this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] procrastitron@lemmy.world 333 points 1 week ago (14 children)

I took a physics course at a community college over 20 years ago and one of the things that stood out to me was the professor telling us not to overthink or assign too much romanticism to the idea of black holes.

His message was basically “it just means the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light… if you plug the size and mass of the universe into the escape velocity formula, the result you get back is greater than the speed of light, so our entire universe is a black hole.”

If this was being discussed at a community college decades ago then I think the new discoveries aren’t as revelatory as they would at first appear to the general public.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 109 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Nah really it was probably some small thing the media got a hold of and just ran with. I think you're spot on

[–] Klear@lemmy.world 114 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)
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[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago (31 children)

On the contrary; while I have heard the explanation that the commenter you replied to has said I have also heard a slightly different theory:

Our universe is the 3 dimensional event horizon of a 4th dimensional black hole. By extension we may find that black holes in our universe have similar funky 2 dimensional areas at their even horizons.

I am sure clickbait articles are part of it but there also seems to be several actual theories surrounding the idea of the nature of our universe relating to black holes.

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[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 65 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Scientist: Scientific discoveries are meaningless when taken out of context.

Journalist: Scientific discoveries are meaningless.

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[–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 53 points 1 week ago (2 children)

another thing I learned at some point: Just because a physics formula returns a result, doesn't mean that it's reality

TBF black holes themselves were originally just the result of a Physics formula, but they eventually turned out to be a "reality". Sometimes that shit happens, yo.

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[–] dutchkimble@lemy.lol 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Orr, you’re missing the obvious alternative here - the guy was a legendary level scientist, but the government stole his research and threatened his family and sidelined him into being a community college professor so that no one pays attention to his “drivel” so that they continue to control us into being workers for the capitalist pigs

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[–] TachyonTele@piefed.social 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Theory is one thing.
Observation is the next step.

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[–] fartographer@lemmy.world 125 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Okay, so now you can barely afford your rent inside a black hole. Enjoy the enhanced granularity of your desperation!

[–] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 33 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That would explain why it feels like my bank account is being sucked dry.

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[–] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 103 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I can barely afford rent!

Well... the good news is you can stretch your income a bit further with spaghettification!

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[–] peregrin5@piefed.social 78 points 1 week ago (6 children)

paying rent sometimes feels like throwing money into a black hole

[–] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The same for mortgages too really. All these people out there toting new construction and how it’s good for property values seem to forget that higher property values means 1) higher property taxes, and 2) higher priority values, for when you sell your home and need to buy a new one.

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[–] Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 61 points 1 week ago (14 children)

This is a postulation not a discovery.

Someone did a weird math thingy that gave a word result and this was how they tried to explain it. There's been zero confirmation this is actually the case. Just like they can't decide if dark energy/matter is a thing.

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[–] Geodad@lemmy.world 53 points 1 week ago (8 children)

What if we're not in a black hole, but in the aftermath of a vacuum decay event?

[–] burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world 43 points 1 week ago (2 children)

no my vacuum is working fine, thanks

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[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 1 week ago (3 children)
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[–] scytale@piefed.zip 52 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (17 children)

Ok I've been meaning to ask this in the Space community or the NoStupidQuestions community. I've seen this news circling around the past 2 weeks and have been watching videos of people talking about it.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think the gist is that astronomers discovered with the JWST that some galaxies at the end of the observable universe appear to be younger than they are supposed to be. So it kinda blows a hole in the big bang expansion where objects farther away should be older. And that somehow ties in with the theory that our universe is inside a blackhole.

It's fascinating but I don't know what to do with that information other than just be fascinated. I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson who said "So what does this new discovery matter to us? Nothing", because us being in a blackhole doesn't change anything in the grand universal scheme of things.

[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

From what I've seen, it's not that they're "young" galaxies, but that they shouldn't have had enough time to develop if the universe were truly so crazily homogenous from the big bang. It doesn't necessarily disprove the big bang, just means the universe might not be as "smooth" as previous assumptions.

Any scientist worth their salt should be readily able to admit it was always an assumption, just one that proved congruent with observations until now.

[–] jared@mander.xyz 14 points 1 week ago (10 children)

I've always liked this theory, imagining the cosmos is just a series/web/tree of black holes draining into the next. Everything gets recycled eventually.

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[–] fluxion@lemmy.world 50 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Tax breaks for the rich is the only solution

[–] Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 14 points 1 week ago

Wouldn't it even be more helpful to just relieve the ultrarich from taxes? So they could better pay their rent too. I'd throw in one or two moneyz to help.

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[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 41 points 1 week ago (7 children)

NOT "discovered inside black hole", just gained further theoretical evidence for the Earth being in a less dense area of the universe. There has been actual evidence of such for some time (at least a decade), but there is uncertainty at such large scales so it cannot be called conclusive based only on a couple types of observation that may have erroneous procedures.

[–] rozodru@lemmy.world 24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

so basically We're out in butt fuck no where in space and the aliens aren't coming any time soon cause they essentially live in New York City and we're in a town in Iowa that no one has ever heard of.

typical.

[–] WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.

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[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 29 points 1 week ago (8 children)

We should all be celebrating our good fortune, protection against a dark forest strike!

[–] IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Except from aliens that are also stuck here with us

[–] Shard@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

We're not stuck in here with them. They're stuck in here with us!

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[–] Taalnazi@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago

Both are fair and valid.

Peaceful science & good housing should go hand in hand.

[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Anyone got a link to either nasa or a good article explaining it?

[–] deltapi@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] Frostbeard@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Scientific American points to an important fact.

"With our latest surveys, such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Euclid, by my very rough estimation, we’ve taken pictures of somewhere around 100 million galaxies out of the two trillion or so estimated to exist in the entire observable universe.

Shamir’s paradigm-shattering conclusion relies on 263 of them."

They are discussing bias in the selection.

"Unfortunately, this kind of extreme selection introduces many opportunities for bias to creep in. When we test a new idea in cosmology—indeed, in all of science—we work to make our conclusion as robust as possible. For example, if we were to change any of these filtering steps, from the selection of survey region to the threshold for deciding whether to include a galaxy in the analysis, our results should hold up or at least show a clear trend where the signal becomes stronger. But there isn’t enough information about such methodological checks in Shamir’s paper to make that judgment, which casts doubt on the validity of the conclusions."

[–] don@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 week ago

I mean, we can talk about it for a bit, Angie, if it’d make you feel better, but that’s really about it, honestly.

[–] sirico@feddit.uk 15 points 1 week ago

You better start believing in compression systems you're in one

[–] SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org 14 points 1 week ago

Considering NASA could be canceled by an ass hole, I think we have other problems.

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