I can't disagree, especially after reading W.B. Smith. Everything comes from "Nothing At All". Which is also why I don't really agree with the Big-Bang Theory. You started with "Nothing At All" and you still have "Nothing At All", so why would there ever have been a big bang? A beginning? Doesn't make any logical sense to me.
The easiest way of explaining it is by way of analogy.
Assume you have a sinusoidal wave. It has a certain amount of energy, which we call a quanta.
Now assume that you've wrapped that wave around on itself, in effect creating a circular standing wave. (We don't really have any way of doing this, but in a supernova which successively exceeds electron degeneracy pressure then neutron degeneracy pressure, that's essentially what's happening... it's mashing those neutrons down into quarks then into a pure wave of coherent energy constrained by a gravity well, creating a superfluid.)
We know that energy and mass are equivalent (Principle of Equivalence), so this quanta of energy has relativistic mass (remember, it's still moving at c, just in a circle), and thus deflects space-time, manifesting gravity.
Gravitational potential:
(This is also why light blue-shifts as it descends into a gravity well, and red-shifts as it climbs out of a gravity well.)
Thus, it attracts energy and mass to itself. As it does so, the added energy and mass are subsumed by the standing wave, increasing its amplitude and thus its energy and thus its deflection of space-time and thus its gravitational attraction.
That's the basis of a black hole. It's gravity doing the same thing that the Higgs field does. Sufficiently strong gravity makes energy set up a circular (spherical, considering the DOF available in the gravity well) standing wave. The Higgs field causes energy to set up a standing wave (although not circular), which makes energy stationary in our frame of reference... what we call "invariant matter".
Our universe will eventually end up as one giant black hole after all the smaller black holes have sucked in (almost) all matter and energy, then coalesced together. Then it'll expand again.
Of course, you need much more than a single quanta of energy, or the black hole evaporates nearly instantaneously because the space-time deflection around it and thus the gravity constraining it is insufficient to actually constrain it. (ie: you have to get the gravity well wider than the Schwarzschild Radius).
Schwarzschild Radius:
For an ordinary sphere - a bowling ball, for example - the mass increases as the cube of the radius. If one bowling ball is twice the diameter of another it will weigh eight times (2 cubed) as much. Black hole radius, however, increases in direct proportion to the mass. This is why black hole density decreases as the black hole gets larger... so a black hole will eventually reach a point where it outgrows its gravity well... but no such black holes exist. For that to happen, the black hole would have to be approximately the size of our universe... giving it the density of our universe... so perhaps we're living in a giant black hole. No one knows.
Now think about what gravity is... it is a deflection of the 4-D plane of space-time. Imagine a gigantic black hole that has subsumed nearly the entirety of the universe, except for one small particle way out in the furthest reaches of the universe.
That one small particle's space-time connection to the gravity well of the black hole in essence creates a massively-deep gravity well for the black hole. But as the particle gets nearer and nearer to the black hole (imagine here a coin rolling around a coin well and pulling the outer edge of the coin well along with it, reducing the coin well's radius and depth as the coin gets closer and closer to the opening at the bottom center of the coin well), it shifts the average plane of space-time nearer and nearer the black hole.
When that last particle in the universe is subsumed by the black hole, the gravity well disappears because the plane of space-time is at the same 'level' as the black hole (energetically speaking), thus the black hole is no longer constrained, and thus it expands again superluminally (because it's all energy at this point, and the expansion causes a decreasing plasma frequency (a red-shift), so the energy still within (and blasting out of) the black hole is above the plasma frequency, so it experiences a negative index of refraction, allowing it to travel faster than c.).
Now, it's likely not a single particle remaining which sets off that quantum fluctuation that causes black hole expansion. And of course you need much more than a single quanta of energy to create a black hole, but the analogy stands.
This implies that the universe has undergone many such expansions (and contractions)... where did the energy come from in the first place?
Well, the Higgs field has a non-zero vacuum expectation value, and it's negative (the Mexican Hat... at zero energy, it's at its energy maximum, not minimum... so it 'rolls downhill' toward a negative potential... this is why we'll never actually see a Higgs boson. All negative expectation value particles attempt to go faster than c, but the universe won't let them and they 'smear out' their energy into a field (in the Higgs boson's case, the Higgs field) in a process known as tachyonic condensation). Gravity, for another example, while an emergent property of space-time deflection, is a negative potential. The vacuum polarization around the nucleus of every atom in the universe is likewise caused by a negative potential.
Thus, the universe is posited to be a finely-balanced mix of positive potential energy and negative potential energy that evolved out of nothing. We're still not sure why or how, but something 'split' the unverse into positive and negative energy, that caused its expansion, which means it'll take time for the two to balance out. Its 'winding down' (entropic increase) is merely the balancing out of that positive and negative potential.
This is why we can pull energy out of the quantum vacuum (ie: geometrically transform a negative potential into a positive potential via vacuum polarization), but it must always eventually be paid back. It's a balance.
This is why quarks are subject to quark confinement... if we apply positive energy to try to pull a quark out of a proton or neutron, then a new quark will be manifested from the quantum vacuum to replace it, and the quark we pulled out will be subsumed back into the quantum vacuum. That's why we can't directly inspect quarks.
