I've been watching PBS episodes of Nova lately, the ones trying to explain black holes, what we've learned and how, what they are, how they started, what's inside, how they'll end.
They have answered a bunch of questions for me, or at least as much as thoughts ending in we-don't-know or we-can't-tell-yet-but-our-latest-theory-is... can produce in answers. Every time I think I understand what they just presented, more questions pop up.
Some concepts from the series stick. Black holes collect galaxies around them and shape them. Stuff actually does escape. They eat stars, and presumably their solar systems. We can't tell what goes on inside the event horizon... but we sort of think we can. And not to be ignored, the graphics in the presentations were fantastic. Mostly. Using a rushing river as an analogy was just silly.
My basic starting place with trying to understand them was wondering what came before and what happens after. What's weird is now that I think that was pretty well explained, I kind of just expanded my question to wondering exactly what eternity is. My understanding was somehow a big bang happened and we have a universe with stars and planets and some with life and some not, and everything is moving somewhere else. Somewhere in all that I didn't lose my thoroughly taught belief in the conservation of matter and energy. Only now the two are more mixed than separate because that seems to be what/how black holes do. From there I go to the idea that the big bang had to have something in mass or energy before it banged, or where did anything come from? Now add in the concept that black holes change mass and energy, maybe by interchanging them into each other... or not.
Eventually the black holes will have sucked in everything, and at that point they won't exist themselves any more. Mass is energy if looked at on the atomic level, everything having a charge of positive, negative or neutral. Those tiny things combine to become atoms, combine to become bigger atoms, combine to become molecules, ad infinitum. Hydrogen crashes into hydrogen and makes helium, crashes again.... When the black holes die in the far future, the energy ends, so mass goes away back to nothing.
Except does it?
What is infinity anyway? Where did the big bang come from? What is left when the universe is over? How can/could either of those things happen? So far 14 billion years is mind blowing enough. But that just brings us up to around now. Presumably billions more years will pass before everything "goes away" - whatever that will actually mean. Does everything return to its simplest energy? And if so, isn't that what we think started it all, and why we call it the Big Bang? Is this merely one cycle among endless other cycles, of boom, construction, destruction, and starting over again? Is infinity so large as a concept that forever actually has meaning? Will everything just keep cycling and cycling and cycling and...?
But you know what? I've only got a few years ahead to wonder about things like that. I'm just going to picture the universe as a Slinky, endlessly stretching, contracting, not in seconds like the toy, but in successive forevers. Let's put some fun back into the unknowable, eh?
Will anybody live long enough to prove the conservation of mass/energy? It's a handy idea to use, simplifying lots of math and such. It that's inescapably true, then we have a slinky universe. So who's got the staircase that the slinky started down on?
I guess this is the point where people start inventing gods again. Or would there be people next time around?
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