Black hole cosmology suggests that the Milky Way and every other observable galaxy in our universe is contained within a black hole that formed in another, much larger, universe.
The theory challenges many fundamental models of the cosmos, including the idea that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe.
It also provides the possibility that black holes within our own universe may be the boundaries to other universes, opening up a potential scenario for a multiverse.
Mine blown 🤯
Dude, after reading the paper from start to finish, this whole thing seems off.
- The guy's an associate professor of computer science and has no degree in cosmology, but he's talking about cosmological implications of these findings.
- Every single paper cited supporting his argument was written by himself (in exactly one case, it was written by himself and a coauthor). In total, Shamir cites himself 106 130 times.
- Numerous other papers by numerous other authors (some mentioned by this paper in attempted rebuttals) using a variety of methodologies find this not to be the case.
- It violates the cosmological principle used by major and highly successful models of the universe.
- The way he performed this analysis was an algorithm which he wrote. When he cites papers that have used this algorithm, he only cites himself, indicating no other academic in the world has thought this algorithm is seriously useful for this application.
- When speaking to The Independent (which is of really middling quality), instead of speaking about the data itself and how he arrived at it, he (again with no formal background in cosmology) starts talking about the most clickbaity possible implications of this data.
It's totally possible Shamir is right and that there really is a massive bias. That would be extremely cool. However, he's published numerous papers on this over the last decade yet still seems to be the only one who agrees with it. Which to me is highly unusual.
Thanks for breaking that down, I wish newspapers or even BBC News did this. They do now have BBC Verify but its never super clear of their findings, certainly not in the format that you've just used. Perhaps theirs should be called BBC Balance. The only thing I would say with regard to your first point is that I'm not against the idea that any individual could make a breakthrough. At least with regard to theory.
We already know that throughout the history of cosmology, whole experts have been wrong when a new discovery is made. E.g. Highly likely that not everyone believed that Earth was centre of the Universe (like the earlier science communities claimed). The issue with this guy is he's using his own biased ideas and data and some people believe whatever is printed in a newspaper must be right.
Only silver lining is at least there clickbaity headlines give the public something more substantial to think about for 60 seconds instead of what the next Kardashian is up to...
To be sure, I agree with your interpretation of your first point. I was establishing that as part of a pattern rather than an end-all "you can't do science without a degree in that field", especially since applied CS is monumentally important to every field. It's that lack of formal education in cosmology combined with a pattern of only citing oneself for support of one's arguments combined with this being a long-held and broadly successful assumption combined with numerous cosmologists using a variety of methodologies which they think are acceptable combined with no cosmologists choosing to use his algorithm combined with ostensibly using his time with The Independent talking almost exclusively about deep cosmological implications.*
* This last one could be The Independent's fault; it's technically possible Shamir talked their ear off about CS stuff and methodology and previous attempts and what he wants to do going forward but The Independent only ran with the juicy sfuff.
Thanks for doing the news org's job for them. They either don't know how or aren't willing to do it.
This is what I missed on r/science. The thorough paper critique! Thank you so much!
@Bitswap@lemmy.world (moderator), can we have a rule about clickbait headlines.
I’m kind of getting sick of these pop-science articles that exagerrate everything times 1000x in the headline. In any other discipline that kind of hyperbole would be considered a lie.
I have always wondered about this and it's always been the question I would want to ask neil degrasse tyson about if I ever met him... I never realized there was a term for it or even other people believed it...
My other crazy theory is that we are always in a state of jumping between realities... As a state of self preservation... We exist in the reality where we keep living. With the possibility of realities being infinite and the possibility of a subset of those infinites being basically the same as the one you're in...
Who knows maybe it's just a reassuring way to be happy knowing that one day your actually going to die instead of all those times you have felt like you have almost died being truly a time you have died...
As I understand it, the idea of Quantum Immortality is a bit more nuanced then that. It's not that you would be "jumping between realities". It's more-so that, as the reality where you are alive is the only one you can possibly be aware of, any reality where you would die simply wouldn't be seen by you. The splits where the potential to die exist would only be seen as "close calls" to the consciousness that is you. It's more so a resolution of logic than a cross-dimensional mind swap. A pop-culture example of this is sort of seen in
Movie name
The Prestige.
