Comment by PaulHoule
3 days ago
I don't see this idea as very new.
There are many models of black holes, such as the Schwarzchild solution, that have an area of "asymptotically flat spacetime" which is, from the viewpoint of our universe, part of the black hole. That something happens around the singularity that creates this new universe doesn't sound that crazy.
If our universe is a child of another universe and that is a child of another universe and so forth it fits into the kind of "multiverse" model that addresses issues such as "why does the universe have the parameters it does?" Either there are a huge amount of universes such that we're lucky to be in one we can live in, or there is some kind of natural selection such that universes that create more black holes have more children.
As for the relative size of the parent black hole, conservation of energy doesn't have to hold for universes in the normal sense. One idea is that the gravitational binding energy of the universe is equal to the opposite of all the mass in the universe such that it all adds up to zero so we could have more or less of it without violating anything.
Do you find the idea of an infinite regress -- "our universe is a child of another universe and that is a child of another universe and so forth" -- holds much explanatory power for you?
To me it's prima facie a hollow explanation. I get that some models, like eternal inflation or certain cyclic cosmologies, entertain the idea of an infinite past or blur the standard arrow of time... but how does pushing the origin question back indefinitely actually resolve anything?
The problem is that:
- We have a parent universe we will never be able to observe.
could be a true statement.
The "infinite sequence" part is just a likely implication, it isn't necessarily true. We would need information we can't access to find out.
I doubt you understand what science is about. The proposed theory, like any theory, should be judged on its power of prediction and simplicity. It doesn't matter if it doesn't satisfy your curiosity.
Well said
where is the "prediction and simplicity" part in this theory?
> "why does the universe have the parameters it does?"
To those who say "oh but if this parameter was slightly off, that thing I subjectively decided to pick wouldn't have happened!":
How would you know that this universe could exist in any other way? Wouldn't things just stabilize into certain frequencies and lengths after some time?
To me "fine tuning" isn't really a conundrum, it is just question begging and you don't need to wish it away with multiverses.
> we're lucky to be in one we can live in
Nitpick: We couldn't be anywhere else, except nonexistent.
The anthropic principle