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Could Black Holes Be Portals to Other Universes?
David Shiga writes "Astronomers have identified many objects out there that they think are black holes. But could they be portals to other universes called wormholes, instead? According to a new study by a pair of physicists, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. They have discovered that wormholes with the right shape would look identical to black holes from the outside. But while a trip into a black hole would mean certain death, a wormhole might spit you out into a parallel universe with its own stars and planets. Exotic effects from quantum physics might produce wormholes naturally from collapsing stars, one of the physicist says, and they might even be produced in future particle accelerator experiments."
throw lawyers in and listen for the sucking sound.
Someone hates these cans.
Hey Dotsters! This is my first posting on slashdot, and on one of my fave subjects too! There are so many misconceptions surrounding black holes, and that's mainly because we rely too heavily ('cuse pun), on a 'gravity based' model to try and understand this f**ken amazing Universe we all find ourselves inhabiting, and we tend to exclude the electrical nature of the universe entirely. Electricity and its ever present magnetic fields have far more influence on the dynamics of the Universe than the feeble force of gravity, and until cosmologists realise this they will continue to make up absurd theories, (read fairytales), for things they don't understand. Here's something to keep in mind... When Isaac Newton was pondering his apple and sussing out his laws on gravity, he didn't have a juicer, or an ipod, or even a computer. Why not? No electricity stupid! In fact, he knew almost nothing about electromagnetic fields, plasmas, double layers, electrostatics etc, except that when you happened to rub amber and wool together, or when you were lucky enough to stroke a pussy with certain objects in the dark, sparks would fly! (pussy cat! Don't be so filthy:-). And so, here we are hundreds of years later still using these original gravity models, and not pausing to see where we may have gone wrong, or where we can improve on older theories by including our new knowledge of the electromagnetic forces and plasma fields that pervade all of space. This practice has led to some of the stupidest ideas in astrophysics including the concept of black holes and missing dark matter in our day and age. It seems to me our scientists were more on to it back in the mid to late 1800's with their ideas of an all pervading aether, except they just didn't understand its properties correctly. Anyway, for those interested in getting closer to the truth about this whole black hole biz, check this link out for another point of view. Cheers :-) Spaceguru. http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=tyybhr r8
I don't see any reason why our universe couldn't be a bubble of space expanding into some OTHER bubble of space.
Clearly it depends on how you define "the universe"
If the universe is everything that could ever affect us then there is an (observer location dependent) edge, beyond which there may well just be more of the same universe which is expanding away from us faster than the speed of light so can never affect us (assuming we _can't_ just pop down a worm hole and appear at the edge of the visible universe).
If you define the universe to be the entire length of all of the spacial dimensions (even past the edge of the visible universe) then the concept of something being "outside" the universe gets more difficult. I suppose if the containing space has more dimensions than our universe then we could be expanding within it, just like the (2 spacial dimensional) "universe" represented by the surface of a balloon can expand inside our (3D) universe.
http://blog.nexusuk.org