[SunkenCiv]

This artist's concept depicts a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. The blue color here represents radiation pouring out from material very close to the black hole. The grayish structure surrounding the black hole, called a torus, is made up of gas and dust. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

[blueunicorn6]

“Black holes appear to destroy information”

Tequila does that, too.

[bigheadfred]

Eventually, the star would meet the event horizon and the black hole would dematerialize in an instant as all the information it had ever sucked in was cast out into the universe.

I don't know about "in an instant" but isn't this idea a bit like what quasars are doing?

[Starstruck]

Because a probe cannot be sent inside a black hole to see what is truly going on, researchers have to rely on theories.

And since the nearest black hole is 1600 light years away that probe will not reach it's destination until the theory has changed at least a hundred times.

[ZX12R]

They should just go get one, and then study it in the laboratory.

[onedoug]

...something on the Planck scale. And when that happens, a bounce will occur, causing the universe to expand again, and then to collapse again and so on forever back and forth.

All entirely theoretical, of course. Yet, I'm haunted by how this harkens back to the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics by Hugh Everett in the 1950s, which essentially postulated that all outcomes to a given event are realized, and not just the outcome we witness here.

There have been many variations of this since. However, M-Theory has since rekindled its spark in me in considering what The Bible, and specifically Jesus meant about "eternal life".

Theoretically, as we die, we are dead here. Yet in an infinity of "parallel" universes our life goes on unaware of any break in its earlier continuity. In some such "settings" we may be young or old, perhaps just born, yet there nonetheless, else any other universe would not apply to us not being in it.

In this sense we would never truly "die" but go on forever, one previous "death" in another sub-system after another, one of those "lives" right here and now.

Though I realize God sets those parameters, who's mechanisms we'll never really know until our souls are fully, infused in Him, which just as possibly may never be. But we'll know Him and those aspects He has prepared for us to once again know each other. And that's more than enough for me.

[LibWhacker]

Nice catch. Thanks for posting.