term is as the complement set to theism. Theists believe in god(s). Atheists lack belief in gods. We don’t claim to know for certain, we just haven’t seen evidence that leads us to believe. (As you say, certainty level regarding any particular god varies depending on which one is in question.)

https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/about-atheism/

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

#622
post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, atheists are people who think they know there is no god. Agnostics are people who realize they don’t know much at all about anything related to the origins of things and realize they don’t want to hold unprovable dogmatic beliefs like the religious people do. I considered myself an atheist for most of my life. As I got older and learned more, this shifted. These days I consider myself agnostic. If atheis…

You’re mixing theism/atheism with gnosticism/agnosticism. They’re two separate axes. > In practice, atheists are people who think they know there is no god. This is generally labeled “gnostic atheism” or “strong atheism”, and only a teeny tiny fraction of people who identify as atheists take this view. The way the vast majority of atheists use the term is as the complement set to theism. Theists believe in god(s). At…

“Gnostic atheism” is a confusing choice of words because in the context of Christianity, "gnostic" already means something quite different:

>Gnosticism is a collection of religious ideas and systems that coalesced in the late 1st century AD among early Christian sects. These diverse groups emphasized personal spiritual knowledge above the teachings, traditions, and authority of religious institutions.

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

#623
post #619

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Relativity applies to mass too. Accelerate and you become heavier. Remember, mathematically, a blackhole is mass in an infinitely small point. You are dividing by 0. I don't know the answer, but if someone is saying that from the outside the apparent mass is different than from the inside, that doesn't set off any alarm bells. We literally are talking about Dr Who style "it's bigger on the inside". Even the ladder ex…

Black holes have the same mass and information as the stars that formed them. Unless the theory also breaks mass and information conservation, the star that gave birth to our black hole must have been as massive as our entire universe. I doubt we have any theory how a star that size can have formed.

I meant apparent mass. Just dropped the apparent because we're on HN and anyone familiar with relativity is likely going to know what I mean. I mean if actual mass went up we'd be violating conservation of energy. It's all about your frame of reference and you can treat these things as local systems.

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

#624
post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re mixing theism/atheism with gnosticism/agnosticism. They’re two separate axes. > In practice, atheists are people who think they know there is no god. This is generally labeled “gnostic atheism” or “strong atheism”, and only a teeny tiny fraction of people who identify as atheists take this view. The way the vast majority of atheists use the term is as the complement set to theism. Theists believe in god(s). At…

“Gnostic atheism” is a confusing choice of words because in the context of Christianity, "gnostic" already means something quite different: >Gnosticism is a collection of religious ideas and systems that coalesced in the late 1st century AD among early Christian sects. These diverse groups emphasized personal spiritual knowledge above the teachings, traditions, and authority of religious institutions.

I shouldn’t have written that so it sounded like both terms were equal. “Strong atheism” became the established term. My understanding is that Huxley’s coining of the term “agnosticism” was based on Christian Gnosticism’s assertion of knowledge (and it’s in the Greek root). So due to the history it’s difficult to use lower-case gnostic in a more general sense. I guess I feel like it makes it easier to understand that agnosticism is orthogonal to theism/atheism. But I should have clarified that.

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

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questions like what was before the big bang or what is outside of our universe seem to be quite natural. However, we still don't know if these questions are well defined and have a proper meaning. For instance, a few hundred years ago, one might have asked, what happens if I go to the edge of the (flat) earth? Or one might ask: What is north of the north pole?

> What is north of the north pole? I really like this analogy for "what is outside of our universe", thank you

Not really. It’s not what’s outside of our universe. It’s why is there something instead of nothing.

It’d be like asking why is there a North Pole? Why is there an Earth to give meaning to a North Pole? Why is there a universe for the Earth to exist? And so on until you inevitably reach why is there something instead of nothing?

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

#626
post #572
post #515

I have two problems / questions with this: 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…

We think the universe had to "begin" because we "began" and tend to anthropomorphize. Is that necessarily true? The universe is under no obligation to have a beginning. Sail around the Earth and you might just end up right where you started.

Current observations make it likely that our observable universe expands (think "stretches"), and the expansion will continue forever.

If it's expanding, then it was smaller earlier. Asking about the far past is a natural reaction, and the Big Bang theory is a pretty good attempt at explaining that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe

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

#627

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Yes. Who are these people paying for jobs that don't do anything, and why are they more concerned about "keeping people busy" than their own profits?

Companies can lay off thousands of employees and not have it affect growth, profits or, really, the workload of remaining employees. How could that be possible if everyone's work is so crucial?

Everyone (eh, most) believes their work is crucial.

There are cognitive biases like the self-serving bias, or the IKEA effect, which leads individuals to overvalue their own contributions, as well as subjective importance derived from their immediate impact and daily responsibilities. And of course limited visibility into the broader organizational priorities often obscures how different roles contribute to overall growth and success.

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

#628

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Most jobs are really not important either, they just keep people busy. Do you need sources for this claim, too?

Ever since I first read this theory, I have always been wondering how credible is this. Where have you heard it from ?

I am not sure, but probably related: https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-....

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

#629
post #350

The article is based on a physics paper (arXiv:2505.23877), not management theory or institutional metaphors. 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…

They have basically disproved Penrose-Hawking's theories of singularity? Isn't that like a pretty big deal? To people working in this field, what is the reaction to this paper?

They predict a non flat curvature, so no (not with existing data and measures, which may improve in the future).

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

#630
post #581
post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you find the idea of an infinite regress -- "our universe is a child of another universe and that is a child of another universe and so forth" -- holds much explanatory power for you? To me it's prima facie a hollow explanation. I get that some models, like eternal inflation or certain cyclic cosmologies, entertain the idea of an infinite past or blur the standard arrow of time... but how does pushing the origin q…

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Well said
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