New Scientist: Before the big bang. One cosmologist’s attempt to apply string theory to the thorny problem of the singularity at the origin of the universe has some surprising results:

“Our Universe is a patch of the inside

of a black hole,” amd there was a time before the Big Bang. Something like this notion is all over science fiction, however, from even before we knew about black holes. Does anyone remember the culmination of James Blish’s Cities in Flight series from the late ’50’s?