Question: If a black hole is a point of infinite mass and infinite gravity,then what is the reverse.Commonly dubbed a white hole,scientists have been theorising its mere excistence for years. Your opinion?

Aoife Lucid answered on 7 Nov 2016:

Though I haven’t studied relativity for a few years I went to do some reading on this as you’ve got me thinking about the idea, I had heard a little about white holes before but ever paid much close attention.

From what I understand about them I doubt that they would actually exist. It’s a very nice bit of maths which essentially claims that white holes would spit out mass instead of taking in mass as a black hole does which, to me, seems highly unlikely. Black holes and general relativity however have been proved to exist, most recently by the really cool LIGO experiment in the US. In theoretical physics you will often find that people have a variety of different theories regarding well established and not so well established areas so there will of course be lots of scientists who will claim that white holes are possible. A good example of this kind of thinking is that while surrounded the standard model and the Higgs Boson before it’s detection in 2012, if you are interested in seeing other theories that people had that were neither proved nor disproved by the discovery I highly recommend the movie Particle Fever which is all about the theory and discovery of the Higgs (I recommend it if you are interested in high energy physics/theoretical physics/particle physics in any case!)