http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018...final-paper-cuts-multiverse-down-to-size.html

According to Hawking's "no-boundary proposal," before the Big Bang, when the entire universe was compressed into a single, infinitely small point, there was no directional time as we experience it. Time was a closed, boundary-free thing, like a sphere without edges.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018...final-paper-cuts-multiverse-down-to-size.html

Space is measured by the amount of (forward) time it takes light to travel from point A to point B -- relative, of course, to some arbitrary observer.

Well, I say that with no directional time, there can also be no space (or at least space that can be measured in the usual sense).

Therefore, terms like "small" and "large" (or even infinite) lose there meaning. Is this just sloppy reporting?

 

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/15/supermassive_black_hole/

The humongous hole, codenamed QSO SMSS J215728.21-360215.1, is the staggering size of about 20 billion suns, and grows at a rate of 200 million suns over a million years. It has a voracious appetite and gobbles a mass equivalent to twice that of our Sun every two days to sustain itself.

"If we had this monster sitting at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, it would appear 10 times brighter than a full moon. It would appear as an incredibly bright pin-point star that would almost wash out all of the stars in the sky," said Christian Wolf, lead author of the study and a researcher from the Australian National University.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.04317.pdf

It's not huge, it's just big boned!

 

Science journalism strikes again. Black holes do not need to "eat" to sustain themselves. Nor are they "hungrier" than any other object of equivalent mass; if we replaced the Sun with a solar mass black hole, the orbits of the planets wouldn't change.

 

Science journalism strikes again. Black holes do not need to "eat" to sustain themselves. Nor are they "hungrier" than any other object of equivalent mass; if we replaced the Sun with a solar mass black hole, the orbits of the planets wouldn't change.

I saw that as well. I've just grown tired bitching about it.

 

Black hole update:

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-vla-image-key-feature-powerful.html

Milky Way update:

https://news.yahoo.com/apos-something-no-human-seen-213011391.html

 

If only there were a way to confirm your suspicions...

 

Hi,

There are only two possibilites:
YES or NO.
Pick one and we can get on with our lives

 

Hi,

There are only two possibilites:
YES or NO.
Pick one and we can get on with our lives

I think I'm gonna choose a "maybe" on this one ...

 

I think I'm gonna choose a "maybe" on this one ...

Hi,

Yes, but strictly speaking, that is not an option. This was not a question about opinion but rather a question about a fact about the Universe.
Think about it. As far as we know, the Universe is either in a black hole or it isn't, or at least that is the actual question at hand.

If we want to go as far as to say it might be both at the same time, I'm going to leave that one alone for now because that brings up even more questions about the actual structure of reality and how we perceive it. Those questions would have to be answered first, and since we don't have those answers yet, we would be forced to say we simply don't know the real answer yet.

 

Yes, but strictly speaking, that is not an option

Ha, I can believe six impossible things before breakfast! Not taking a position on something unknown is a piece of cake.

 

Ha, I can believe six impossible things before breakfast! Not taking a position on something unknown is a piece of cake.

It's an attempt to get past the whole question which has no answer anyway
If we flip a coin and accept the result as truth, then we can get on with our lives (ha ha).
This is partly because we can't know the answer to this for certain, at least not in our lifetimes.

Why does this question even come up. From what we know about black holes currently, the gravity inside would be immense; much more than any human can stand.
It seems silly, and on that note maybe we can say that we are not living in a black hole, a black hole is living in us (ha ha ha).