**Extra Major** plot spoiler
Quick summary - in the movie, Hugh Jackman's character gets access to a machine that instantly duplicates him, which he uses for his magic shows. To resolve the "small" issue of there being an ever multiplying amount of him, he has a mechanism to immediately drown the version of him on stage when they disappear as the other version reveals himself elsewhere in the theater. At one point, he talks about how he was always terrified that he would be the one being drowned. There's a few interesting things about this particular line, the most pertinent one being that he is never the version that gets drowned, evident from the fact he is talking about it. Obviously this is just fiction, but I think it's a good illustration of the concept. There are also a lot of details left nebulous, possible details of which could suggest Destructive Teleportation instead.
Our consciousness continuously transferring between realities to stay alive is kinda crazy ngl
What's the big question you've always wondered about though? It's not clear from your comment
If the whole observable galaxy is inside a black hole...
Black holes get bigger and expand as does our observable universe... I always wondered if the two were connected...
But from reading everything in this post it seems like the theory doesn't hold up... But also who knows...
I like my other theory better anyways.
My theory is that the Big Bang is local and there have been other big bangs outside our observable universe and our entire existence is inside a multi trillion year expanding and contracting space foam
Big Crunch and white holes and all that
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(time)
The concept of recreation is pretty old
I recommend critically reading the paper. It is quite accessible to those with college-level science background.
Most importantly, it is still highly controversial whether this galaxy rotation direction bias actually exists. If you look at section 4 of the paper, the author is debating against different groups that did similar surveys and found no bias. Someone needs to actually work through this author's methodology as well as those of other groups and figure out what is going on.
If there is indeed a bias, that is super exciting! An anisotropic universe due to being in a black hole would be a very cool explanation. But given the ongoing debate, a general-audience publication like Independent presenting this rotation bias as a given fact is very poor journalism.
Last few paragraphs...
Shamir noted that an alternative explanation for why most of the galaxies in the study rotate clockwise is that the Milky Way’s rotational velocity is having an impact on the measurements.
“If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” said Shamir.
"The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself.”
That's leading me to think that that's actually the more probable explanation, and the black hole idea comes in a distant second in terms of probability, but is much more attention grabbing/sensational/click-baity.
The black hole idea is actually weirdly solid, its a case of the maths says we definetaly should be but observation and just intuition says its crazy. If you consider the event horizon to be the surface of a volume, black holes get less dense as their radius increases, you can have a black hole with the same density as rock, water, air, even the miniscule density of the gas in a vacuum, so long as teh black hole is large enough. The average density of the observable universe is higher than the density of a black hole the size of the observable universe so technically we should be in one.
Technically this doesn't have to affect anything, larger black holes can have gentler gravity gradients and nothing in physics actually demands all the mass inside be concentrated at a miniscule central point, it just works out that way for black holes of the size we've seen so far. So the entire universe could be a black hole (assuming its finite) with the event horizon just being functionally inacessable and the black hole so large that internal conditions aren't really influenced in any way.
Surely at some point it stops being useful to apply the same terminology to such vastly different concepts. If the universe is a black hole and Sagittarius A* is a black hole then "black hole" doesn't communicate anything effectively outside of extremely niche astrophysics conversations.
The mass of the visible universe is apparently enough to make a black hole with an event horizon ten times larger than the visible universe's. I don't understand how that hasn't happened already, but apparently it just doesn't look like it's happened ("unless...").
It could totally have happened already and we just don't notice, though there's kind of a critical size where a black hole just gets infinitely big as adsorbing a stray hydrogen atom in the vacuum of space increases its radius enough to encompass multiple new hydrogen atoms and the whole thing just expands to encompass the entire universe. Kind of when everything is a black hole then nothing is a black hole sorta situation.
Some of the findings match a pre-existing pipe dream but this boring alternative is pretty neat too:
The latest findings do not provide definitive proof of black hole cosmology, with more evidence required to fully understand the implications.
Shamir noted that an alternative explanation for why most of the galaxies in the study rotate clockwise is that the Milky Way’s rotational velocity is having an impact on the measurements.
“If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” said Shamir.
"The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself.”
That alternative idea seems like an Occam's Razor type explanation. I like it.
Yeah it's like either I don't understand 3D space or they don't. Clockwise to what? What if you go stand on the South Pole, does it all reverse? Maybe they need to read Enders Game again.
