phinds said:
For this, and many other basic questions, you should get in the habit of doing a forum search. This particular question gets asked/answered at least a couple of time a month.
How often do physicists approach the question and analyze it?
If it gets asked on here a couple of times a month, I get the impression it's something that's been mulled over quite a bit and has had quite a bit of academic material published on it?
It seems like an intriguing question, though. I'm aiming to become a relativist myself, and it looks like the sort of thing I'd love to do original research on.
Heh, I'm not sure whether I'm disheartened by the thought of it being something that a huge number of people have already worked on and thus beat me to any conclusions I can make or any insights I can provide - or if I'm excited at the prospect to be able to build off of their work and go further by standing on their shoulders, so to speak.
Actually, I wasn't planning to hit on the question itself, but reading the links here, I've found a thing I'm curious about...
From
here, which was linked from https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=506992.
...The short answer is that the Big Bang gets away with it because it is expanding rapidly near the beginning and the rate of expansion is slowing down...
Isn't that only true in the original Big Bang model, though? I thought the core feature of Inflationary Cosmology was that the rate of expansion increases in the first moments, allowing for the universe to come so close to thermal equilibrium to create the mostly thermally homogeneous universe that we observe.
That being said, I'm not too confused, though, thanks to Greg's explanation in addition to that one... It makes sense to me that there'd be a huge difference in-between a region of high density surrounded by flat spacetime, as opposed to an entire universe of extreme density. After all, what region would an event horizon form and enclose, if all of space is homogeneously past critical density?
That being said, if there were some sort of space outside the space of our universe (however that would work; let's call this "outer space"), then I guess our universe would be a black hole there, because the event horizon would enclose the region of space associated with all of our space.
Thought: "all of our space" may be infinite, but finite within "outer space" because of how a dimension of time has swapped roles with a dimension of space upon crossing the event horizon. It's not just the singularity that I find uncannily similar to a black hole and our universe - it's other features, such as this, as well - how the bubble universes of a "Swiss Cheese" inflationary cosmology multiverse, when viewed from outside, have a number of similarities to black holes (can be bigger on the inside, outermost regions correspond to first moments in time, involve extremely dense matter, etc.).