Foreword

I've been getting quite into AudioBooks recently. One of the reasons I got myself a decent car (its a 2006 Infiniti M45) was because I wanted to be able to travel in comfort for the 40-45 minutes it takes me to get to work. I'd been getting quite frustrated by the lack of time to read books - at home there is always something more important to do, so the drive to work seemed like a perfect chance to "catch up on my reading".

I recently completed one of Barnes and Noble's Portable Professor lecture audiobooks called Eternal Questions, Timeless Approaches: How to Think Like a Philosopher, which I mention because this course together with other articles I've read recently have led me to formulate a theory about what happened in time before the Big Bang! To help me find answers, I recently picked up Stephen Hawking's "The Universe in a Nutshell, but Hawking appears to be saying that The Big Bang was the start of time and there was nothing before it, and I'm not sure I agree. (Yes, I know!)

As I get further into Hawking's work I will revisit this theory as necessary.


We know through radio astronomy that the universe is not static, but is expanding, and is around 14 billion years old. There is even evidence to show that the rate of expansion is increasing, suggesting that the universe is heavier than it should be according to the matter we can see. Scientists this difference between measured and expected mass to something they call "Dark Matter" - some super gravitational stuff we can't see. I have read it postulated that eventually the Universe may begin to collapse again.

We know too that our own galaxy (and likely every other galaxy) has a super-massive black hole at its core. Our black hole is know as Sagittarius A* or SGR A* for short, and is estimated to be 93 million miles in diameter and having the mass of 4 million Suns.

This led me to wonder: What would happen if SGR A* kept assimilating nearby matter, getting larger and stronger in so doing. Would it eventually pull in all the stars in our galaxy? What then? Would it start to pull in our neighboring galaxies too?

I don't dare to suggest that black hole of a galactic scale would account for the Dark Matter. Black holes warp light and emit x-rays as they absorb matter, and such a massive black hole would be the brightest thing in the sky to the Chandra X-Ray Telescope.

Still, is it possible that the reason we don't see such pheonomena is because the universe is still growing and that no galaxy has been around long enough for this process to have occured?

And what happens as this galactic black hole grows and absorbs other galaxies. What would happen at the core of such a black hole? If we already believe that a black hole has almost infinite mass, does there come a point where this black hole would have absorbed so much material that its core would reach infinite mass - where there was not only no gap between the sub-atomic particles, but somehow less than no gap! If such a thing was to occur, what would happen?

It seems like there may be an analog with what happens in blue super giant stars, where fusion converts hydrogen to helium, then to heavy elements. When the stars gets as far as attempting to fuse iron all hell breaks lose and the star goes supernova.

Could a black hole of almost infinite mass become unstable and also go supernova? Might this not be the explanation for the Big Bang as we know it?

And how much mass would the black hole have had to acquire to get to this point? Would it have to be all the mass in the universe? What if that was a few kilograms too few to cause the critical mass to the reached?

Similarly, what would happen if the critical mass was reached before that last few galaxies had been absorbed? In this case you would have a Big Bang that formed a new universe of galaxies, mixed in with some galaxies left over from the previous universe state before the Big Bang!

In any case, if this theory holds true, you could see how our 14 billion year old universe may have seen many generations of expansion and collapse down to the point of reaching the critical near-infinite mass before violently reforming. Stephen Hawking talks about how time stops in a black hole because of the warping of spacetime. He also describes how there was no concept of time before the Big Bang because there was no concept of space. My postulation is that the two effects are one and the same, and that as (or most?!) matter in the universe is pulled into the super black hole, time stops for that matter, only to restart when the black hole itself goes "supernova". You might think of it as time stops for a while then restarts.

Unfortunately, I'm probably a far better philosopher than I am an astrophysicist, and have no way to qualify much if any of this. I'm also a pretty poor philosopher, and I should probably stick to designing super-scalable web applications, so I hope you will forgive my indulgence.

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4 Comments:

Dude, the answer to the nature of the universe is: 47. Oh, and you're probably going to hell for thinking creation is more than 5000 years old. Everyone(re: Pat Robertson) knows this...;}
	By Mr. Hines, at 11/12/2005 7:05 PM
Actually, it's a pretty good theory. If the universe keeps expanding at an exponential rate as it is currently doing, then everything will be so spread out that nothing could draw it all back together again. In either case, I doubt humanity will be around to see it. ;)
	By dukemeiser, at 11/12/2005 8:11 PM
There's a fascinating story that was printed in Analog magazine back in the mid 80's. I have kept that copy, just for that story... Anyway, it's a story of a bunch of students experimenting with an augmented reality simulation of the life cycle of the universe. Most of the other students create these super-massive universes that reached a certain size when gravity finally pulls it back together into a singularity, where it explodes again, creating a cyclic universe. But our hero's universe was made entirely too small. Not enough mass for collapse. All the other students derided his attempt. The professor suggested he start again, that there was still time to create a more massive universe. He insisted that he stick with his attempt. His universe lasted a thousand times longer than the other massive ones. Most normal matter evaporated into quarks and neutrinos, and yet somehow, patterns of life and civilizations continued! Finally, the last subatomic particle evaporated, and there was nothing left of his universe except the same state that existed before his universe exploded into existence - as soon as he had realized this, his universe exploded again, and thus became cyclic. Fascinating stuff, cosmology.
	By Fraize, at 11/13/2005 8:19 AM
How fun. I enjoy these lines of thought, great exercises them. Although I believe it's analogous to a common yard ant attempting to postulate the workings of a Ferarri, it's a great way to reach for the eventual understanding of such amazing happenings. Oh, and it's 42 Mr Hines. 8-) Mr. Frazier, you are a dork for keeping a sci-fi magazine for 20 years. 8-) I'm feeling judgemental today... hehe. BTW, anyone have freakonomics in audiobook/mp3? Charlie
	By Charlie, at 11/24/2005 1:37 PM

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