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Welcome Chasteen02! People of all walks of life make theories about the weather or which horse may win the Triple Crown. However for a theory to be scientific it must make a prediction that is falsifiable, i.e., that must be true or the theory is incorrect. You base your theory that the universe is alive on two assumptions. #1 Black holes accrete matter until the singularity becomes a Big Bang for another universe, thus reproducing itself. #2 that dark energy exihibits the property of food for a universe that appears to "grow" like a living organism. You may be happy to know that your first assumption has already been proposed by scientists back in the twentieth century. However, we still don't have a mechanism to verify/falsify this, as no way exists to acquire information on anything that passes the event horizon of a black hole. Dark energy does cause the universe to "grow". Does this qualify the universe to be "alive". Even NASA is struggling with what qualifies for life. Obvious signs for life, like breathing, consuming food and growing also would apply to a fire. The ability to reproduce would seem obvious, but would exclude all mules. So, it seems that science cannot provide an answer to the question of whether the universe qualifies for a living organism.

To quote ACG52, "No."

FYI "Sitting on Labeyrie's drawing board are plans for a hypertelescope, a new breed of space telescope that is capable of mapping distant cousins of Earth in exquisite detail... Malcolm Fridlund, project scientist for ESA's Darwin mission in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, is pragmatic. 'The costs would be really prohibitive,' he points out." (The hypertelescope: a zoom with a view. New Scientist, 23 February 2006) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer

The Strong force allows quarks and hadrons to form. We know the level of the binding energy of the Strong force. We also know that the gravity at the singularity of a black hole exceeds that of the binding energy of the Strong force. So no quarks or hadrons exist at the singularity and gravity reigns supreme. However, I have read that just as Neutron stars exist, where the property of neutron degeneracy halts their collapse into a black hole, so Quark stars may exist, I suppose held up by the Strong force.

If you mean that stars near the accretion disk could distort that disk, then perhaps a large star would cause local disruption. However, the star would become part of the accretion disk, so I don't know if that would count. The escape velocity of the black hole at the event horizon is greater than the speed of light, so nothing is going to escape. The material in an accretion disk gets ionized and the electro-magnetic field of the spinning singularity at the center of the black hole causes some of the material to be ejected in two polarized jets as a quasar. This would not be caused by a nearby star. So no, what you describe does not happen.

The energy that sparked the Big Bang was about what you would get from a kilogram of matter. The amount of negative pressure stuff needed to coax inflation into making a new universe is less than that. We still don't know how to actually do these things, but that is what the math indicates. The energy for all the stars came when the Superforce separated into the four fundamental forces. Your friend believes that an omnipotent being created the universe exactly the way it is today. Is this plausible? Sure, that's what omnipotent means. Some very great scientists have asked if the universe is just a science experiment, which would of course require an experimenter. I believe that science governs the universe and that God should help us to govern ouselves.

Schwartzschild calculated that a huge star would collapse to a point. Roy Kerr realized that a star has angular momentum because it spins on its axis. He reasoned that a collapsed star would still have to spin to retain angular momentum. A point cannot display angular momentum, so he concluded that a singularity must be a flat ring with the dimensions of the Planck scale that spins in one direction. The ring has no height dimension, so both the point and the Kerr ring singularity have a volume of zero.

Alan Guth, who posed inflation as the mechanism that expanded the universe, thinks that creating another universe is a distinct possibility. He reasons that the synthetic universe would start to inflate and then separate from ours. Thus it would not be "a smaller part of it". If one universe can be created then an infinite number would also be possible. With an infinite number of universes, the subset of universes exactly like our own would also be infinite. However, since these universes would be separate from our own, we could never interface with them and speculation about them would not be subject to scientific scrutiny. Dobrii dyen!

We can only receive photons from the observable universe. GR determines that the observable universe is not a taurus. That is what I addressed.

For photons to "loop around", the universe would have to be bent into a taurus (doughnut) shape. Mass bends space time, so a sufficiently large amount of mass might do this. For space time to be bent into such a shape, or topology, we have determined that more mass would be required than has been observed. So a photon in the observable universe would not be able to loop.

http://www.universetoday.com/13002/what-happens-when-supermassive-black-holes-collide/ Apparently not always.

Is this clip what you saw? If so, then he doesn't say anything about something inside the event horizon traveling fater than light, for the reasons posted. Edit: you are welcome.

A pulsar is a neutron star that rotates so fast that it generates an electromagnetic field like a dynamo. It's not a black hole. Not all supernovae result in a black hole. Some stellar remnants only collapse into a neutron star. Edit: You are welcome, John.

