Have you ever wondered about what happened before the big bang?
The key to finding out might actually lie in the depths of a black hole.
Imagine you're a star. Not that kinda star
But a sun-like star
except with a mass that's 20 times more than that of our sun
you look around and you think these objects are only attracted to you
because of your insanely attractive gravitational force
while Newtonian physics does look at gravity as only a force,
now is a good time to look at this in terms of Einstein's gravity
a distortion of spacetime. The massive star's matter
bends the fabrics of spacetime itself, which is why
objects which can otherwise travel in a straight line
seem to follow a curved pathway.
As an analogy, if the spacetime fabric was like a net
you can see how massive objects in space
can attract each other.
However, the effect of gravity on an object
can still be calculated using Newton's law which depends on its mass
and distance from the star.
Being much more massive than the sun, this star will eventually
end in a supernova explosion
- after which the mass of the remaining matter is high enough
to collapse back together in the fabric of spacetime.
The remnants keep collapsing so much under gravity so that eventually,
all of the matter is concentrated in a volume of zero size.
Welcome to the Black hole.
Hold on, if it has got a zero volume, does it even exist?
How about its gravity? Remember, it has
still got a mass equal to the remnants of the explosion
Simple math shows us that the effect of gravity
and therefore, the curvature of spacetime is infinite.
So, unlike a star of finite volume,
the blackhole curves space and time infinitely
Behold the singularity. Mind you,
this isn't a location or an object of compressed mass
rather, it's like the edge of spacetime itself.
A bottomless pit, if you will.
In math, it's just an abstract point of an infinite quantity
but in a black hole, the singularity is why
an object travelling in a straight line from A to B
would have to travel an infinite curvature, taking an infinite amount of time.
So if you watched a space cat go into a black hole,
all you'd see is that it slows down as it gets closer and closer
and completely stops at the event horizon
only to get red-shifted before disappearing.
That is, you'll never actually see it enter
the black hole, much less cross it
but for the cat itself, it would be the complete opposite
time outside the black hole would just run faster and faster
and more importantly, the cat would know that it really did go into the black hole
So, in a sense, to us as distant observers, anything
beyond the event horizon, only exists in the future
- an infinite time away, so we never actually see it.
this diagram of the Big Bang explosion
looks familiar now, doesn't it?
Scientists think so too. So going back to the first question,
scientists think that the Big Bang can be traced to something of
the sort of a black hole. Which means the entire universe
as we know it, could've emerged from a singularity
far far away in time
and no,
physics is not magic, but it's similar, so
go wild!
