Thursday 6 January 2011

The Lava Lamp Shaped Universe

Two of the great scientific questions of the age are what was before the "big bang" and what goes on inside a black hole.  It has always struck me as blindingly obvious that the "big bang" and block holes are both opposite ends of the same tunnel.  Whatever gets sucked into a black hole will eventually get spewed out into a new universe somewhere in a parallel dimension.  I believe Lee Smolin has done some research on this.

How does this work?  Well, imagine of you would a huge lava lamp.  As time goes by it changes shape, bits bubble off and bits join up again but there is always the same amount of "stuff".  The way i see it there is an unbreakable skin round the universe that can increase or decrease in size. when a bubble occurs it doesn't break off from the main body but instead goes off into another dimension in the same space. Then matter gets sucked out of the old universe and into the new one, a bit like sand running from one compartment in an egg timer to another.

So how does this relate to our universe?  Well imagine there was another universe U1.  U1 at some point in its life gets a black hole in it.  This is some sort of hole between dimensions.  matter starts leaking out from U1 and that forms our universe U2.  As it is in a different dimension it is an entity unto itself.  The bang in the "big bang" is the force of the matter flowing into our universe.  As more and more flow in, our universe expands and U1 shrinks.  This carries on until U2 starts to develop black holes.  Now we are leaking matter into any number of other universes Un.  Eventually once there are enough black holes, the amount of matter leaving U2 will be greater than the amount coming in.  This is why the universe seems to be contracting.  It is literally getting smaller.

This makes much more sense than all the matter sucked into a black hole being reduced to an infinitely small point or all the matter in the universe coming from one either.  it doe however make more questions that need answering.  If you have more than one black hole then what happens when they meet?  If the rest of the universe has been consumed then does one consume the other or can one suck the matter back out the other?  If the second black hole is consumed, would this have any effect on its child universes?  Who knows?  Is any of this measurable?  Probably not.