The laws of physics break down at the singularity, which is a tiny point within the blackhole. This is probably what you heard an astronomer say. However, a black hole is much larger than the singualrity at its core and has several regions. The gravity of the singularity creates an event horizon at a certain distance depending on its mass. From the singularity to the event horizon our physics can tell us some of what is going on. This cannot be confirmed by observation, but shown mathematically. If something should travel faster than light inside the event horizon, then it would escape, which is not possible.

If the feeding frenzy is over I shall point out again that I never posted that the universe is infinite. No one else will say this either, so you can't google it to Stephen Hawking or Stevie Nicks. However, we can calculate with WMAP results how an infinite universe would behave. The original WMAP results gave a flatness to about 5%. Five years later, WMAP5 gave a result of four tenths of a percent. WMAP10 may get .0000001%. We can never directly observe an infinite universe, but we can observe a local flatness to the geometry of the observable universe that would not rule out the possibility of an infinite whole universe. A universe of finite age cannot expand at a finite rate to be infinite in size. The evidence indicates that the age of the universe is finite. The evidence also indicates that the size of the universe may be infinite. An "exponential rate" of inflation would approach what as a limit? So you're okay with inflation creating a universe out of nothing and then expanding it to size X no matter how big X is, just as long as no one mentions infinity?

Images from billions of light years away are of events that actually happened billions of years ago. Billions of years ago our local group of galaxies probably had Quasars, but not anymore. "Quasi-stellar" objects are most likely black holes accreting mass from surrounding dust particles all the way up to nearby stars. During early galaxy formation, a super massive black hole was able to "feed" on surrounding matter. However, at one point the accretion creates a shockwave that drives matter beyond a certain distance away, thus turning off the feeding. So we see this in distant young galaxies but not in the surrounding mature galaxies.

The logic that you are so pleased with is a tenet of philosophy, not physics. In philosphy by definition something infinite cannot expand to become greater. However, by direct observation the universe is expanding and from the physical evidence of WMAP may be infinite. Fortunately, this is a science forum and not a philosophy forum. BTW, I've never said that it is infinite. The observable universe may just have a flat geometry locally which would falsely indicate an infinite universe. By Hubble's law, today objects far enough away are receding at the speed of light. Objects even farther away are receding at twice that rate out to a rate of a googolplex greater. If the universe is indeed infinite, then as the distance increases the rate of recession approaches infinity. So, even today very distant objects would be receding at an infinite rate. "How can the universe be infinite in size?" After the Big Bang, the universe inflated at an infinite rate.

You mean the assertions of the crew at NASA? If a universe with finite age is infinite as indicated by the WMAP results, then it must have inflated at an infinite rate. Pink elephants aside, what part of that doesn't answer the OP?

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_shape.html Apparently the humans at NASA have a pretty good consciousness. "We now know (as of 2013) that the universe is flat with only a 0.4% margin of error. This suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent; however, since the Universe has a finite age, we can only observe a finite volume of the Universe. All we can truly conclude is that the Universe is much larger than the volume we can directly observe." (my italics) As I posted, the physics of the finite observable universe does not leave out the possibility that the whole universe is infinite. If this is the case, then an infinite universe with a finite age must have inflated at an infinite rate. That seems like a pretty short bridge to me.

Today, as posted, the observable universe is expanding at 70km per megaparsec, which causes distant parts of the whole universe to recede faster than the speed of light. At a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, inflation caused the observable universe to expand faster than the speed of light. So more distant parts may have expanded much faster, perhaps infinitely faster. The evidence indicates that the universe started out smaller than a proton as a singularity that present physics cannot describe.

When we observe something, the laws of physics explain how what we observe happens. We cannot observe the whole universe. The observable universe is finite. However, when it is taken as an example of the whole universe, what we can see almost acts as if the whole universe were also finite, but not completely. So the possibility that the whole universe may have been infinite right from the beginning cannot yet be ruled out.

MigL, the LHC can still do this: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/lhc-black-holes-string-theory/ and this: http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.2461

Well the Large Hadron Collider has found no evidence of fundamental building blocks smaller than a quark, nor extra dimensions. This is not a head shot for string theory in general, but some of the string “sub-theories” are in trouble.

Huge stars of several hundred solar masses rapidly convert their core supply of hydrogen into iron after only a few million years and collapse into a black hole. The universe is 13.72 billion years old, so this is more than enough time for clouds of hydrogen to collapse into huge stars that then form black holes.

How about this for rotating stars? Kerr showed with GR that a rotating star collapses into a spinning 2-D ring (to preserve angular momentum) with the Planck length that would vibrate due to quantum effects. Observations support the spinning singularity proposal. It is an interesting duality that if all of the closed strings in such a star were crushed together due to gravity, then the end result would be the same. The strings might stack onto each other (remaining for all intents one 2-D string) and their individual vibrations would amplify from harmonics. Thus one closed string vibrating at a very high pitch to represent a massive particle (the singularity) and Kerr’s description of a singularity would be the same.