Are We Living Inside a Black Hole? A Cosmic Bounce Instead of a Big Bang?

[00:00:01]Some physicists think our universe didn't begin with a simple Big Bang, but with a collapse. A parent universe forming a black hole so massive that its core didn't end in destruction. It bounced creating a new expanding cosmos on the inside. That cosmos could be us.

[00:00:21]The idea goes back to Raj Pathria in 1972, who noticed something strange. The math describing black holes looks [music] eerily similar to the math describing our universe. Both have singularities.

[00:00:35]Both have horizons. Both trap information. [music] In black hole cosmology, every black hole could be a doorway to a new universe with the Big Bang acting as the moment of the bounce. Other theories push it further.

[00:00:49]>> [music] >> The holographic principle suggests our entire universe might be encoded on a two-dimensional surface, just like a black hole's event horizon. And Lee Smolin's [music] cosmological natural selection proposes that black holes give birth to new universes with slightly different physical laws, creating a cosmic [music] family tree. Then, there's the strange new clue. JWST found that hundreds of galaxies share a preferred spin direction, as if our universe [music] inherited the rotation of a larger black hole that birthed it. But, the idea [music] has problems.

[00:01:26]>> [snorts] >> We've never seen beyond an event horizon. Black holes [music] collapse inward, while our universe expands outward. And the cosmos is far too [music] smooth and uniform compared to the chaos near a singularity. So, is our universe inside a black hole? It's possible. It's elegant. It's mathematically tempting. But, for now, it's still a cosmic maybe. A theory waiting for the next clue.

[00:01:55]>> [music] >> Mhm.