UNH Researcher: Cosmos Expanded Quickly Because We Are in Black Hole

By assuming the universe is located in a black hole, Nikodem J. Poplawski, a senior lecturer at the University of New Haven, and Shantanu Desai, a research fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Germany, say that the early expansion of the universe (known as inflation) can be explained simply and remain consistent with observations by those who study the cosmos.

Their paper, "Non-parametric Reconstruction of An Inflaton Potential from Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble Gravity with Particle Production," can be found at arXiv (http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.08834), an archive for scholarly research hosted at the Cornell University Library. The paper expands on earlier research by Poplawski, who theorized that our universe may exist within a black hole, or rather, on the other side of its boundary known as an event horizon.

Poplawski, an expert on black holes, was featured in a Forbes magazine story last year that speculated on who might be the next Einstein.A theoretical physicist, he was identified as one of five scientists in the world most like Einstein.

"We studied the dynamics of a universe formed in a black hole using the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory of gravity which extends general relativity by including the spin of matter and torsion of space-time," the pair states in their paper.

They found that "… a universe in a black hole with spin, torsion, and particle production provides a simple and natural mechanism for inflation which does not require hypothetical fields and is consistent with the Planck 2015 observations."

The theory of inflation was developed to explain the expansion of space and the formation of such things as galaxies. Planck was a space exploration mission launched in 2009 to observe the first light of the universe. Observations from that mission were released earlier this year.

It is commonly accepted, Poplawski, said,  that the universe began when a high concentration of matter exploded and expanded—the so-called Big Bang. But there are issues with the Big Bang model. It doesn’t answer such questions as: What started the Big Bang? What is the source of the mysterious dark energy that is apparently causing the universe to speed up its expansion? 

"It has been known since the 1970s that the standard hot Big Bang model suffers from the horizon, flatness, and homogeneity problems and there must be another dynamical mechanism prior to Big Bang nucleosynthesis (the formation of atoms more complex than the hydrogen atom) to alleviate these problems," they write.

Their work demonstrates that torsion not only solves these problems but also manifests itself at extremely high densities as a repulsive force, which avoids the formation of singularities (points in space where physics breaks down) and replaces the Big Bang by a "Big Bounce" in a black hole.

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