Introduction

Chris Bon
Web Project for Physics 211 Fall 2014
Section F01

    What caused the universe into existence? What was the cause of this cause? Whatever beginning we can imagine must itself have a cause in an endless chain of causality. The end of time is also impossible to imagine, and any attempt to limit space inside any bounds is futile. We can reasonably assume therefore, that space and time is infinite, limitless. But if space-time is infinite in every direction, past, and present, how is it that we are in the present moment since it would take an infinite amount of time to reach today?

    Scientists determine the age and size of the universe by looking out into the distant stars. It is interesting to find that the farther out we look into the universe, the closer we can get to the boundary of both space and time. But we will never be able to find out the limit of the universe as we are limited by the speed of light. What I mean by this, is that since the Big Bang happened approximately 13.8 billion years, we can only see out into the universe about 130,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters away (calculated by multiplying the age of the universe by a light-year, or the distance that light travels in one year). This is a stupendously astronomical distance, but this distance becomes zero when we consider an infinite universe.

    In an infinite universe, there is no conception of boundaries that does not contradict our notion of infinite. But that is exactly what I am attempting to show in this project.

Thesis

    Because the universe is infinite, the only way to reach its bounds would be to transform this infinite into a singularity or move at an infinite speed. But there is such a thing that can allow us to reach the very limits of space. What I want to prove is that the boundary of the universe is the event horizon of a black hole. The event horizon is a spherical ellipse around a black hole demarcating the point of no return. Another way to put it is that the escape velocity required to escape from a black hole at the event horizon is greater than the speed of light, which is equivalent to infinite speed.

    I started thinking about black holes in this way when I learned about the extreme distortion in the fabric of space-time caused by black holes. I think this is a good place to start. I will break this distortion down into its spatial and temporal components for those of you who do not know about these distortions, and then I will use this idea to elucidate my theory. Then I will continue with my ideas about light and the beginning and end of space-time.

    As far as I know, no one else has thought of black holes in this way, so I hope you read through all of it because I put in a lot of time into this project. Well, let's begin with quick review of space-time and how it can be affected by gravity.