Question on Smolin's theory on Black Holes and new Universes

[Tanelorn]

As far as I know a state of true nothingness is the only state which does not require a first cause. For all other concepts I can ask, well what caused that? The next question is, how can we go from a state of true nothingness to any other state, because this step is infinite?

Seasons greetings all.

 

[julcab12]

As far as I know a state of true nothingness is the only state which does not require a first cause. For all other concepts I can ask, well what caused that? The next question is, how can we go from a state of true nothingness to any other state, because this step is infinite?

Seasons greetings all.

... Maybe the underlying layer of causation/locality could be relational and transformative. OTH. I could treat nothingness as infinity's evil twin.

I like the simpler version that marcus stated. "I think, is to learn of the changes it seems to have undergone.."

 

[Tanelorn]

I wonder what would happen in a Smolin black hole Universe model when two black holes merge?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/s...les-dance-toward-an-explosive-union.html?_r=1

 

[Chronos]

Good question! Black hole evaporation would be another issue. Does causal disconnection insulate 'baby' universes from the fate of 'mommy'? Such questions wander beyond my comfort zone. I view it as a backdoor 'multiverse' version of reality.

 

[PeterDonis]

I wonder what would happen in a Smolin black hole Universe model when two black holes merge?

As I understand the model, from the point of view of any event in the baby universe, events in the "spawning" universe are all in the past. That includes the events involved in a black hole merger. From the viewpoint of the baby universe, the "singularity" inside the black hole that spawned it is still one singularity--one spacelike hypersurface that marks the past boundary of the baby universe. The only difference if that black hole merges with another one is that the event horizon surrounding that singularity, in the "spawning" universe, is shaped like a pair of trousers instead of a cylinder (if we imagine a space-time diagram in which time is vertical and we suppress one spatial dimension so the cross section of the event horizon is a circle instead of a 2-sphere). But all that is in the past of the baby universe.

 

[PeterDonis]

Does causal disconnection insulate 'baby' universes from the fate of 'mommy'?

As I understand the model, yes; the baby universe, like any event inside the event horizon of the black hole that spawned it, is causally disconnected from events in the exterior region in the original universe, including "heat death" or anything else. The only caveat to this that I'm aware of is that the "baby universe" model, AFAIK, doesn't work if the original universe recollapses in a Big Crunch, because in that scenario there are no true event horizons in the original universe; every timelike or null path ends up in the Big Crunch singularity, so there is no "room" for baby universes to spawn, so to speak. But this is getting outside of my comfort zone too; I don't know what other kinds of speculative models have been considered, so there may be some that get around this somehow.