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It Really is "Turtles all the Way Down".

gnome said:
Nah, not an infinite regression. Just three. The black holes inside the black holes inside the black holes don't have anything in them.
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Why three? Just because that’s how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? (you know the owl was the wisest). Without some special pleading those last terminal layers (nothing inside the black hole below and no black hole around the universe above) are going to need some real fundamental differences in the quantum gravity that explains their formation. Oops there's that big first hurdle again.
 
It is absolutely special pleading, in that I made it up entirely.
 
"I have requested they be merged.

Gord "

Then Spock will get to meet Evil Spock With A Beard and go to Quark's for a few Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters. Rowdy Starship Troopers start a brawl and are calmed down by Jame Retief in a diplomatic fashion. John Carter and his trusty Thoat, Freddy, are asking if Thuvia is still tending bar during Friday Happy Week.
 
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Jeff Corey said:
"I have requested they be merged.

Gord "

Then Spock will get to meet Evil Spock With A Beard and go to Quark's for a few Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters. Rowdy Starship Troopers start a brawl and are calmed down by Jame Retief in a diplomatic fashion. John Carter and his trusty Thoat, Freddy, are asking if Thuvia is still tending bar during Friday Happy Week.
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Hang on a sec while I get out my sonic screwdriver. :cool:
 
Pretty sure I've seen Sol shoot down this idea with a very simple argument based on observations which contradict the possibility.
 
boooeee said:
I didn't know High Times had a science column.
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Like, what if the universe, man, was like one of an infinite number and they were inside black holes, but inside each other too.

And what if, it stopped expanding and collapsed and.........


...dude, what was I just talking about?
 
I don't know dude but that was like so excrementally phantasmagorically deep. You should like do that thing where you know you like write stuff down and then people like read it. Dude that would be so assume. You could bifurcate the disestablishment and recoflabulate it to a more incohesive, sorry, dicocohesive embellishment. You know what I'm saying!! Ok, who's got the liter?
 
Baby universes don't need black holes to hide in. They can be spawned by random quantum fluctuations, breaking off from the underlying Void into their own private spacetimes.

The black hole speculation requires that a universe must already exist, to make the black holes the baby ones are born in. This is madness. How did the first one come about? If you imagine an infinite regression, then how did the entire infinite regression come about? What kind of hole was IT born in?

Therein lies madness, and then religion.
 
geni said:
I hate science by press release.
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How about science by science. Just because this article is the first you've heard of it doesn't mean the same is true for everyone else. This is absolutely real science. It may well be wrong, but that's a very different matter.

Gord_in_Toronto said:
It probably loops around in an infinite regression such that no universe is not inside another one. Still looking for the First Cause though.
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Indeed. I doubt we'll ever get an answer that will settle that part. Either you need to get something from nothing, or it's infinite turtles. Even if we manage to come up with what seems to be a definitive answer, it's just not going to satisfy most people since neither of those options really seem to make sense from a human-scale perspective.
 
Cuddles said:
Indeed. I doubt we'll ever get an answer that will settle that part. Either you need to get something from nothing, or it's infinite turtles. Even if we manage to come up with what seems to be a definitive answer, it's just not going to satisfy most people since neither of those options really seem to make sense from a human-scale perspective.
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We don't need to get something from nothing if 'nothing' is a bogus concept to begin with. All that's really required is a fundamental, timeless Void (the closest possible 'something' to the contradictory nothingness), and you've got your bottom turtle. Then all you need is quantum mechanics, which apparently thrives in a Void. Both Void and mechanics were noticed decades ago, and have been successfully toyed with since.
 
Black holes are finite in size, they have event horizons and at least from the outside would appear to have a middle. Also, don't they collapse inward, not expand outward?

[The author of this post admits having not yet read the articles and to only skimming the other thread posts. :p]
 
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Skeptic Ginger said:
Black holes are finite in size, they have event horizons and at least from the outside would appear to have a middle. Also, don't they collapse inward, not expand outward?

[The author of this post admits having not yet read the articles and to only skimming the other thread posts. :p]
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The event horizon of a black hole does expand as the black hole consumes mass and becomes more massive. But the contents of the hole, the mass, is squinched down to a point.

They're hard-pulling bastards, but I very seriously doubt they're universes.
 
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