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Thursday, April 8, 2010

Is our Universe in a black hole?


I can't resist this one. Whether right or wrong the hypothesis by Nikodem J. Poplatski is so suggestive that I have at least to mention it.


It all has to do with the controversial wormholes (or Einstein-Rosen bridges), thought to exist within black holes. What Poplatski says is that actual observed black holes may be of this kind, hosting wormholes with whole universes inside them and that, therefore, our own universe may well be one of such universes within a black hole. This would provide an explanation for the Big Bang itself, which would be a white hole (something I have always thought quite logical).


The euclidean representation of a wormhole (from Wikipedia)

It's complicated to explain and even to understand. A longer article can be read at Science Daily and the full original article can be found here (pay per view):

Nikodem J. Popławski, Radial motion into an Einstein–Rosen bridge. Physics Letters B, 2010.

7 comments:

Marnie said...

Hopefully, this article won't be picked up by popular science magazines. It's interesting, but very conjectural and theoretical, like string theory.

For my part, I'm waiting to see what comes out of the Large Hadron Collider.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/
LHC-en.html

If this link doesn't come up, google CERN Large Hadron Collider.

Maju said...

I'm all for string theory. I really don't like too much quantum mechanics alone that ignore gravity and spacetime altogether.

Also we require an explanation for the Big Bang and strange phenomenons like dark matter (?), dark energy (??) and some noticeable irregularities in the background radiation field.

While the CERN can help us to find those answers experimentally, there's a much bigger CERN up there to experiment with all kind of theories at cosmological and not just particle scale.

Maju said...

I had a quick look at your profile and saw you're into engineering. I'd dare say that people with such a material orientation tend to dislike string theory and probably relativity itself because they don't deal with matter as such or rather make it be something else, more "immaterial".

However, as good scientist, you probably know that matter is just an state of energy and that energy is just a way we describe the spacetime continuum, so I would say that materialist approaches are bound to provide only limited answers.

Marnie said...

sorry maju, i have a double undergraduate major in mathematical physics and electrical engineering. and an MASc in EE, but took a number of courses in physics, as the university I attended has an excellent physics department:

http://www.physics.ubc.ca/php/
directory/research/faculty_by_name.php


anyway, i'd said that string theory is conjectural, something that hardly any serious physicist would disagree with.

in terms of immediate experience, concepts such as quantum decoherence are more interesting to me.

i don't care if i'm living in a black hole. i don't experience that. but when I see a rainbow or hear a bell, i'm catching a glimpse of the underlying quantum world.

but it's ok, i'm used to dumb stereotypes about engineers.

Maju said...

Well, there are too many engineers in my family... but, well, they are all Taurus - so maybe it's that.

Marnie said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Marnie said...

you're forgiven.

i'll put up some questions/ideas on your Basque "Day of the Fatherland" thread tonight.

best.