Black Holes and an Infinite Number of Universes

Black Holes and an Infinite Number of Universes

In the 1920’s, in a direction opposite to M31 galaxy, observers found a distant pair of spiral galaxies. Was it possible, they wondered, that they were seeing the Milky was and M31 from the other direction – like seeing the back of your head with light that has circumnavigated the universe?

We know now that the universe is much larger than these scientists imagined in the 1920’s. It would take more than the age of the universe for light to circumnavigate it. And the galaxies are younger than the universe. But if the Cosmos is closed and light cannot escape from it, then it may be perfectly correct to describe the universe a black hole.

There exists a possibility of wormholes to get from one place in the universe to another without covering the intervening distance – through a black hole. We can imagine these wormholes as tubes running through a fourth physical dimension. In fact, we do not know if such wormholes exist, but if they do, must they always hook up with another place in our universe? Or is it just possible that wormholes connect with other universes, places that would otherwise be forever inaccessible to us.

If you wish to know what it is like inside a black hole, look around you (quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: © M. Jorgensen (Elena)

For all we know, there may be many other universes and perhaps they are, in some sense, nested within one another.

The Hindu cosmology is the only religious idea we know that surpasses the endless number of infinitely old cycling universes. What would these unverses be like? Would they be built on different laws of physics? Would they have stars and galaxies and worlds, or something quite different? Might they be compatible with some unimaginably different form of life? To enter them, we would somehow have to penetrate a fourth physical dimension – not an easy undertaking, surely, but perhaps a black hole would provide a way. There may be small black holes in the solar neighborhood. Posed at the edge of forever, we would jump off…