I'm Going to Prove the Universe Is a Black Hole

Prospectus Announcement

The only condition under which I would ever learn calculus is after I’ve made a public claim to a groundbreaking physics theory which I promise to articulate in a series of technical essays.

And so it begins: Toward a Black-Hole-Interior Model of the Universe: A Prospectus and Publication Road Map

The upcoming papers (and even the prospectus) will be hard to understand if you don’t have a background in physics. I wouldn’t be able to write them without help from AI and math/physics people.

Last year I wrote a couple public-facing essays in the language of my own logic, but no one could understand them, so this time I’ll write two versions of every paper—one for the dorks, and one for you.

The Planned Essays and Their Topics in Plain English

The following essays contain no speculative physics. They are strictly adherent to the established framework of relativity. The novel aspect of my model is its cosmological interpretation of relativity, which remains an open question.

So there’s no new forces, no wormholes, no multiverse, no invisible magic dark energy (ahem). Just nuts and bolts relativity, nothing speculative. My challenge to mainstream physics is deconstructive—I seek to correct existing and erroneously-accepted speculation, beginning with Einstein’s assumption that the universe is expanding because it looks like it’s expanding.

1. No Body Crosses an Event Horizon

Falling into a black hole would fuck you up unbelievably badly.

2. The Limits of Proper Time

It feels intuitive to use time in physics, but relativity can be reframed as a deconstruction of the concept of time. This paper analyzes the mistakes we make when we import intuitions about time into the relativity framework.

3. Time Dilation as Conformal-Spatial Scaling

We should be thinking spatially in relativity. This essay explains how to do that.

4. Infinite Lensing Demands an Observer-Centered Black-Hole Interior (technical linchpin)

“Lensing” here refers to gravity’s ability to change the apparent location of objects in your frame.

“Infinite lensing” means the singularity at the center of the black hole appears in every direction, like a big sphere around you.

This leads to an “observer-centered” interior, meaning that if you fell into a black hole, you’d think you were at the center at all time (this is also a characteristic of our universe).

The observer also concludes that all additional infalling matter begin its journey at the observer’s location at the beginning of time—a.k.a., the Big Bang.

Additionally, the perceived edge/center swap means that the observer actually occupies the entire surface of the event horizon at once, producing a wavelike rather than pointlike observer (meaning you’re a universe-sized ball and not a dot in the center).

The universe is literally inside you.

5. Local Flatness Inside a Black Hole

There’s a physics principle that says things look normal around you, but how does that jibe with being inside a black hole, where supposedly nothing is normal? This paper will answer that.

6. The Outward Collapse of the Universe

As explained in essay 4’s summary, a black hole, and thus our universe, is an inverted sphere. You think you’re at the center, but really you’re at the edge. When you look out at the sky, you’re actually looking toward the center.

So when we think the universe is expanding because galaxies are moving outward, they’re actually falling inward.

As mentioned above, Einstein and others concluded that the universe isn’t collapsing because it doesn’t look like it’s collapsing, so an expansion factor was invented to explain why objects fall toward each other locally but not globally.

The mistake here was overlooking other established phenomena that allow for extremely warped perspectives of objects at great distances from the observer.

7. Dark Energy as Gravity

Physicists call the mysterious force that supposedly makes the universe expand “dark energy.” As stated above, I propose that it’s just good ol’ gravity, seen from a confusing perspective.

8. Nested-Horizon Thought Experiments: Why Does Time Pass?

I’m going to use some thought experiments to argue that time doesn’t just pass for no reason—it only passes if you’re inside a black hole. Which we are.

9. The Observable Universe as a Black-Hole Interior (synthesis)

The big finale that ties it all together.

There will be cartoons. There will be animations.

Many of you got upset with me for talking about physics last year. I have thought that it’s because you don’t want me to be crazy. Maybe you don’t want me to be a physics genius. Or maybe you just don’t want to live in a black hole.

But, at the end of the day, I want you to understand me, and you can’t understand me if you don’t understand relativity. So I’m going to teach it to you.

