Why Our Universe Must Have Been Born Inside a Black Hole. I've always thought that the Big Bang sounded like the other end of a black hole, but assumed that there was some mathematical reason why they weren't all saying so. Einstein's theory of gravity said that gravity approaches infinity at the center of black holes, so it seems reasonable to believe that these phenomena must compress matter to the point where it breaks down into space-time and erupts into a new universe. Too bad I can't do math in 11 dimensions. Heck, I couldn't even make a drawing as cool as the one in the story.

As I was watching a program about dark matter, dark energy and dark flow, last night, it occurred to me that there's more going on with vacuum than we understand. Hawkings explanation of how black holes can evaporate as virtual particle pairs get separated by the event horizon, is pretty much a mathematical model. But the basic fact that vacuum is a teeming sea of virtual particles that split apart and recombine faster than can be detected has evidence to support it.