well?
well?
209 comments
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I took a physics course at a community college over 20 years ago and one of the things that stood out to me was the professor telling us not to overthink or assign too much romanticism to the idea of black holes.
His message was basically “it just means the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light… if you plug the size and mass of the universe into the escape velocity formula, the result you get back is greater than the speed of light, so our entire universe is a black hole.”
If this was being discussed at a community college decades ago then I think the new discoveries aren’t as revelatory as they would at first appear to the general public.
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Nah really it was probably some small thing the media got a hold of and just ran with. I think you're spot on
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And a relevant smbc for good measure.
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On the contrary; while I have heard the explanation that the commenter you replied to has said I have also heard a slightly different theory:
Our universe is the 3 dimensional event horizon of a 4th dimensional black hole. By extension we may find that black holes in our universe have similar funky 2 dimensional areas at their even horizons.
I am sure clickbait articles are part of it but there also seems to be several actual theories surrounding the idea of the nature of our universe relating to black holes.
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another thing I learned at some point: Just because a physics formula returns a result, doesn't mean that it's reality
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TBF black holes themselves were originally just the result of a Physics formula, but they eventually turned out to be a "reality". Sometimes that shit happens, yo.
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Iff the rules of physics are accurate then it does, but we don't know that they are. In fact, we're pretty sure we're missing some things. See: The Crisis in Cosmology.
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Orr, you’re missing the obvious alternative here - the guy was a legendary level scientist, but the government stole his research and threatened his family and sidelined him into being a community college professor so that no one pays attention to his “drivel” so that they continue to control us into being workers for the capitalist pigs
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I mean, the model was first developed in the 70s so maybe not that specific guy
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Would make for a decent flick, get Hollywood on the call
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Theory is one thing.
Observation is the next step.-
Absolutely. I don’t want to minimize the importance of the new discoveries in any way; I’m just saying this isn’t the great surprise the original post seems to think it is.
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When I first saw pictures of galaxies as a kid I noticed they all looked like black holes.
In a way we're all just bits of organic matter mid-flush, waiting for the Drainpipe of Destiny
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In a way we're all just bits of organic matter mid-flush, waiting for the Drainpipe of Destiny
Word
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Okay, so now you can barely afford your rent inside a black hole. Enjoy the enhanced granularity of your desperation!
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That would explain why it feels like my bank account is being sucked dry.
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Fortunately the universe can get Cosmic Overdraft Protection, for only a small annual fee and 23 squillion bazillion stomptillion dollars per occurrence.
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What is this black hole, my ex-wife?
tugs collar
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I can barely afford rent!
Well... the good news is you can stretch your income a bit further with spaghettification!
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Beans are economical too
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nuclear pasta is very energy dense
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paying rent sometimes feels like throwing money into a black hole
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The same for mortgages too really. All these people out there toting new construction and how it’s good for property values seem to forget that higher property values means 1) higher property taxes, and 2) higher priority values, for when you sell your home and need to buy a new one.
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Only sometimes?
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Therefore your landlord's bank account is a black hole. Therefore black holes are inside banks. Therefore the universe is inside a bank.
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cosmic horror
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It's actually throwing money into BlackRock.
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Don't worry, the money goes to paying your landlord's mortgage.
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This is a postulation not a discovery.
Someone did a weird math thingy that gave a word result and this was how they tried to explain it. There's been zero confirmation this is actually the case. Just like they can't decide if dark energy/matter is a thing.
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Dark Matter/Energy is just a placeholder for stuff we can detect or see influencing things we can detect but have no friggin idea what it is yet. It could be many different things all at once; or nothing and we just got some other things about what we observe wrong. It's just a symptom of taking what we know from observing the universe and reconciling it with what we know about math, and trying to make a mathematical model that recreates the universe as we have observed it.
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We have a theory for expansion of the universe. It is called "the big bang theory".
However according to the math our universe should slow down expanding, but we can observe it is speeding up. Solution? Dark Energy.
There are models that try to simulate the orbits and shit of things we can see. Now those models aren't working however... Solution? Dark matter.
This is very run down concept of what dark matter and energy is. Basically shit we need for the math to work out to the observation we make.
However I don't think we are inside a black hole. This would mean that instead of mostly nothing our universe would be cramped with matter....