My Black Hole Epiphany

I was on a walk last winter, talking about black holes with ChatGPT, when it repeated that common physics slogan, “For an infalling observer within a black hole, the singularity appears to lie in every direction.”

I paused, looked up at the night sky, and realized I was staring right at it—the center of the universe and the end of time.

My head did not spin with calculations and physics concepts all clicking into place. It was purely emotional: I just knew that I’d locked eyes with death.

While I had a nascent logical understanding of black hole physics, I was far from fluent in the language of relativity. This actually helped my thought process, because some of the common errors are encoded into the language, but it made it difficult to share my ideas.

Still, I wanted to unleash my realization upon the world.

But my rushed, anxious, groping essays earned me scorn and ridicule, got me banned from the “r/askphysics” subreddit, and alienated a good chunk of my audience.

The social experience was that of being wrong, yet I knew logically I was correct. It just seemed so incredibly obvious to me that the universe is a black hole. And sticking to my guns when everyone is calling me crazy is like my superpower, right?

Deaf Ears

I carved $5,000 out of my retirement savings and paid Shaelin to take a month off from her job and reach out to physicists for help. I was not going to let this slip away.

My now ex-therapist scoffed at me when I told him the plan. He said, “You’re becoming a closed system.” That’s therapist-speak for “you’re going crazy, but I’m not going to say that directly so I can still be mean about it.”

Shaelin’s $5,000 physicist search was not fruitful.

I paid a handful of consultants for Zoom calls, but they would invariably become agitated and angry with me. We couldn’t even settle on a definition of what a black hole is, let alone get to the part where I suggest we’re inside one.

In response to my claim that nothing has ever entered a black hole (because it takes forever), one well-known physics writer said, “A baseball would appear to slow down as it reaches the event horizon in your frame, but in its own frame it crosses in finite proper time.”

This type of handwaving, frame-blending, relativity-postulate-violating evasiveness is very, very common.

Furious, I said, “I’m not asking about what it would look like, I’m asking when it would get there in any outside frame.”

”Well, we could actually do that calculation.”

”Okay,” I said, “Go ahead. We have thirty minutes left, take all the time you need.” I’d paid him $300 for the hour.

He fumbled with a pen and paper for a moment, clearly bluffing, and then changed the subject.

Every conversation with every physicist was exactly like this. I began to realize they didn’t necessarily “disagree” with me—they simply couldn’t understand what I was saying. And not because they were stupid, but because they were upset.

Physicists Are Defensive and Mean

Since general relativity is so unintuitive and confusing, physicists have to accept sets of perplexing rules and interpretations on blind faith. This has paradoxically turned relativity into a religion. You know how people say that ChatGPT is a glorified autocomplete that has no idea what it’s saying? That’s how physicists are.

My theory was also criticized for not containing “new math,” as if I’m challenging calculus itself. I’m not. My claim is that the physical interpretation of the existing and correct math is wrong. I am playing with conceptual Legos, sticking them together to make the most logical picture I can.

Mathematicians are not specially qualified to make physical predictions about unobservable regions of spacetime. In fact, they may be uniquely bad at it, and impatient puzzle-solvers might be uniquely skilled—except we suck at math, so we’re moated out.

(Until now, of course. AI makes for a great English-to-math translator, and I expect studying calculus to go much better than when I failed the subject in high school.)

Another moat is the shame moat. Physicists are mean. They will freak out and call you stupid. And it feels really, really bad. I was being shredded by intellectual tire spikes. Physics has a cultural problem where everyone’s insecure and lashing out and trying to look smart, and of course they have a slur for people with stupid, bad, baseless ideas: crackpots.

Yes, the people who think the universe expands because of invisible magic dark energy will call you a crackpot if you attempt to solve the clearly unsolved problems in cosmology.

Here’s a whole smug, annoying, gleeful, insecure video about this topic:

I understand: black holes are fun to think about, and calculus is really boring, and this combination leads to people generating theories that double as a creative science fiction outlet. At the same time, there really are a lot of prominent physicists who also throw shit at the wall to see what sticks. There are genuinely baffling “settled” interpretations (like surviving an event horizon crossing).

