Nikodem Poplawski displays a “tornado in a tube”. The top bottle symbolizes a black hole, the linked necks represent a wormhole and the reduce bottle symbolizes the increasing universe on the just-formed other side of the wormhole. Credit: Courtesy of Indiana University
Our universe might exist within a black hole. This may possibly sound strange, but it could truly be the best explanation of how the universe started, and what we observe today. It is a theory that has been explored over the past couple of decades by a little group of physicists such as myself.
Profitable as it is, there are notable unsolved queries with the regular large bang theory, which suggests that the universe started as a seemingly impossible “singularity,” an infinitely modest point containing an infinitely large concentration of matter, expanding in dimension to what we observe today. The theory of inflation, a super-rapidly expansion of space proposed in current decades, fills in many crucial particulars, such as why slight lumps in the concentration of matter in the early universe coalesced into massive celestial bodies such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies.
But these theories leave key questions unresolved. For illustration: What commenced the big bang? What brought on inflation to finish? What is the source of the mysterious dark energy that is apparently leading to the universe to speed up its expansion?
The idea that our universe is completely contained within a black hole provides solutions to these issues and several a lot more. It eliminates the notion of physically unattainable singularities in our universe. And it draws on two central theories in physics.
The first is general relativity, the contemporary theory of gravity. It describes the universe at the largest scales. Any occasion in the universe occurs as a point in space and time, or spacetime. A enormous object such as the Sun distorts or “curves” spacetime, like a bowling ball sitting on a canvas. The Sun’s gravitational dent alters the motion of Earth and the other planets orbiting it.