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If you take all the mass in our universe and run it through the Schwarzschild equation, you get a black hole with about the same radius as our observable universe.
Things don't need to be tightly packed to be a black hole, there just needs to be enough stuff in an area.
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There's also been some major leaps in dark matter physics in the last few years. Revisiting primordial black holes using lasers and microlensing might actually be able to get supporting evidence here before long if the hypothesis holds.
PBS Space Time has a good video breaking this possibility and methodology down.
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Difference being that we understand dark matter exponentially more than dark energy. We can actually observe it's gravity affecting light.
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There's also cyclic conformal universe theory, put forth by Penrose.
Where once you have an empty enough space.... its mathematically indistinguishable from a singularity.
So, if its true, then yeah, we could be inside of a blackhole/singularity.
At this point, that doesn't really matter.
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So, dark matter and energy is the Universe's theorized version of the Kelevin (from The Office).
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What if we're not in a black hole, but in the aftermath of a vacuum decay event?
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That is literally what the current big bang theory says! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflationary_epoch?wprov=sfla1
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We're inside a dust cup?
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Ok I've been meaning to ask this in the Space community or the NoStupidQuestions community. I've seen this news circling around the past 2 weeks and have been watching videos of people talking about it.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think the gist is that astronomers discovered with the JWST that some galaxies at the end of the observable universe appear to be younger than they are supposed to be. So it kinda blows a hole in the big bang expansion where objects farther away should be older. And that somehow ties in with the theory that our universe is inside a blackhole.
It's fascinating but I don't know what to do with that information other than just be fascinated. I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson who said "So what does this new discovery matter to us? Nothing", because us being in a blackhole doesn't change anything in the grand universal scheme of things.
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From what I've seen, it's not that they're "young" galaxies, but that they shouldn't have had enough time to develop if the universe were truly so crazily homogenous from the big bang. It doesn't necessarily disprove the big bang, just means the universe might not be as "smooth" as previous assumptions.
Any scientist worth their salt should be readily able to admit it was always an assumption, just one that proved congruent with observations until now.
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I've always liked this theory, imagining the cosmos is just a series/web/tree of black holes draining into the next. Everything gets recycled eventually.
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It meshes well with my occasional feeling that reality is just circling the drain.
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actually, we are inside the dream of someone else, and that one too is again in a dream ...
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It doesn't answer where it all came from. Whatever theory or religion you choose, there's no answer to this question apart from it suddenly appeared which implies something can be created out of nothing and that creates a whole lot of new questions and possibilities.
It's also just whitehole theory which is possible but we've never seen one and we likely should have by now.
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Another big part of it is that if the big bang happened evenly then galaxies and other objects should be spinning in random directions. So far that's not what's been observed. There seems to be a preferred direction everything spins in.
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The direction the black hole "toilet" flushes as it sucks stuff in and smashes it against each other?
Maybe there's a parallel universe called Astraliastra where the black hole flushes the other direction!
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There seems to be a preferred direction everything spins in.
I'm sorry but i think that's just not true?
Inside the solar system, yes, planets more or less spin around the same axis than the whole solar system does.
But the axis of the solar system and of the whole milky way are like 63° towards each other. Source So, not the same direction at all.
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We also have to remember that we can only see a bounded sphere of the universe from our frame of reference.
If we were to move our observation points to elsewhere in the universe, we'll be able to see more of the universe and challenge our current theories.
The JSWT sees only what it can, and our theories about the universe can only extend as far as that evidence. Those galaxies might appear to be younger, but the science is never finished!
Probably goes without saying
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The Hubble radius of the universe is also equal to its Schwarzschild radius, which is a requirement for any “we’re inside a black hole” theory.
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That's not an empirical observation nor a new discovery though. It just an analogy that leans on the definition of Schwarzschild Radius. No one is seriously implying, that we're somehow trapped in the very center of a black hole with the Hubble limit as the event horizon equidistant around us.
In fact, the analogy only holds, if the Hubble parameter is not constant and this new result, if it holds up, would still indicate, that it is not constant. As was expected by the standard model of cosmology. If the Hubble constant is decreasing, and consensus is that it does, than the Hubble radius is also different from an event horizon in the following way: light reaching us from more than 5 billion years ago comes from regions that have always been receding from us at speeds faster than light.