And, as I’ve said, (and perhaps demonstrated), most physicists genuinely do not have a solid conceptual grasp of relativity. How could they? The ideas are confusing to begin with, they’re siloed into hyper-specialized fields where no one else even understands what they do, and they’re all terrified of looking like fools.

If my model is right, not knowing the math and not speaking the overly compartmentalized and precise language of relativity was an asset to my thinking, not a hinderance.

My Physics Freakout

Coming out of the absolute nightmare of writing The Destiny Report and dealing with over a year of constant harassment from his cult fanbase, I was not prepared for another psychological assault so soon.

What’s more, a number of those harassers relished in the opportunity to make me look (and feel) stupid and crazy about physics.

On top of that, my interest in physics really started in childhood, when my father would occasionally teach me the odd fact about relativity. He once challenged me to explain the shape of the universe when I was 15, simultaneously gloating about his ability to imagine the unimaginable, but also quietly prompting me to figure it out.

My relationship with my father is a constant shadow over my life and work, and, as a child, I was literally screamed at for being either too smart or too dumb.

And on top of that, I was suspended four times in high school and arrested in college for challenging the academic status quo.

To preserve my flagging sanity, I had to block more people calling me a physics crackpot than I did when everyone was calling me a pedophile.

I was demoralized, depressed, and excruciatingly embarrassed.

I also started having psychotic thoughts:

If every observer thinks they are at the center of the universe, does everyone else think they’re me?

Stalling to a dead stop in the entrance to the grocery store.

What if the universe is a video game, and this puzzle is the end? Will they rip the ceiling off of my house? Are they going to take Shaelin away?

So, I did what anyone would do. I made this cartoon explaining my idea:

No one understood the cartoon.

My theory felt like a hot iron pressing into my brain.

I told myself I’d just make a few cartoons laying out the theory, and then if someone else proved me right academically, I’d still be able to tell my fans that I solved it independently. mrgirl was right again. That’s what it’s all about, right?

Then I had the worst breakdown of my adult life.

One night I crawled into bed at 5am, already sobbing, and woke Shaelin up. She held me while I thrashed and screamed that I am useless, that my life is useless, that nothing I do has any meaning, and that I should die.

The low, quiet self-aware voice that talks rationally to me no matter what—even during car crashes—was silent. My inner monologue was gone and I was losing my mind.

Moving On

I didn’t have an articulated reason for dropping the theory. I simply could not think about it anymore.

I awkwardly told Shaelin and my friends that I’d had a manic episode where I thought I’d solved the universe and publicly embarrassed myself.

They were more skeptical of my retraction than they were of the theory, but Shaelin dutifully pretended to no longer think I was a physics genius.

I began work on The Steve Myers Project.

As you may know, I throw myself fully into every project, and the documentary has been no exception. I’ve taken a dozen trips all over the country and conducted over 50 interviews to put this film together.

But, every few days or so, another jigsaw piece bubbles up and clicks onto the tangled mass of ideas. Always against my will, like an unwanted erection.

I sequester the idea in my miscellaneous physics notes, heart pounding, and go back to thinking about child abuse.

But I’m Actually Right

I’m always so smug about denial and doublespeak, but for the past year, I have fully believed that I both know nothing about physics and that I solved cosmology.

Like death, I simply have not been able to tolerate thinking about it, so I just put it out of my head.

As the research phase of my documentary winds down, I’ve started allowing myself to think about physics more, in compartmentalized, heart-pounding bursts.

And now it’s time for me to step back into the light and say it with my chest: the universe is a black hole.

I’m right. I know I’m right.

I’m not allowing it to consume me as I did last time.

I can still have normal conversations with Shaelin that are not about black holes. I don’t stay up until 11am, terrified (but also wishing) that someone else will prove it before me and end my misery.

With the prospectus published, the flag planted, and the promise made, it’s time to bring it home.

I’ll be just fine.