*In the Beginning and Ending thru a Black Hole*
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In Our Element Universe Realm
Cosmic Mystery Tour
Humankind has wondered about the origin of the universe throughout recorded history, and no doubt before. Before the invention of the telescope, we believed our solar system (the sun, the earth and other planets) comprised the entire universe. The stars were believed to be small holes in a heavenly sphere behind which burned the fires of creation.
As astronomers probed deeper into space with powerful telescopes, they realized the universe is vastly larger than our solar system. We now know that the edge of the visible universe is roughly ten trillion (10,000,000,000,000) times as distant as Neptune, currently the outermost planet in our solar system.
Cosmology is the field of science that studies the universe as a whole--its entire history and all that it contains
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/Cosmos/InTheBeginning.html
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/Cosmos/CosmicMysteryTour.html -
Do We Live in a Black Hole?
Consider the size of the universe. You might have read in the popular science literature that the universe has a radius of about 10 (or 20) billion light years. The size of our observable universe is based on Hubble's Law. Hubble's law represents the expansion velocity of the universe as:
v=H0r
Where v is the expansion velocity of the universe at a distance r, and H0is Hubble's constant. Now, since nothing can go faster than the speed of light, we can estimate the age of the universe by looking at our formula and noticing that v increases as r increases. Or we can deduce that r cannot be large enough to bring v to a value greater than the speed of light. In other words:
r=c/H0
Gives this as the maximum observable size of the universe. This works out to be anywhere from 10 to 20 billion light years in radius (see also "How Old is the Universe") If we run time backwards with this fixed radius, then, matter would expand until it filled this volume. A meter, then gets much closer to the size of the universe... In loose terms, then the size of the universe "ruler" at the time of the "big-bang" would be the same as a material ruler. Furthermore, the evidence we've collected over the last 30 years or so indicate that the the "big-bang" might have been a hot "big-bang". So, our initial conditions for the big-bang involve a very large, very hot "sphere" of primordial stuff. Now, if we run time forwards, we can kind of visualize the beginning of our universe as a very rapid collapse (the inverse of "Inflation"). A similar kind of event happens when a star (hot ,spherical, massive, dense...) becomes so dense and massive it collapses in on itself and forms that mysterious black hole. Here's an interesting question to explore... "Did our universe begin as a star that underwent a gravitational collapse?" I.e., do we live in a black hole? (See also "Is the big bang a black-hole?" for the other side
http://www.martinelli.org/rexpansion/bhole.htm -
Was the Universe born in a Black Hole?
The universe may have been created by an explosion within a black hole, according to a new theory by two mathematicians recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A..
"It's a mathematically plausible model which refines the standard model of the Big Bang," said Blake Temple, professor of mathematics at UC Davis and co-author of the paper with Joel Smoller, professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan.
In the standard model of cosmology, the universe burst into existence with the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago. Since then, the universe, which contains an infinite amount of matter and is infinite in extent, has been expanding in all directions.
In the new model, the Big Bang is an actual explosion within a black hole in an existing space. The shock wave of the explosion is expanding into an infinite space, leaving behind it a finite amount of matter. The universe is emerging from a white hole. The opposite of a black hole, a white hole throws matter out instead of sucking it in.
The shockwave and the universe beyond the black hole lies in our future. Eventually, the universe will emerge from the black hole as something like a supernova, but on an enormously large scale, Temple said.
The equations that describe a black hole were written by Albert Einstein as part of the General Theory of Relativity. Einstein's equations work equally well if time runs forward or backwards. But explosive shockwaves, which include an increase in entropy, are time-irreversible. The new theory satisfies Einstein's equations while allowing the universe to expand.
Whether the matter emerging from the white hole came from matter that previously fell into another black hole is an open question, Temple said.
"It is natural to wonder if there is a connection between the mass that disappears into black hole singularities and the mass that emerges from white hole singularities," Smoller and Temple wrote.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-09/uoc--wtu091603.php