After a quick trip through cyber-space in search of info on black holes, I came across the Hubble official site, which had some stuff on black holes.

OK, so the theory is that a black hole is a collapsed giant star, right?

But through the laws of conservation of matter, don't both the star and the resulting black hole both have to have the same mass? Just because it collapses, and gets smaller, does not therefore increase it's mass, and make it all of a suddden a different gravitational force. The gravity per unit area would certainly be higher, but the overall mass must still be the same. And on a cosmic scale, does it matter if the mass is a few thousands of miles in diameter, or the size of a loaf of bread, if the nearest object is x millions of miles away?



Another ψάρια-science topic (since it may fall niether ubnder science, nor psuedo-science, I'm making a third category: fishy science): the Big Bang and the expanding universe.

So, if the theory is that the universe was created all of a sudden in the Big Bang. What was there before? What is outside of the bubble of our expanding sphere of the known universe? Is science saying that there is such a thing as nothing? An absence of anything?