Sometimes the jokes write themselves in a completely different topic, even when they shouldn't.
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Posted on 06/14/2025 8:16:24 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
A new hypothesis from physicists at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. challenges the long-standing Big Bang Theory as the ultimate origin of the universe.
This new “Black Hole Universe” hypothesis, suggests that our universe possibly “bounced” from the formation of larger black hole in another parent universe.
While intriguing, the Big Bang Theory is the undisputed cosmological champ for a reason, so it'll take lots of rigorous experiments to confirm its theoretical conclusions.
Throughout human history, there has been no greater question than “where do we come from?” This existential curiosity has spawned entire religions, philosophies, and (more recently) serious scientific inquiry. Amazingly, as science and technology have progressed over the past century, we’ve begun to actually answer that age-old question. Thanks to groundbreaking discoveries in the 20th century—not the least of which was the accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background in the 1960s—we now know that the universe most likely formed from a rapid expansion of matter known formally as the Big Bang.
But just because the Big Bang is our best answer for the beginning of everything, that doesn’t mean it’s the only one. In the early years, the main competitor to Big Bang Cosmology was the Steady State Universe (though the discovery of the CMB largely put that idea to rest). But in recent years, new alternatives have emerged to challenge the Big Bang’s cosmological supremacy. One of the latest in this contrarian family is detailed in a new paper published in the journal Physical Review D, in which physicists from the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. theorize that maybe our universe formed within an interior black hole of a larger parent universe.
Comparisons between black holes and the cosmology of our universe make some sense—after all, both contain singularities of a sort and horizons beyond which we can’t hope to glimpse. However, this new theory, which is called the “Black Hole Universe,” suggests that our black hole-generated universe is just one step in a cosmological cycle driven by gravity and quantum mechanics.
“The Big Bang model begins with a point of infinite density where the laws of physics break down. This is a deep theoretical problem that suggests the beginning of the Universe is not fully understood,” Enrique Gaztanaga, lead author of the study from the University of Portsmouth, said in a press statement. “We’ve questioned that model and tackled questions from a different angle—by looking inward instead of outward. Instead of starting with an expanding Universe and asking how it began, we considered what happens when an overdensity of matter collapses under gravity.”
The genesis of this theory and others like it stems from the fact that we simply don’t know what goes on the heart of black hole. And because knowledge (like nature) abhors a vacuum, scientists begin crafting hypotheses in an attempt to understand this unknown. In Gaztanaga and his team’s case, they’ve shown that a gravitational collapse doesn’t necessarily end in a singularity, but can instead “bounce” into a new expansion phase.
“Crucially, this bounce occurs entirely within the framework of general relativity, combined with the basic principles of quantum mechanics,” Gaztanaga’s team said in a press statement. “We now have a fully worked-out solution that shows the bounce is not only possible—it’s inevitable under the right conditions. One of the strengths of this model is that it makes predictions that can be thoroughly tested.”
As a science coordinator on the ESA mission Analysis of Resolved Remnants of Accreted galaxies as a Key Instrument for Halo Surveys, or ARRAKIHS (a true master-class in science acronym-ing), Gaztanaga hopes to use the instrument’s ability to analyze ultra-low surface brightness structures in the outskirts of galaxies to see if data points to a “Black Hole Universe” or the undisputed scientific champ, the Big Bang.
Presenting alternative ideas to long-standing theories is a key function of the scientific method, as it rigorously tests what we think we know from new angles. Even if ARRAKIHS confirms our Big Bang suspicions (as it most likely will), this alternative hypothesis still take us one step closer to truly understanding a question that’s followed our species for hundreds of thousands of years.
Will the junk science never end?
Why you gotta go all ethnic, why it gotta be a Black hole?
I have a theory too, it goes like this, the Black Hole ate too much and puked out our universe.
Hell, everyone knows the only thing that comes out of black holes is black poop.
The other name is Greek.
The only one that is Greek.
All the rest are Latin.
I think we can assume a joke. And since the joke has gone very stale I propose a return to Latin. For the sake of symmetry.
Yes, Uranus belongs in a symmetry...
Nice one!
The Covid fraud started to wake people up about issues with science.
Hopefully a new generation will rediscover the great historical debates over the philosophy of science—and radically restructure the way modern science is done.
The current system is a disaster.
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week, try the veal...
The problem is the publish or perish paradigm at colleges\universities. For example a published scientific result is only “scientific (useful\worthwhile)” if it can be duplicated. There is no mechanism\incentive for scientists\graduate students to do that. You’re not going to get funding to show Dr Joe Blow’s result is true and students won’t get degrees participating & doing it either.
Given that its no wonder there’s a publication crisis!
I think there is a deeper issue.
Students get good grades and rewarded for answering “correctly”.
That means that if the “approved” science underlying the “correct” answer turns out to be false then the best students have been trained to say things that are false.
There are so many examples.
If graduate students in the 1970s published analysis arguing that Pluto was not a planet they would not have been published and would not have gotten their PHD.
It's publishing publishing, publishing which means grants grant grants!( often 50% for university overhead!) mean summer salaries, conference trips, graduate student tuition waivers and salaries, lab supplies, computer cost, etc. Money drives it all and money comes from grants which you get by having a publishing record.
Typo: mean = means
Right—but you don’t get to publish, publish, publish if your ideas are heretical.
It is not just publish or perish.
It is obey or perish.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein
It's the same problem with panspermia, makes sense comets could have populated life on Earth, but who created that life and when / how did it begin? That infinite reductive gives equal weight to life began here because why not?
Obviously this is all Almighty God's handiwork, but since God is in the details, I would like to know.
Black holes, dark matter and dark energy have never been seen by anyone.
They are totally theoretical and determined by equations.
It is entirely possible none of them exist at all.
If so future generations are going to have a good laugh at how dumb our scientists are.
Agree!
For all the claims that universities are home to and encourage new ideas. That absolutely false it’s go along to get along!
Sometimes the jokes write themselves in a completely different topic, even when they shouldn't.
You are not supposed to "trust the science", since science itself is all about questioning, not trusting, everything.
So, science's great moment is less about Archimedes running through town shouting "Eureka" ("I found it"), than it is about an obscure scientist somewhere pouring over data and, on finding an anomaly, saying, "Isn't that strange?"
Of course, scientific theories endlessly tested and confirmed are what keep our airplanes in the air, our ships floating at sea, our spaceships reaching their destinations, power plants generating electricity, etc., etc.
Those all have legitimate claims of our trust, but even so, how often do planes crash, ships sink, spaceships burn up and electric power goes out?
Not that often, but it does happen, and so "trust the science" is never, ever, 100%.
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