The big bang...

"...in the mathematical model of general relativity, time must have a beginning in what is called the big bang," writes Stephen Hawking. Mr. Hawking also states, "...there is another kind of time, called imaginary time [in the sense of i²=-1; i is what mathematicians call an imaginary number], that is at right angles to the ordinary real time we feel going by. The history of the universe in real time determines its history in imaginary time, and vice versa, but the two kinds of history can be very different. In particular, the universe need have no beginning or end in imaginary time. Imaginary time behaves just like another direction in space."

Furthermore, "It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet believe in for other reasons." For these and related reasons, Mr. Hawking tells us that the "universe has multiple histories, "each of which is determined by a tiny nut" such as the one perched atop your shoulders. Accordingly, Mr. Hawking has been referred to derisively as a bootstrapper by those scientists with an unyielding faith in objective materialism. See The Universe in a Nutshell (New York: Bantam Books, 2001), pp. 41, 58-59, 82-83.

Now, a remark about black holes: Just as Hawking & Penrose proved that time has a beginning in what is called the big bang, similar arguments prove that time comes to an end in a black hole. But from earth we can observe and measure the effects of real black holes many light-years away, i.e. in what we regard as our temporal past. One such black hole is Sagittarius A* located more than 10,000 light years from earth at the center of the Milky Way. So, there's both a beginning and an end of time in what we conventionally label the temporal past. And since there can be multiple black holes, many of which we can detect, so also time ending in multiple places throughout the cosmos.

Whoa...say what?? Remember that "time" is not like a railroad track independent of the events which occur in 3D space. This Newtonian idea was rejected with the advent of special and general relativity; the term spacetime is now used for the continuum in which space and time are unified. Gravity is merely how you experience the geometric curvature of spacetime that exists in the presence of matter. So, you cannot talk of time without simultaneously talking about space.

With spacetime, however, it's believed that what you regard as past, present and future are each equally real, thus the term block time. By analogy, all the points along the two lines drawn on this web page are equally real. Although this suggests a sort of Calvinistic predestination for each of us, quantum theory can be used to rule out such a conclusion. Furthermore, depending on one's speed and direction, it is logically, if not yet technologically, possible for the temporal dimension of one observer to appear as a mixture of the space and temporal dimensions of another. We should therefore be able to conclude that there are an infinite number of parallel paths through time, just as there are in ordinary space.

Check out the March 2005 issue of Scientific American for Misconceptions about the big bang, but beware of the sloppy editing and the habit of the authors to confuse correlation with causality, beg questions, and so on. Also see Parallel Universes in the May 2003 issue to learn about the observations which support the existence of another you only 10 to the 10²³ meters away. That's 10 multiplied by itself 10²³ times. In comparison, 10 raised to the 10¹ equals 10,000,000,000; 10 raised to the 10² equals 10¹⁰⁰, also called a googol.

"A trou noir has no hair."

In other words, since black holes have at most
three observable properties, mass, electric charge and angular momentum,
any two black holes with equal values for all three are indistinguishable.