If black holes are powered by gravity, are white holes powered by levity?

Yes, for the universe their seems to be a "cosmic-levity". BHs powered by Newton's G and the cosmos by Einstein's λ - he unsuccessfully tried to hold his universe in a static state, but today we know λ does more than that.

So, if the universe is a white hole, just what is it spewing into?

I think if the BB was a white hole (and that's a big IF), it would have spewed out space itself. Into nothing? Into the 'bulk'?

The definition of a white hole is basically a response to Einstein's theories, which is purely a mathematical construct, for no one has observed one in our universe - as far as I know. Actually, I think Hawkings basically stated it was the same thing as a black hole - at least from a thermodynamics point of view.

The only possibility known to date is the anomaly GRB 060614, which was a gamma ray burst of about 102 seconds with no detectable supernova afterglow.

Some speculate that may have been a white hole since Einstein's theories predict any white hole formation would almost instantly expire (ejecting all of its matter at once).

At this point I think the definition of a white hole is a little too loose and it seems anyone can take the liberty to apply it in a number of ways. So, could that describe the big bang? Maybe, but I am not sure it is any more valid than the various Fecund universes, multiverse theories, or M-Theory since all are simply theoretical abstracts so far.

I agree. The BB is a maybe, but we are definitely not living "inside a WH", despite the apparent 'BH time reversal' that I have described with the 'galaxies falling outwards' through the Hubble radius. Apart from the short lifetime of WHs, the observed cosmic expansion dynamics is also wrong for a WH.

"Apart from the short lifetime of WHs..."

Using whose time scale? Remember the main principle of Relativity:

"An hour spent with a pretty woman can feel like a minute, a minute sitting on a hot stove can feel longer than any hour. That's relativity." -Einstein

A day is but one of countless (if you're young) or fleeting (if you're old) many to a human, but for a mayfly, it is an entire lifetime. Compared to the 'lifetime' of the planet, all of humanity is but the blink of an eye, and in the History of the Universe, we barely register at all on the chart, a fraction of a second at the end of the Cosmic Year.

How can we be sure that events 'inside' a white whole experience time at the same rate as events 'outside' it? It seems like Hubris to think that everything in the universe needs to run at the rate of our own clocks.

Remember the Three-Body Theorem from Physics? Coming up with stable orbits for three bodies around their mutual gravitational 'center of mass' is an almost impossible formula to balance mathematically, and from observation, Nature 'solves' the equation my ejecting one of the bodies, or smashing two bodies together, leaving it with the much simpler 'two-body theorem.' Ignoring moons, the Solar System is a 9-10 body system (depending on whether or not you count Pluto) so, if Physics plays its course, all but one planet will be ejected/destroyed over time, leaving the sun alone with its 'favorite.' The time scale for this is currently such that it is considered that the Sun will 'eat' the inner planets (out of boredom, maybe?) before any planet is officially kicked out of the group (and with it's eccentric, off-plane orbit, it looks like Pluto is probably the first one to be given the ol' heave-ho out of here.)

Look at the history of the solar system with a slower 'frame rate' and it looks a lot like an explosion in the middle of throwing debris away. We're flying around the sun at millions of miles an hour, but to our senses it seems like a slow, stately crawl because of the distances involved.

I think I'm losing my focus here, so I'll just end with another quote:

"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." -Ford Prefect (Douglas Adams)

As far as time goes, they don't, but since the whole universe is now expanding it seems pretty well assured we are living in the post-white hole epoch.

I heard of this proposal of the BB being a white hole many years ago. I believe that this is one of the variety of concepts that leads to the multi-verse concept since we [indirectly] observe that our universe has many black holes but apparently only the single white hole of the BB.

I personally like this proposal, but science is not predicated on preferences. This and all other cosmology proposals have always baffled me when the next question gets asked, how does one test if this is true or not?

I guess the hard thing to swallow with the idea that a white hole is the exit port of a black hole and our universe is but one example of this phenomena is that the black hole that formed any white hole large enough to spew all the mass and energy into our known universe would be one very large black hole.

The probability of a black hole that large seems remote if not impossible as black holes appear to have an upper size limit that is far, far short of the current mass of the universe.

However, we are already well past any testable science with this discussion that it probably doesn't matter whether there is any secondary science that would support that theory.

"This [the Hubble radius] is the inverse of the Hubble constant, which is conventionally expressed as km/sec per Mega-parsec. Its present value is 67.9 km/s per Mpc, which translates to 1/144^th of one percent per million years. One can also say that the present proper cosmic distances increase by 1% every 144 million years.

Almost paradoxically, despite the present accelerating expansion, this rate will eventually come down to 1/173^th of one percent per million years and then stay there for as long as we can foresee."

I'm a little surprised that nobody took me up on the last paragraph. Accelerating expansion with a decreasing % rate of expansion? And what about when the expansion rate eventually settles into a constant 1/173^th % per My?