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Maybe the far away galaxies are just the close galaxies seen from the other side?
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Nah, that would require spacetime to curve a lot more than it does. It'd also have to curve in the other direction (local spacetime is hyperbolic, "local" as in basically all of the observable universe). Calculations show the universe must be several times larger than the observable universe (I forgot the exact numbers, but iirc it's in the single digits or low teens) in order to match even Hubble observations, let alone JWST observations.
IMO, it's likely that the universe just isn't as homogenous as assumed, or maybe that certain geometries that span across spacetime or movement of the galaxies simply make us think the galaxies are further away than they actually are, or both.
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Tax breaks for the rich is the only solution
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Wouldn't it even be more helpful to just relieve the ultrarich from taxes? So they could better pay their rent too. I'd throw in one or two moneyz to help.
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I suddenly feel something trickling down from above. Is this what they were talking about all these years? Is this a good thing? It smells bad, like really bad. Like somebody is cooking meth while they have a near fatal case of diarrhea. What am I supposed to do?
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Get hooked on meth, it'll wildly change your priorities.
(This is a joke, please do not do this)
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NOT "discovered inside black hole", just gained further theoretical evidence for the Earth being in a less dense area of the universe. There has been actual evidence of such for some time (at least a decade), but there is uncertainty at such large scales so it cannot be called conclusive based only on a couple types of observation that may have erroneous procedures.
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so basically We're out in butt fuck no where in space and the aliens aren't coming any time soon cause they essentially live in New York City and we're in a town in Iowa that no one has ever heard of.
typical.
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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.
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It’s entirely possible that there are no aliens in the “New York City” part of the universe.
Dense regions of space will have much more interactions between stellar systems and may not be stable enough for life to evolve. It could be why we haven’t seen anyone else, they’re all in their own little pockets of peace.
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Flyover state.
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Being from Iowa, I take offense to that... But yes, you are correct.
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Less dense as in ~20% less dense. It's absolutely nowhere near the population density difference of rural vs NYC, even assuming matter == chance for life, which simply is not the case, either.
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But then there's the guy who added all the mass and energy of the observable universe, calculated its' Schwarzschild Radius, and came up with 13.8 billion light years.
There's also how our observable universe's Hubble Horizon acts like a black hole event horizon, the way in which even the speed of light is insufficient to escape beyond.
A lot of the math inside a black hole is eerily similar to the math of our own horizon, as traced by the age of the universe plus the speed of light.
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That is simply how horizons work. It's nothing magical about our universe. It's discussed in every astrophysics course worth its salt year one...
PBS Spacetime has many episodes on horizons and this very concept comes up a lot. It's also equally probable using such simple logic that we are in a white hole given the effects of dark energy, but the truth is they are very different sorts of horizons.
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Nah, there's been a bunch of discussion about our entire universe being inside a black hole.
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We should all be celebrating our good fortune, protection against a dark forest strike!
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Sucking us into a black hole WAS the attack.
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Dark Forest theory is just way for a Chinese author to make up bullshit nonsense physics to turn 3D space into 2D space via Clarktech while desperately trying to not piss off the CCCP.
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Dude. Relax. It was fiction.
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Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien.
And so, Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,” he said. “I would evacuate tomorrow, to the United States or Europe or—I don’t know.” The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice. He went on, “Here’s the truth: if you were to become the President of China tomorrow, you would find that you had no other choice than to do exactly as he has done.”
It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes. I was reminded of something he wrote in his afterword to the English edition of “The Three-Body Problem”: “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds
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What's wrong about it? It seems like the obvious assumption that running into intelligent alien civilizations, them figuring out that we exist, would be extremely dangerous.
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Anyone got a link to either nasa or a good article explaining it?
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/10/big-bang-theory-is-wrong-claim-scientists/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-inside-a-black-hole/
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798?login=false
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Scientific American points to an important fact.
"With our latest surveys, such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Euclid, by my very rough estimation, we’ve taken pictures of somewhere around 100 million galaxies out of the two trillion or so estimated to exist in the entire observable universe.
Shamir’s paradigm-shattering conclusion relies on 263 of them."
They are discussing bias in the selection.
