Sunday, March 02, 2014

NatGeo, SciAm educate us about black holes and multiple universes in heavily illustrated articles: the afterlife could be real even for agnostics

The March 2014 print issue of National Geographic is important to mention for a detailed article by Michael Finkel, impressive art work by Mark A. Garlick, “The Truth About Black Holes: Star Eater”. 

Albert Einstein had, at one time, thought that something like a black hole would not exist. Now, we know that our galaxy and probably most or all galaxies have large black holes in the center, areas where gravity is so strong that light cannot escape. 

At the center of the sphere there is a mathematical point of infinite density called “the singularity”.  It is possible that sometimes singularities “explode” with a big-bang to create a new universe.  Could this happen at the center of the Milky Way and obliterate our existence?  Conceivably it has happened in the Universe a few times.  It seems to be rare, and an act of intentional creation.
The article imagines what happens as one goes into a black hole.  Nothing, because time stops.  But one microinstant later you are “spaghettified”.  But the stoppage of time raises an intriguing idea: at death, maybe our sense of time stops, and we remain conscious of our last moments (which could be horrible for some people) or of our entire lives, with every day easily retrievable. 

Back in February 2012, Michael Mayer had authored a piece in Scientific American, “The Quantum Universe: Is Space Digital?”  He had proposed that information associated with consciousness (and free will, capable of moral accountability) gets transferred on “light sheets” to black hole surfaces.  There could be an issue of how long it takes that sheet to reach the center of a galaxy (at “c” as the limit).  But there’s also a problem in that the larger the black hole sphere, the less adequate the surface would he in holding all possible information, relative to the volume.  (That’s pretty easy to prove with calculus.)  Also, because of Hawking radiation, black holes can “evaporate” or sublime (like snow in the sun when the air temperature is below freezing) so stored consciousness could be lost.  Maybe this supports the need for reincarnation.  Or maybe absolutely eternal life is still relative.  Maybe the Mormon idea that we advance toward becoming “gods” through eternal marriage could even make some sense, cosmologically. 

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