The research was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a study titled ‘The distribution of galaxy rotation in JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey’.
Yeah!
I've kinda thought that were some n-dimension universe getting sucked into an n-dimension black hole, and what happens as that universe crosses the event horizon is the big bang, the arrow of time. And all of the matter and forces that have them appearing to interact is just some beautiful n-dimension spaghettification.
The universe isn't expanding; all mafter within it is shrinking, being crushed. all matter appears to be accelerating further and further away because, well, it is. From our perspective.
Think of our whole universe as the most epic allegory of the cave possible.
I'll go back to ripping my bong now.
Dude
If this is true, do you think time exists outside the outer black hole? In the least, I might imagine it's moving very differently than our interior universe.
Idk I've thought about it and it's like, if time is created by the passage into the event horizon and it's an artifact of the n-dimension universe it can both imply that this n-dimension universe doesn't have "time" as we know it and our experience of it is, again, artifactual. However, the "movement" of this universe toward a n-dimension black hole kind of implies time, at least in the sense that we understand it (physical state changes of matter. It was there, now it's here! How'd it happen? Time!)
So... "Yes" but I would wager if my stoner theory holds gravity (pun intended) that whatever "time" exists in a parent n-dimension universe is not the same as time as we understand it? But maybe it is! Idk. Someone ask Neil degrasse Tyson why I'm wrong. And dont let him fool you that my model wouldn't account for red and blue shifts as our little matter-islands shrink and "accelerate away" from one another. It do! 🙂
Also fun to ponder with my silly stoner model here is that... Well... There is a supermassive black hole at the center of most galaxies... Like it's some sort of iterative and exponentiating recursive process? 😵💫
"Time" exists in any reality that isn't static, it's simply the concept of being with any measureable change. Doesn't have to be linear or consistent but if there's two quarks then there's time.
It does seem somewhat likely that the flow of time would be different if other universes exist. Hard to apply our physical laws to guesses entirely outside observable reality.
The Frensh-German TV-Channel Arte published a Documentary about the theorem, that we are probably living in a black hole. According to them its based on the work of Nikodem Poplawski (mathematician and physicist). It was a kinda nice theory and seemed appealing. But Im no scientist and I have no idea about higher Math and Physics. Sadly, on the German Arte-TV-Site the video is not avaible anymore. (According to German Law public-TV-Channels arent allowed to keep their Videos up online unlimited) https://www.arte.tv/...
But I assume there are other sources, probably even in other languages.
Oh sure but when I say this I'm "too high" and need to "quit smoking." I been told y'all.
the idea that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe
I always thought this was the consensus, but turns out, it was just as far back as we can go where physics as we know it work. Not everyone claimed that nothing existed before.
nothing existed before
Thing is that there's no "before", because time itself started with the big bang. The questions to ask are: is there anything other than our universe, and does that even matter? If nothing can get in or out of our universe, then there's no way to prove the existence of anything outside of it and there's zero impact one way or another.
Time as we know it started. That doesn't mean time as we don't know it wasn't around.
I saw some science stuff on YouTube the other day that explained that the expansion of the universe seems to have started before the big bang. Also that the expansion is what caused particles to come into existence from nothing and thus creating the big bang.
Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHdUFPAK7f0
Anyway, you're right that whatever was before or outside the universe is irrelevant to us. However, if we can get closer to understanding as much of the process as possible, it might still pave the way for something that we can use today.
"Thing is that there's no "before", because time itself started with the big bang."
Good to know modern science is catching up to fourth century theology:
"There was therefore never any time when you had not made anything, because you made time itself."
Saint Augustine posited in "Confessions" that before the Universe was created there was no time. Also, that the Universe was not made in any "place" because no place existed before the Universe existed(space is also created with the Universe).
For exact argumentation you can refer to the text, I suppose(chapter XI). I just think it is fascinating that conceptual tools and concepts developed by theologians and philosophers more than 1500 years ago are still incredibly useful.
For exact argumentation you can refer to the text, I suppose(chapter XI). I just think it is fascinating that conceptual tools and concepts developed by theologians and philosophers more than 1500 years ago are still incredibly useful.
They're not even a little bit useful. Using tautilogical arguments like this are actually a disservice to science, and anti-thetical to the scientific method.
I fail to see how this is tautological.
