Cosmic humility – what if the universe is inside a black hole?

What if the Big Bang didn’t actually happen, and we’re actually sitting inside a black hole?

This could be true, according to scientists at the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation.

The claims challenge the standardized Big Bang theories as championed by scientists since the 1930s.

Recent images by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which NASA uses, have ignited fresh interest in the matter.

The birth of new information

“We are not witnessing the birth of everything from nothing, but rather the continuation of a cosmic cycle,” said Prof Enrique Gaztañaga.

In other words, popular theories by Roger Penrose and Prof Stephen Hawking argued a singularity construction, whereby matter gravitationally collapses inside a black hole.

Meanwhile, Gaztañaga and his team's core idea is that instead of a collapsing universe, it compresses like a spring and bounces back.

And as for the classic layman's question of what’s on the other side:

“What emerges on the other side of the bounce is a universe remarkably like our own,” said Prof Gaztañaga.”

Beyond the bounce

This bouncing spring theory, put forward by physicist Raj Kumar Pathria, dates back to 1972 and has mostly remained under the radar until now.

And it’s the JWST that has revived this interest with recent galactic rotational findings.

For instance, the fact that two-thirds of early galaxies spin clockwise, creating an unexpected imbalance, with the remaining third whirling anti-clockwise, means an anomaly in a universe with perfectly balanced conditions.

This peculiarity suggests that the universe itself was born rotating, which would have to have happened inside a black hole.

The edge of the universe also forms a kind of “event horizon” through which we can’t see.

Observational limits mean we can’t see beyond the cosmic horizon, meaning a shift in school of thought from “birth from nothing” to “a continuation of cycles.”

Cosmic humility

This approach aligns with both general relativity and quantum mechanics, bridging a gap in modern physics.

General relativity was developed by Einstein and successfully explains large-scale phenomena like planetary orbits, black holes, and the expansion of the universe.

Quantum mechanics, developed in the 1920s by pioneers like Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Niels Bohr, imposes fundamental limits on measurable quantities.

The Portsmouth scientists aim to bridge the gap between the two:

We are not special. We are not witnessing the birth of everything from nothing, but rather the continuation of a cosmic cycle – one shaped by gravity, quantum mechanics, and the deep interconnections between them.

explained Gaztañaga.