This, like most ideas, came to me after waking up. If the Universe, black holes and theoretical physics is just the sort of thing that makes you fall asleep at your keyboard ...well, you might want to look elsewhere on the web. Or be happy with this picture of a kitten. It's extremely cute and furry and purry.

Aw, the cuteness!

OK, what do we know about the Universe we're in? Here are a few things we're pretty sure of.

1 - Universe's boundary is accelerating away from us at the speed of light, to our observations (and we're inside of it) so nothing can escape the Universe. Not even light.

2 - Because of this, we have no way of telling what is outside the Universe. We can hypothesize that there's either nothing of any form outside the Universe or that if there IS something beyond the boundary, it can't see in.

3 - There's a lot of debate about what happens to the matter in our Universe with all this expansion. Will gravity eventually get the better of it all and pull us back into a big crunch or will the matter fly off, eventually expanding to the point where all there exists is a cold nothingness? One molecule every light-year or more, or all the molecules back in a single point? No light or discernable energy because the Universe is spread so thin, or the ingredients for another Big Bang? That kind of thing.

OK, that's part one of three. Part two is: what do we know about black holes.

1 - because of the nature of a black hole, nothing pulled inside (beyond the point of no return called the 'event horizon') can escape. For us outside, it seems that time slows infinitely for the thing or person pulled in. To the observer getting pulled in, time dilates so the stars are born and die in an instant. If anyone survives, it would appear, we can speculate, that even going at the speed of light will not get them out of the black hole. The event horizon is accelerating away from their point-of-view at the speed of light. Like the Universe, light can't escape it.

2 - Because of this, we have no way of telling what is inside the black hole. We can hypothesize that there's either nothing of any form inside the black hole or that if there IS something beyond the boundary, it can't see out.

3 - There's a lot of debate about what happens to the matter in a black hole with all this expansion. Will tidal forces eventually get the better of it all and pull it all into a big crunch or will the matter expand as the hole does, eventually expanding to the point where the black hole slowly evaporates its mass as energy (and yes, black holes do this, as Hawking proved as described here)? And the bigger the black hole gets, Hawking said the hole radiates less radiation.

That's where the final part occurred to me this morning. Nothing inside can get out, no way of telling what's happening either side of the boundary, no idea yet if the end result is all or nothing. When we're describing what happens to a theoretical Universe, it's the same as a black hole. Are they both the same thing, just observed from different locations?

Professor Stephen Hawkin once said that "this would imply that the area of a horizon of a black hole could only increase in time, never shrink". But he also says that, because of Hawking Radiation, energy density can sometimes be negative on the quantum level and (true enough) that's why black holes can radiate.

But that applies more as the black hole is small. The larger the hole, the less it radiates. So; as the black hole (or the Universe) gets bigger, can we say it can only radiate less into the domain beyond its boundary? And also, that the Universe and the black holes inside it continue to grow?

In effect, is our visible Universe nothing more than just a black hole devouring up matter from beyond its Universal Event Horizon, and are the black holes in our Universe merely doing the same? Could there be an infinite number of steps, getting sucked into an infinite number of Universes within Universes? Is the idea of other Universes a valid one, but wrong in the respect that the Universes aren't like bubbles in a bath but more like an infinite number of Russian dolls?

I want to be the first to say yes. Seabrook's Layered Dimensional Theory, until someone else comes up with a better name for it.

You are here. In one of these layers. Anything further in from your layer appears to be a singularity, anything further out appears to be expanding away from us at the maximum speed possible. Not so much an explosion in a black hole as postulated here but the contents of an outer level's singularity in and of itself. This means that there would not need to be a white hole because the entire outer horizon of the Universe you're in IS the point where matter seems to be created.

I hope it's an infinite thing, otherwise one Universe will end up with all the matter. Like having one room in the world having all the furniture, it would make it a lot harder to sort out the space!

Listen : Out There In The Universe - Spacetribe ... Supermassive Black Hole - Muse ... The Emptiness Of Nothingness - Amorphous Androgynous (FSOL).