FINALLY! The Big Bang theory fizzles out!

Today's standard cosmological model, based on the Big Bang and cosmic inflation (the idea that the early universe rapidly blew up in size), has been remarkably successful in explaining the structure and evolution of the universe. But it comes at a price: it leaves some of the most fundamental questions unanswered.

For one, the Big Bang model begins with a singularity—a point of infinite density where the laws of physics break down. This is not just a technical glitch; it's a deep theoretical problem that suggests we don't really understand the beginning at all.

In short, the standard model of cosmology works well—but only by introducing new ingredients we have never observed directly. Meanwhile, the most basic questions remain open: where did everything come from? Why did it begin this way? And why is the universe so flat, smooth, and large?

English astronomer Fred Hoyle is credited with coining the term "Big Bang" during a talk for a March 1949 BBC Radio broadcast. The term survived an international competition in which three judges sifted through 13,099 entries from 41 countries to come up with a better name and concluded that none was apt enough to replace it. No winner was declared, and like it or not, we have been stuck with 'big bang' ever since.

Until NOW! An article published on phys.org describes new research that suggests the beginning of our universe may have taken place inside a black hole. Here are some highlights from that article….

“The Big Bang was not the start of everything, but rather the outcome of a gravitational crunch or collapse that formed a very massive black hole—followed by a bounce inside it. This idea, which we call the black hole universe, offers a radically different view of cosmic origins, yet it is grounded entirely in known physics and observations [with the supporting mathematics].

“The new model tackles the age-old questions from a different angle—by looking inward instead of outward. Instead of starting with an expanding universe and trying to trace back how it began, we consider what happens when an overly dense collection of matter collapses under gravity.

This is a familiar process: stars collapse into black holes, which are among the most well-understood objects in physics. But what happens inside a black hole, beyond the event horizon from which nothing can escape, remains a mystery.

“In 1965, the British physicist Roger Penrose proved that under very general conditions, gravitational collapse must lead to a singularity. This new research proves that gravitational collapse does not have to end in a singularity. The math shows that as we approach the potential singularity, the size of the universe changes as a (hyperbolic) function of cosmic time. This simple mathematical solution describes how a collapsing cloud of matter can reach a high-density state and then bounce, rebounding outward into a new expanding phase.

“What emerges on the other side of the bounce is a universe remarkably like our own. Even more surprisingly, the rebound naturally produces the two separate phases of accelerated expansion—inflation and dark energy—driven not by a hypothetical fields but by the physics of the bounce itself.

“This model does more than fix technical problems with standard cosmology. It could also shed new light on other deep mysteries in our understanding of the early universe—such as the origin of supermassive black holes, the nature of dark matter, or the hierarchical formation and evolution of galaxies.

“The black hole universe also offers a new perspective on our place in the cosmos. In this framework, our entire observable universe lies inside the interior of a black hole formed in some larger ‘parent’ universe.

“We are not special, no more than Earth was in the geocentric worldview that led Galileo (the astronomer who suggested Earth revolves around the sun in the 16th and 17th centuries) to be placed under house arrest.

“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.”

Key sentence: our entire observable universe lies inside the interior of a black hole formed in some larger ‘parent’ universe.

I was immediately reminded of Seahaven in The Truman Show, where Truman Burbank lived his whole life in an environment created by Christof while the whole world watched on TV. And it sounded a lot like what some very well-respected physicists are telling us….

For example, Leonard Susskind and Gerard ’t Hooft, in their work on black holes, helped establish the “holographic principle”—the idea that all of the information that falls into a black hole is not lost, but rather encoded on its event horizon, a 2D surface. The interior of a black hole, then, may be a 3D (or 4D spacetime) holographic projection of quantum information encoded on its surface.

So, if our universe is inside a black hole, and if the holographic principle holds, then everything we perceive as our 3D universe would indeed be a holographic projection from a 2D surface—the event horizon of a parent-universe black hole.

This doesn’t mean we live in a "simulation" in the digital sense, but it does suggest that our perceived 3D reality is emergent—possibly from a deeper 2D quantum description. In that sense, this research lends powerful conceptual support to the idea that we are living in a hologram.