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This is my theory.

After watching Steven Hawking's series on The Universe, he talked about Black Holes and how they keep growing and growing; sucking in more mass and getting denser and denser, whilst at the same time amasing more gravity.

i.e. the more mass something has, the more gravity it exerts, the more mass it attracts -- a viscious cirle.

So my theory, don't laugh, is that the universe if cyclical. After a Black Hole has consumed everything, including other Black Holes etc. it explodes and all that mass gets released creating the universe as we know it. And so on and so on over a gazillion years.

Is that absurd?

Edit: Many thanks for the informative replies...




Isaac Asimov has a brilliantly-written, chilling (indeed, to some, downright terrifying) very short story on this very topic:

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html "The Last Question"

I won't spoil it for you. But go read it.


Wow, oh wow, that was absolutely fantastic. Cheers!


That was a great read! Thank you for sharing!


Very awesome


Two things to consider:

1) The volume of space a black hole influences doesn't increase without bound. If our sun collapsed suddenly into a black hole, it would have the same exact pull on the earth (i.e. we wouldn't suddenly be pulled into the black hole)

2) It is hypothesized that black holes do evaporate slowly (see Hawking radiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation)



The universe contains more than matter. Did every last photon ever emitted end up in a black hole too? Or is the universe losing energy with every cycle?

This is besides the empirical evidence against a cyclical universe. Cosmological expansion is accelerating, rather than slowing down, as you would expect if gravity were to slow everything down enough to eventually contract.


The rough idea-that the universe is cyclical, not necessarily the black holes-is in fact one of the models explored in the paper.


Pulsating / cyclical universe theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model


Black holes exist in space-time, they do not create it (even if they explode). The Big Bang made space-time happen. It was not an explosion in any normal sense.

For whatever reason popular cosmology has done a really poor job of getting that across, so you're not alone. It seems only a very small proportion of people who have heard of the Big Bang in the first place, think of it as something other than just really big, but otherwise unremarkable, explosion.




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