

Might Our Universe Have Been Born Inside a Black Hole? - dmuth
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25430/

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avar
Please don't submit these sort of "Scientists Now Believe" articles. The
universe "Must" not have been born inside a Black Hole, that's just something
one 10-day old paper is claiming.

Let is settle for a while before shouting from the rooftops that it's a
groundbreaking bit of science. Many others have suggested before that black
holes may be feeding baby universes, but it hasn't stuck.

~~~
Loy
I like reading such theories in the same way I like reading Sci Fi. They are
fun for the adventurous mind, they can also be a source of inspiration.

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aseem
Clearly God is an Object Oriented programmer. Universes inheriting from each
other, time being an inherited property... Nice.

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jerf
This theory corresponds more closely to prototype-oriented programming, like
Javascript.

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chc
Whenever I see this "We're inside a black hole" idea, two things always come
to mind:

1\. Wouldn't this invalidate the laws of thermodynamics, with energy pouring
into the universe out of "nowhere"?

2\. Conversely, shouldn't the universe be evaporating?

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hugh3
It's the creation of the universe. It's pretty much going to violate
conservation of energy no matter how you slice it.

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chc
But I mean, shouldn't conservation of energy be invalid _right now_ , as more
matter and energy fall into our universe from the outside-place? It sounds
like he's not just saying black holes spawn universes, but that universes
exist inside black holes. Thus universes should grow in mass beyond what they
started with, and should eventually lose all their mass to Hawking radiation.

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kiba
Interesting theory but the comments below the article indicate that the theory
is all pseudoscience crack pottery.

Any good reason why or why not I should take their theory seriously?

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ThomPete
I can tell you why I wont take it too serious for now.

"The problem with inflation is that it needs an additional theory to explain
why it occurs and that's ugly."

It's always a bad sign when scientist start looking for beauty rather than go
where the facts lead them even if it's ugly.

On top of that, it's not like there haven't been many many many many very
intelligent people trying to solve this problem.

He seems to try to solve the problem semantically, i.e. try to re-interpret
the facts into a more aesthetically pleasing model which is exactly where it
becomes pseudoscience.

To the best of my knowledge (and I am no scientist) the information that we
have about the universe simply can't lead to a solution to the problem if it
can be solved at all.

Only if we get additional information about our universe will we be able to
perhaps find another way to interpret what this all means.

But cherry picking in the current knowledge base won't magically create a
theory.

It's not about interpretation it's about facts.

The facts lead us to two "competing" theories that just can't be combined.

Maybe he is onto something, but then he needs to make some predictions with
it.

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Helianthus16
When scientists say that an additional theory is ugly, they mean that adding
the theory means ugly math. Ugly math is complicated, unsupported calculation
--it's tweaking the theory to suit the data. In other words, the very reason
they call it ugly is because of the things you cited. Now, it is certainly
pseudo-science or wishful thinking, but cherry-picking the current knowledge
base is how you create new theories.

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gsk
Must have been? Like it escaped after being born and is now out in the wild?
To me, these sort of papers seem to be exercises in futile epistemology. It's
not even wrong.

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b-e-p
Why "must" it? Can't we just say sensible things like "New evidence and
thought experiments suggest that…"?

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d0m
Actually, I enjoy reading those theories on hacker news. Cosmology is so
mystifying.

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Yaa101
At least one truth comes out of this article, big questions lure big egos.

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zb
Turtles all the way down.

~~~
sliverstorm
Honestly.

You forgot about the elephants.

[http://infomavensdesktop.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/discwor...](http://infomavensdesktop.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/discworld1.jpg)

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sabat
If anyone needs another bong hit, the HN bong is hidden under the third
comment below.

