So, Stephen Hawking proposed in 1971 (or thereabouts) that black holes will eventually radiate themselves into nothingness (not the supposed nothingness that black holes are because they actually contain a lot of mass). As far as I can tell, Hawking's postulate has been generally accepted by the scientific community. One day the universe will consist of nothing but black holes and then one day after that the universe will consist of nothing but the heat that the black holes radiated away into.
Or something like that.
But now Nikodem Polawski of Indiana University has put some science into a speculative thought that millions of people have shared: What if black holes open out into other universes?.
Poplawski has suggested (in math I'm not qualified to discuss) that the universe could actually be "inside" a black hole that is sucking matter from another universe, and that perhaps all the black holes in our universe are sucking matter into their own universes.
The Big Bang, according to a theory called the Einstein-Rosen bridge, might be a white hole that is channeling energy (and matter) into the universe from some "future" black hole. That is, Poplawski's work combined with everyone else's work suggests that perhaps the universe is recycling matter/energy either from the future or from another universe (which exists in a lattice of universes through which a lot of matter/energy is flowing).
At least, that's my layman's grasp of the concept. White holes supposedly don't exist for very long. Think of all the water flowing out of the bottom of a self-sealing tank very rapidly. That is sort of how a white hole might behave: it drains the contents of something else and then closes up (vanishes).
The universe is supposedly expanding outward (into a nothingness or somethingness that is larger than the universe itself). Most scientists assume that universal expansion will eventually lead to a time when future inhabitants of galactic clusters will only be able to see their own galactic clusters, and even more chronodistant inhabitants of galaxies will only be able to see their own galaxies.
Eventually, everything will supposedly have moved so far away that whatever is left will just die down and stop interacting and all the bajillions of fragments of what was once the universe we see today will vanish.
That seems rather depressing, I suppose, and attempts to quantify the amount of time that elapses before this final fate (maybe 100,000,000,000 years) don't help. The universe just seems to be so finite when viewed in this clinical fashion.
Of course, one wonders how scientists justify their estimates for the size of the universe and how it is behaving. Their observations of the so-called Cosmic Background Radiation seem to confirm that there was a Big Bang-like event at some time in the past.
The problem with measuring the universe by the Cosmic Background Radiation is that it suggests the universe was larger than an infinitismally small point back when it supposedly burst into existence. To resolve that minor difficulty, scientists argue there must have been a period of Inflation soon after the birth of the universe in which space expanded quickly (faster than the speed of light) into what may now constitute about 13,000,000,000 light-years of space -- and then from there continued to expand outward (at less than the speed of light but with an accelerating velocity) toward the boundaries that we believe exist today.
Sound confusing? Yeah, it's all kind of weird science. But I don't have to defend or destroy it. My task is just to let it spin my head around and make me dizzy.
In the meantime, the scientists are still trying to figure it all out for themselves (and the rest of us). Good luck to all. See you in about 100 billion years.
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