The answer lurks in the way distances are defined in cosmology. The Hubble constant was originally defined to work with co-moving distances, while the acceleration of expansion is defined in terms of proper distance.

In the co-moving distance scale we assign a constant spatial value to a galaxy, not changing with expansion; it is as if the measuring tape is (and always was) stretching with the expansion. The scale on the tape was however chosen to coincide with today's scale. If a galaxy first formed 10 billion years ago, it had the same co-moving coordinates as what it has today.

Proper distance is as if we 'freeze' expansion at any time and then use today's standard tape to measure the distance to the galaxy. If someone could have measured the distance between our location and the above galaxy when it formed, it would have been less than 30% of what is today.^[1]

Another way to look at it is to consider an investment at a fixed compound interest rate. The actual amount of money 'expands' (slightly) exponentially.

-J

[1] The distance would depend one what its redshift is. We cannot measure such a large distance; we calculate it from our best model, using the Hubble constant and the redshift.
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Perhaps we all are considering this wrongly. A BH is a black hole, with space reaching downward into a hyperbolic cone (event horizon --> critical point) as the singularity is reached. Perhaps a WH does not stand for white hole, since technically it would not be a hole at all. WH is either white house (not applicable here and mainly irrelevant, and yes I could not avoid the dig), or White Hill. I should be credited with coining this new term to bandy about. Apparently in a WH, all the space-time is piled up in one singularity a point in space-time, and apparently space-time is repulsive when the matter density is <0. (Imaginary Universe?). Then some perturbation to the space-time wave function (whatever that actually is), takes place, and the critical phenomenon of "salting out" a universe from an imaginary universe takes place.

I am not fluent enough in mathematics to express this, but here I will try:

(1) E-MC² =0; and at the WH singularity, this requires a metastable state, similar to a saddle-point or local maximum. and E/M-C²=0. For a true WH to exist there has to be (in my little imagination) M<0, and somehow E would be <0 for eq. 1 to work at all. Within this is a conundrum of nonsense for a normal universe.

(2)viewing this another way: C= E^1/2/M^1/2 ; and we presume C is a positive, real, non-complex number. For any singularity where there is M≤ 0, it follows that E≤ 0 also. But if inside this singularity E and M are complex, then all bets are off as to both being <0 or so. It does not matter as long as the square root of the ratio comes out to C.

(3) Another mind-blowing idea (I have no idea how this results from general relativity or if it could): Suppose instead of E = mc² , we have this: E= mc² + m²c⁴ + ..., but somehow the higher order terms only show up in a singularity such as WH. For that to happen there needs to be something that puts the higher order terms off into the imaginary plane?

Please don't shoot me for having crazy ideas, I am just a simple lumberjack in a desert.

I volunteer to travel through a black hole and report my findings on the otherside.

I was thinking of sending that guy that keeps bombarding us with all those love and life consultations first.

No, no, we can't start with human testing.

Send the politicians in first.

( Can you tell I'm already sick of all the campaigning and smear tactics for this election season? Feels like we've been dealing with it since the mid-terms. )

Oh, you have inside information that he was human?

Well, giving the benefit of the doubt.

Start with the ones we KNOW are not human, and while we're using the 'sure things,' look closer at the 'marginal cases' to see who else qualifies for the ultimate in 'bottomless pit depth testing.'

Andrew Thomas in a little book "Hidden in Plain Sight 2" has a novel theory about this that explains cosmic expansion and its acceleration without invoking dark energy and involves not white holes but rather what happens to gravity when the entire mass of an object (in this case the mass of the material universe [including I suppose dark matter]) lies inside its own Schwartzchild radius. Anyone besides me read this little book?

No, I haven't read the book, but the idea that our universe "lies inside its own Schwartzchild radius" has been proven wrong. The total amount of matter (normal and dark) in our observable universe only amounts to some 30% of what is needed to make it lie within the Schwarzschild radius.

As an example, the Hubble radius is presently measured at 14.4 billion light years, while the observable universe has a present proper radius of some 46 billion light years.

-J

Hello Jorrie,

Yes I understand the calculated Schwartzchild radius is about 10 billion ly. I suppose the only thing that might save Thomas' theory is that we don't know how much mass lies outside what we can observe! My understanding is (admittedly superficial) is that as mass goes up the Schwartzchild radius can increase faster than the physical radius.

I am in no way committed to Thomas' theory. I did think it a novel solution to the expansion problem I hadn't seen anywhere else.