"Unfortunately, this kind of extreme selection introduces many opportunities for bias to creep in. When we test a new idea in cosmology—indeed, in all of science—we work to make our conclusion as robust as possible. For example, if we were to change any of these filtering steps, from the selection of survey region to the threshold for deciding whether to include a galaxy in the analysis, our results should hold up or at least show a clear trend where the signal becomes stronger. But there isn’t enough information about such methodological checks in Shamir’s paper to make that judgment, which casts doubt on the validity of the conclusions."
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Both are fair and valid.
Peaceful science & good housing should go hand in hand.
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I mean, we can talk about it for a bit, Angie, if it’d make you feel better, but that’s really about it, honestly.
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You better start believing in compression systems you're in one
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Considering NASA could be canceled by an ass hole, I think we have other problems.
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May be that's why it sucks to live here.. It's related
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Man I really wish we had super fast space travel like star wars...
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hasn't this been a theory for a while now? The event horizon of a black hole keeps information minus one dimension. and the theory goes that our entire universe is just at the edge or a black hole in a 4D universe
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Yes. It's basically how the holographic principle got started, and that was decades ago.
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we could acknowledge it as a possibility AND work to better our um.. local frame of reference.
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Yes, we ignore it. Given the size of the universe, if being inside a black implies any conseqences that will ever hurt us, it will be a process that takes billions of years to develop, giving the human race billions of years to either become extinct or solve the problem.
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There is no problem introduced by noticing that there exists a horizon to the universe. It's also in no way what so ever a new "discovery", but a basic concept based on how horizons work in the first place.
The only "new" "discovery" I'm aware of is just a theory about our galaxy being roughly in the center of a less dense area of the universe that's ~ 2 billion lightyears across. There has been observational evidence for it for many years, but the new info correlates it with dark energy observations as well as distance/density observations, or thereabouts.
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Don't get me wrong, understanding the nature of the universe is valuable and noteworthy. But how would that information meaningfully impact anyone's life or change their behavior or worldview beyond a general awe at the unfathomable mysteries we already have towards space as we've understood it for centuries? Especially in a way that would ne noticeable to this person. Am I meant to stare up at the sky from 8:15 to 8:30 every other night with my mouth agap while I try to wrap my mind around the spacetime bubble we all exist on the surface of? Or can I just eat dinner?
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The reason research like this exists is because we don't know what we don't know. Results like these are meant to stoke curiousity so that more research can be done.
So on and so forth until one day you have horseshoe crabs saving millions of lives. But they didn't know that would be the case when they started researching them crabs, function comes after exploration.
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For sure, not undervaluing scientific research and exploration by any means. But Angie's post seemed to be a call to action or an expectation of a greater reaction to potential findings from the general public. But A) it's honestly the first I've heard about any such news. And B) I don't think the vast majority of people would have any idea how to even process that information, let alone get excited about it or understand it's full implications, or to have any sort of reaction to it at all.
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Am I meant to stare up at the sky from 8:15 to 8:30 every other night with my mouth agap while I try to wrap my mind around the spacetime bubble we all exist on the surface of?
At scale that sounds better for society than going to church. We need a little more memento mori (memento minima?) in modern life.
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Astronomy is critical towards understanding the foundational principles of reality. Observing the universe around us is the guide for where physics should follow
And I think most people would agree that understanding how our world works, the physics of it all, is very very useful in unforeseen ways. Cannot hope to make a circuit if you don't know how electricity works, right?
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Again, I'm not poopooing scientific endeavor. I love science. But this person seemed to be mystified that we weren't all majorly reacting to this news as if this possible fact, in itself, was life changing. For most people, it changes nothing about their day to day lives.
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I mean on top of answering fundamental questions about the nature if reality, proving that the universe is a black hole would necessarily invalidate almost every religion. That fact alone would upend society, and probably in a bad way.
Also, if the universe is a black hole that means the universe is capable of reproduction. If the universe reproduces, there is likely no limit to the number of times it can do so. If an infinite number of universes spawn an infinite number of children, it basically establishes reincarnation as a fact of life.
And that's ignoring all the philosophical implications such a discovery would immediately raise.
Maybe it wouldn't change anything. Maybe it would change everything.
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No way, at all, what so ever.
