What made the black whole in the other universe?
An incredibly massive star that collapsed in on itself. What made that other universe? Another black hole possibly. What made that second other universe? Another black hole in yet another universe? We could just trace this back through an infinite number of black holes, and infinite number of universes, going back through an infinite stretch of time.
No starting point. I'm not really trying to argue science vs. religious faith here. I just find it incredibly frustrating that people insist on a beginning to everything. I do find though that often religious advocates like to question scientific thinkers down to a point where they are asking "what started the big bang?", or "what created the first hydrogen gas?". It is so appealing to think some higher power did. But of course, this can be turned around on the fanatic, and he can be asked "what created God?"
The religious thinker would probably then say "no-one needed to create God, he has always existed." Surely this answer is entirely hypocritical! Didn't the fanatic just try to corner the scientist into accepting that there had to be a beginning to everything?
Naturally we have this idea that there must be a beginning based on intuition built from everyday life experience. This intuition is horribly misleading, because as humans we observe such a
tiny fraction of reality. For example, macroscopic slowly moving bodies. This is why when we look at a situation that is out of the ordinary to us, our intuition almost
always fails! For example, we find that time is not absolute, that velocities are NOT additive (ever!), and so on, in special relativity. These properties become more easily measurable as we speed things up much faster than we are used to observing them. And when we go down to a microscopic level, we have all sorts of other counter-intuitive things happening, like quantum-tunnelling -- non-zero probabilities of particles surpassing energy barriers that are greater than the particles' kinetic energy. Also consider the double slit experiment, etc.
Using everyday intuition, and thinking "there has to be a beginning" seems like an horrible way to approach thinking about the creation of our universe: something more far removed from everyday experience than special relativity or quantum mechanics!
Further, there are many infinite patterns (like the black hole one I described at the beginning of this post) that we have found in nature. Fractals are a good example.
btw: (black *hole
)
Poll