The idea that the universe is the inside of a white hole, does not take into account all the universe's dimensions. A white hole would be mass and energy only, and not the entire framework of the universe.
The Universal Framework. First would be Time, in all of it's dimensional qualities (must have more than one). Then comes Space, in all of it's dimensionality. Then the forces, strong, electromagnetic, and weak forces (list them as fractional dimensions, or folded dimensions). Gravity, however is not a force, it is only the curvature of space-time.
A black hole is Space-Time curved enough to prevent light from coming past the event horizon. It does not accelerate matter to the speed of light at the event horizon, it would accelerate it to it's terminal velocity based upon the mass of the black hole, up to the speed of light. The light is travels in a straight line as it appears to it. The entire mass and energy within the Event Horizon, is still there and still within our universe. It is just inside curved space-time so tight that it appears to us as very small. Also, if the mass and energy were to become unrelated to the rest of the universe, it's effect on the curvature of space-time would cease. The idea that a black hole could become a white hole to elsewhere would mean that the entire mass energy of it would disappear.
This does not take into account a multitude of special cases, such as quantum tunneling and other odd effects.

I think we have agreed here that we can't be living inside a white hole (WH), but there is no evidence ruling out the possibility that we are here because of a WH, i.e. the BB could have been a traditional WH (time reversal in Einstein's equations).

So maybe we are living outside of a WH event that happened some 13.7 billion years ago?

-J

PS: Welcome to CR4, Brian :)

I don't believe that the BB could have been caused by a WH. The basic framework of the universe, the complex balance of forces and dimensional matrix's are too complicated for a simple WH to have been the cause of the BB. A WH would have to have set the universe into motion. The WH would also have too come from somewhere and into somewhere, the basics would already have to exist.
The universe would have to have Time to start first. For without Time, nothing can happen. Time should have three dimensions, or rather components or qualities. Space would have to have come into existence next, with six dimensions. With the balance of the three forces, that are enfolded dimensions.
Therefore we would live within a twelve dimensional manifold for our basic framework. The nature of Time, would have a linear direction, a curvature vector, or angular momentum, and an amplitude, or resonance. The nature of Space would be the three seen dimensions with three extended dimensions, with the three enfolded dimensions, corresponding to the three forces, the strong, electromagnetic, and weak. These three enfolded dimensions, along with the six Spacial dimensions would have a hyper-cubic properties. The Spacial dimensions and the Temporal dimensions would also have to enfold within themselves. This would have been at the very start of the universe.
Time would start, which forces space to unfold with the three forces in balance. immediately, the spacial dimensions and the three forces would blend into each other, and then coalesce into the Temporal dimensions which would give us the basic framework of Space-Time. This would have to happen at the very start of time, within the Plank scale.
It would be like a hyper-dimensional flower opening to unfold into a new flower shape.
Don't Blink.

Yes, Brian, welcome to CR-4. We look forward to more contributions.

I would strongly urge that you remove your email address in your signature. Not only is that a violation of policy, but a vulnerability that no one here would like to see exploited.

Your analysis seems based on a variant String Theory. I am not sure I am signed up for that, but it is a fascinating theory, nonetheless.

The encouraging news is that what has been once thought unprovable now physicists may have some clever means of at least disproving the theory in the not so distant future. It would be nice to see that in my lifetime.

Hi Jorrie,

I enjoy your input. It's very informing and eye opening. This article is no different. This is the first time I have heard the concept of a White Hole. I have thought for some time that the Black Hole is nothing more than a form of cosmic recycling. The Black Hole, like a huge vacuum cleaner sucks up galaxies and must redistribute the matter somewhere. I have thought it must be to an alternate universe. It seems that we would see the output of such a magnitude in our universe (Dark Energy?). From what I've read it seems that the bulk matter (planets and stars) as it enters the Event Horizon is channeled into what I imagine as a swirling vortex where I imagine the matter is broken down to its basic components of bits and pieces of atoms. As if it were a being sent through a cosmic atom smashing collider. I then imagine that the remaining particles of planets and stars are sort of aspirated with cosmic force creating a new bubble universe. If this were the case, would there be light? I imagine that this flow swirls around and begins to coalesce into new planets and stars. This is what I imagine as what is referred to as the Big Bang. Nature, as we know it, is all about recycling. Why wouldn't the cosmos be recycled? Of course this is nothing more that mere speculation. From our prospective what else do we have?

Thank you for your patience.

MMM

Hi MMM, a warm welcome to this forum!

We have no evidence of BHs recycling matter. As far as we can tell, the gravity of that matter stays in our universe and is not recycled somewhere else. There is a theoretical possibility that once a BHs is 'starved' of things to 'feed on', it slowly evaporates away and eventually releases all that energy back into our space. Note that BH's cant 'eat' all the matter around it. If something orbits at a safe distance from a BH, it is quite safe...

In cosmology, the strongest theory at present indicates a 'bounce' from a previous contracting phase of the universe. Whether we can call the result of the bounce (if it is true) a White Hole I'm not sure, but we definitely call it the Big Bang. The weird thing is that what contracted could have been of infinite size and stayed so right through the 'Bang'. It is just that density increased to the Planck level, where the contraction got stopped and reversed - brain-bending stuff...

-J