: : : : Nothing escapes from a black hole. Conditions prior : : : to the big bang were, by all accounts, an extreme case : : : of black hole. So how could the big bang result in : : : expansion?

: : I just started doing some calculations on the size : : of a black hole containing all the matter in the : : universe. I made very low estimates of average : : mass of a star, number of stars in a galaxy etc : : and didn't add the black matter. My first result : : was an event horizon over 10^7 light years radius.

: : What bothers me is, the gravitational force froze : : out long before the universe was this big, so how : : could it have expanded?

Answer? - Possibly inflation: if the inflation of the universe caused the universe to expand with exponentially increasing rate of speed, as it is hypothesized, then it would have caused the universe to expand to a large enough size to outpace gravity. Another thing - why must the original "singularity" resemble a black hole? A black hole still exists in spacetime; we know this because it's effect on gravity and energy and mass exist in spacetime. BUT, the original "singularity", or point of universal origin, was probably not black hole at all, but rather a breach in the fabric of the virtual particle universe, which contains horrendous amounts of energy but little in the form of mass, except as can be detected coming in to existnce and then almost instantaneously disappearing by annihilation with anitmatter formed at the same time. A wrinkle or rip in this virtual soup, this false vacuum, was more likely the original source of matter and energy, rather than a pre-existing point source. from the virtual breach, the matter may have flowed slowly enough, and inflation expanded rapidly enough, to easily outpace the early pangs of formative gravity...Bruce