Sitting here, I have a moment to open my mind and let the ink flow to the pages, or in this case, let my fingers pull pixels of light directly down from the conduit of the muses as I type. Likely this missive qualifies as much more spiritual than scientific, but perhaps the two are not mutually exclusive, any more than are yin and yang, or why and how.
Think of this, perhaps, as a stretch of science fiction imaginings of how the Universe could work. A vision or a dream that has substance only in the multiverse which is in my own head.
Black holes have fascinated me since I was a small child.
The smallest is called primordial, these are hypothetical and possibly ancient and you can read about them from wikipedia.
Most black holes are stellar and contain the mass of 10 to 100 or so suns, which fit within a radius of about 10 miles. More or less. Our sun is relatively small, many stars out there are dozens to hundreds of the mass of Sol, and when they die, they collapse into this type.
And then there are supermassive black holes, which are tens of thousands to billions of solar masses. These live as the cores of galaxies. They are large enough that billions of solar systems orbit them, just as the earth and the other planets orbit our sun.
I will not go into how these are formed or what causes them to grow, other than ask the question, What happens to all that matter that is pulled in and ripped apart within the event horizon?
Since even light can’t escape, and all within the event horizon has time essentially cut off from our universe, we can’t really know for sure. The molecules, apparently, rip apart to mere energy and compress into a singularity: which is a single point of infinite density and infinite smallness.
OK… that sounds exactly like something else scientists describe...
At the moment of what is called the Big Bang, the all of everything that has been or ever will be was compressed into a dot of infinite density and infinite smallness. Yes, you were there too… or, at least the energy that now makes up the substance of your body was. It immediately expanded into the reality that is our universe, and is still expanding.
It has been said that the first inflationary expansion was faster than light… perhaps, but I get the feeling that since time likely hadn’t really kicked in as we know it, “faster” is a relative term. A few seconds and a billion years could have been the same thing, depending on perspective. Let’s just say, things expanded very quickly.
The plasma-like substance that was the universe coagulated, sub-atomic particles formed, photons formed (Let there be light!) Over the next tens of thousands to billions of years, atoms and molecules and nebulas and stars and galaxies formed and died and exploded and made more and more complex atoms and molecules.
And then we evolved, and our ancestors looked up at the sky and started asking questions about how the stars got there. Ten thousand years later, and we are still asking.
Is that what went on inside Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy? Is universe-building a normal occurrence within the billions of black holes out there? Is there a galaxy orbiting our universe beyond the event horizon that encompasses it?
Many scientists talk about the multiverse, but most don’t try to define how the universes are connected. Nor do they try to explain where the matter of our universe came from, or what led to the Big Bang. This explanation makes sense to me for both questions.
And what flavor of consciences exist within those black hole universes? And what is reality like within the universe that birthed our black hole?
I like the idea of fractals, the very small imitating the very large and everything in between. Atoms appear as solar systems which look like galaxies, which I believe look like the whole universe. A speck of sand looks like a pebble, which looks like a stone, which looks like a mountain. If you were small enough to live on an electron, what would your perception of the universe be? Or if you were large enough that our solar system was an atom, what would you see? What time would you experience?
The large scale images of the universe to me look like neurons. Strange correlation.
I believe these are limits of dimensions; height, width, depth, and time are but 4. Infinite smallness or infinite bigness are two more. The speed of light is another limit of dimension. The event horizon of a black hole yet another.
This is a very long winded way to say that there is no reason to assume a singularity inside a black hole is really just a single point from its own perspective.
More to come…
Images courtesy of
Thank you to the great scientist Nikodem Poplawski for theorizing and writing about black holes as universes. His is an inspiring article