Most religious people will readily admit it's based on faith, not fact. Furthermore, it'd likely make them believe it more. God has always been described as beyond the universe, bigger than, all encompassing, etc. If the holographic principle proves true, it'd actually provide a mathematical path for such statements to be literally true. Yes, it'd still be a pile of assumptions about such an external entity, but the point is there would still exist a scientific path for the most basic of things to be good enough for faith.
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Why would the universe being a black hole invalidate religion, any more than, for example, the universe being really big already does? Don't most religions focus more on some entity or entities they think made or govern the universe more than what physical processes are "used" to do that, or what the ultimate shape of the universe is? Even when a contradiction is found, it's easy enough for a religion to just say "well, that was metaphorical", or "just the limited understanding given by (insert deity here) to our ancestors" or something along those lines to make it fit.
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It's just black holes all the way down.
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Is it not more like all the way out?
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Wait... Are we simulating black holes yet?
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One has to wonder lol.
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I got it! We're within a simulation of the innards of a black hole. And that is the first time I've used the word "innards". Lol
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I thought black holes aren't actually holes at all, they're literally gigantic physical objects because they're dead suns with shockingly high gravity that prevents light from escaping; how could our universe be inside something like that?
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Firstly, a black hole isn't an object, really. If you manage to compress enough mass in one place, gravity becomes the dominant force and the mass collapses into itself, eternally compressing and densifying. This is the singularity at the center of a black hole, and we use the term singularity because it's describing a single unmeasurable point in spacetime.
Next point: high gravity curves space. Light only travels in straight lines if it can get away with it, so when light bends in space it's because the space being traversed is deformed by gravity. Like, the Earth is, as far as it cares, going in a straight line that happens to curve back to where it started. If gravity is strong enough in a region, all possible "paths" through space become bent inwards to higher gravity. Like, even a perfectly straight line away from the black hole will be forced inwards again. That's the event horizon, the region in space around the singularity where nothing can escape anymore: all paths go deeper into the black hole.
Third point: weird shit happens inside the event horizon. We're well into Math now because we can't actually see inside these things, but we can use math to theorize and describe the inside of a black hole. Basically, time and space switch places inside the event horizon. Because every possible direction you can move in only takes you deeper, that means the future is the singularity, and as you move forward in time you move closer in space to it.
So in net: they're not really holes and they're not really physical objects: they're regions where every path in space is forced into going towards the singularity, which is itself infinitely small and infinitely dense.
Anyways, you can accurately calculate the precise size of the region. It's called the Schwarzschild Radius, and it's the size of the black hole that any particular amount of mass, if forced to collapse, would become. Turns out that if you calculate the size of the black hole that contains all of the mass and energy in the universe, it would be about the size of the universe, but not quite precisely. That's all that's been calculated.
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I mean, I think it's fair to ignore it 99% of the time. Frankly, as much as I love space science and science in general, we all should have a responsibility to solve real problems here and now. That's been my issue with a lot of science, currently - we need problem solvers rather than idle explorers.
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The problem is that most of our problems aren't really science problems. Or at least the thing holding them up isn't the lack of practical applied scientists. They're political ones. We've known what we needed to do about climate change for decades but their are capitalists who stand to lose from doing anything about it, so we don't. We have plenty of housing, it's just being hoarded by people who do nothing with it but extract free money from people who are desperate to have a place to live. We have amazing medicine, but corporations are able to abuse IP laws to price gouge people who need it to live.
A scientist or engineer could come up with some amazing sci-fi tech that has the potential to save us and capitalists would find some way to make it bleed us dry.
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That's not what science is, though. Science is about pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. Science isn't about having a problem and trying to find a solution -- that's engineering, which is informed by science.
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Whenever you get this kind of thoughts, take a moment to also think about the maths behind your CT and MRI scans, which originated from early radio astronomy. Alas, I don't have a source for this other than it was said by an astronomy professor during a lesson for an exam I never even attempted.
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You're not wrong though, I've heard the same anecdote. But it sort of sticks by my point. It was solving problems. Radio astronomy is important, and so is someone looking at the math and the machine and saying "hey, we can do stuff that X-Rays can't with this!"
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209 comments
If we are in a black hole, then the thing you feared most about falling into a black hole must be bullshit since we are quite fine. Relative to the vastness of shit in the universe, anyway.