How is that antithetical to the scientific method? Science uses routinely uses manufactured conceptual instruments, theoretical objects and even applies mundane concepts in a metaphorical way. Science is a struggle to create theoretical frameworks that explain observations, and this is why in times of crisis science often turns to philosophy, since old frameworks might not be doing it anymore and philosophy provides new ones, as it happened with the crisis of classical mechanics, for example. This is a relevant example because it relates to the issues of space being absolute or relative and time as well.
Kurtzegat (spelling debatable) did a video on this almost a year ago in case anyone wants a 10ish minute simplified version
I honestly appreciate that we don't understand the universe. Theories keep evolving and that's what science should look like. If we can't question "established" scientific theories, we have abandoned the scientific method. Strong theories hold up. Like the theory of gravity, although even there I'm not convinced we have a complete understanding. Good answers are good, but who knows what we might be capable of if we keep pushing for more.
Or you might just as well live given the absurdity of it all.
Pulls deeply on the cigarette, stomps it out and then waves the pistol's barrel towards a dark corner of the room.
"Now get into the box..."
we might just as well die
Because it's not what you expected?
I can assure you, whatever you expected is just as strange and absurd as this.
Let me put this in another way:
To think that time might have not existed, then started up at some point, breaks my brain.
To think that time might go on for infinity in the past, with no starting point, also breaks my brain.
No because it is just so crushingly huge. I mean maybe humanity could understand and even partially explore the universe at some point. But trying to understand a universe within a universe, fuck that. Whose to say it is not a sequence of universes?
Man, this is so cool!!
I like these observations and theories, despite them being the ramblings of very ignorant creatures (all of us as a species).
This said, we don't have evidence to suggest we aren't the most intelligent creatures to ever exist. It seems very, very unlikely... But, such is the rarity of life so far as we've observed.
So... These are lots of fun! If not for any other reason, than for the reason of humbling us all.
Explains the warped timeline
black holes all the way down?
The way things are going, more like we got tossed in an endless trash can. I don’t blame the Vulcans.
Ok yea that makes sense because we’re in hell
I'm mostly curious how higher dimensioal space could explain (perceived) expansion. Like: maybe we live in a 3d bubble embedded in an n-d space which keeps on collapsing, pouring more and more energy into our "universe"...
Sooooo the expanse was right?
🐢🐢🐢Turtles 🐢🐢🐢
But if this leaves anyone in a philosophical mood, I leave this video on a comic book villain that unpacks into a metaphysical wonderment.
I’ve always believed that our entire universe is the inside of a gravastar in a 4D-universe. Our universe is the false vacuum inside it, permanently in superposition. We’re just one of the infinite potential states the wave function of the Bose-Einstein condensate inside could collapse into.
Oh, and gravity as a force would be the result of the 4D gravastar’s centrifugal force as it rotates on 2-axis, and that would be why we can’t figure it out.
At least that’s what I’ve always imagined reality. (Also known as my rambling brain doing its best in the moments between wakefulness and sleep)
Edit: tbh 5D/3-axis makes more sense
You might like this video by PBS Spacetime. I'm not sure how this relates to your centrifugal force idea, but we do actually know a few things about "what gravity is" that are really interesting.
Oh, I’ve seen this before! Although my interpretation is purely spatial and lacks any temporal component aside from the act of rotation itself. So it’s still applicable.
That why our timeline seems to keep radically changing?
Go Wildcats!
Whoa.
If this is true, this makes sense to me. Right or wrong, I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of infinite, endless space. Like God just existing for all time, never having a start or a stop is a cheap way of admitting we just don’t know, and may never know. Why does “God” and the universe get to be treated differently than everything else? Things come from other things.
I digress. I have often daydreamed that our universe only appears infinite because it’s actually a sphere or a bubble, and what we see as infinite is merely a reflection of our finite space like an infinity mirror would look.
But those ideas are just that: daydreams. If anything, I hope that the scientific and academic communities can keep open minds and not dismiss these radical ideas because it contradicts their religious fervor.
God was created by man. Change my mind.
Yes, it's called Trump and it's sucking up fucking everything.
Can't i just have one article that doesn't mention that fat sack of shit. This is actually really interesting physics, and you had to go and ruin it.
Obama turned up, too, but it was funny.
i know trump and elon are big topic now, but didn't expect to show up in an astronomy post
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
yeah it's just the most headline grabbing possibility
save