Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Worlds Within Worlds

How Did the Universe Start? | Cosmic Variance
Most of us suffer under the vague impression — with our intuitions trained by classical general relativity and the innocent-sounding assumption that our local uniformity can be straightforwardly extrapolated across infinity — that the Big Bang singularity is a past boundary to the entire universe, one that must somehow be smoothed out to make sense of the pre-Bang universe. But the Bang isn’t all that different from future singularities, of the type we’re familiar with from black holes. We don’t really know what’s going on at black-hole singularities, either, but that doesn’t stop us from making sense of what happens from the outside. A black hole forms, settles down, Hawking-radiates, and eventually disappears entirely. Something quasi-singular goes on inside, but it’s just a passing phase, with the outside world going on its merry way.

The Big Bang could have very well been like that, but backwards in time. In other words, our observable patch of expanding universe could be some local region that has a singularity (or whatever quantum effects may resolve it) in the past, but is part of a larger space in which many past-going paths don’t hit that singularity.

Maybe our universe is just one tiny bubble within a vast ocean — an ocean which, itself, is on a planet in a galaxy in a universe which is just one tiny bubble within a vast ocean. And so on. Forever.

We simply have no way of knowing.

Moments like these just make me smile.