Please don't submit these sort of "Scientists Now Believe" articles. The universe "Must" not have been born inside a Black Hole, that's just something one 10-day old paper is claiming.
Let is settle for a while before shouting from the rooftops that it's a groundbreaking bit of science. Many others have suggested before that black holes may be feeding baby universes, but it hasn't stuck.
Either that our we're all inside of a bunch of nested lexical closures. Maybe time isn't inherited from an object hierarchy, but is a locally bound variable inside of a closure function? Meh... functional & OO start to look pretty much the same if you squint your eyes just right.
Well, if we assume a big-crunch outcome of the universe,
then it could be said that all matter would end up inside 1 big black hole. And then it might follow that the universe is re-spawned inside of the black hole. This solves your 2 issues, all escaping material would be re-absorbed, and there would only be a background oscillation of energy in and out of the universe that would net to a constant.
This example kinda kills the whole romantic-fantasy element of universes in black holes, since you would only get 1 child universe per parent universe, and it would not really be noticeable from our point of view. (what happens to those poor universes when 2 of the black holes combine??)
But I mean, shouldn't conservation of energy be invalid right now, as more matter and energy fall into our universe from the outside-place? It sounds like he's not just saying black holes spawn universes, but that universes exist inside black holes. Thus universes should grow in mass beyond what they started with, and should eventually lose all their mass to Hawking radiation.
Must have been? Like it escaped after being born and is now out in the wild? To me, these sort of papers seem to be exercises in futile epistemology. It's not even wrong.
In this particular case, the comments calling the article crackpot are far more crackpot than the actual article. Extracts from the comment:
The very idea of a black hole is based on the concept of continuity, an idea that is not only illogical (it leads to an infinite regress), but is not even scientific in the Popperian sense of falsification. Even Einstein, Mr. Continuity himself, had doubts about continuity.
Worst of all is the idea that somehow time has a direction of flow, i.e., an arrow. The idea that we are moving in time in one direction or another is a conceptual disaster. Why? Because time cannot change by definition...
The problem with the physics community is that theirs is an incestuous science that has been spawning hideous monstrosities for some time now. Their bunker mentality (the public is stupid and is the enemy) prevents them from considering other points of view, especially views that contradict their worldview.
And so forth. This sets off most of the alarms on the crackpot detection test (references to Einstein, assertions that all physicists are stupid, nonsensical use of terminology et cetera). But it does it in such a way that I think I see a self-aware troll at work, rather than a garden-variety crackpot.
As for the paper, I'll give it a "meh" for now. It doesn't seem to be crackpot, but it's not necessarily true either; it's just speculative, and doesn't seem to make any testable predictions.
Worst of all is the idea that somehow time has a direction of flow, i.e., an arrow. The idea that we are moving in time in one direction or another is a conceptual disaster.
That's a funny comment (I realize it's not yours, hugh3), because this guy is flying in the face of respected theoretical physicists. Time is immutable? It cannot have a direction? Blogga please.
I can tell you why I wont take it too serious for now.
"The problem with inflation is that it needs an additional theory to explain why it occurs and that's ugly."
It's always a bad sign when scientist start looking for beauty rather than go where the facts lead them even if it's ugly.
On top of that, it's not like there haven't been many many many many very intelligent people trying to solve this problem.
He seems to try to solve the problem semantically, i.e. try to re-interpret the facts into a more aesthetically pleasing model which is exactly where it becomes pseudoscience.
To the best of my knowledge (and I am no scientist) the information that we have about the universe simply can't lead to a solution to the problem if it can be solved at all.
Only if we get additional information about our universe will we be able to perhaps find another way to interpret what this all means.
But cherry picking in the current knowledge base won't magically create a theory.
It's not about interpretation it's about facts.
The facts lead us to two "competing" theories that just can't be combined.
Maybe he is onto something, but then he needs to make some predictions with it.
When scientists say that an additional theory is ugly, they mean that adding the theory means ugly math. Ugly math is complicated, unsupported calculation--it's tweaking the theory to suit the data. In other words, the very reason they call it ugly is because of the things you cited. Now, it is certainly pseudo-science or wishful thinking, but cherry-picking the current knowledge base is how you create new theories.
There are real arguments against inflation other than it not being pretty. See http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_4.html#Steinhardt for an explanation of why one of the early theorists who supported it has come to reject it.
(That tidbit notwithstanding, I am insufficiently informed to have a worthwhile opinion on this subject.)
I think that after dozens of years of neuroscience we can determine whether a person is thinking or not by several means, all very different to 'introspection'.
Arguing about 'the illusion of thought' really sounds like medieval philosophy.
I recommend 'I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self' by Rodolfo Llinás for a more modern take on these issues.
Let is settle for a while before shouting from the rooftops that it's a groundbreaking bit of science. Many others have suggested before that black holes may be feeding baby universes, but it hasn't stuck.