Current theory is the key word here, Famine. It changes every year. They are just attempts to find a model that account for current perceptions of reality. That they fit the perceptions largely doesn't mean they are valid, because all previous models accurately described reality too until new data was found that didn't agree with it.
At this level and scale, current theory is highly conjectural and I find it very helpful to keep going back to the basics. At the same time, I like to keep human nature in mind too. The concept 'has to end somewhere over there' is because causality is so deeply rooted into the human brain that infinity is a difficult concept to deal with for us. For now though, there is no reason to believe it 'has to end somehwere over there' at all. If you do, you always run into something like the beginning and the end. Now that 'problem' is being solved by saying that the beginning and the end are the same point, that we circle into ...
I think it is Jupiter that has this ring of debris. Say that our galaxy was embedded in that debris. We could conjecture the same theory from our readings of that situation, but eventually we'd discover that the ring becomes contaminated with new meteors on a different course.
As far as your time explanation goes, yes, see I read the original. Forgive me if this sounds presumptious but few people look at the original works and forget about the basic concepts. Einstein specifically wrote he thought that time travel was impossible and never forgot that time was a way of measuring movement. So when he looked at:
If an object is travelling away from you at c, you will not be able to see it. It will appear to you to have vanished, as it moves forwards in time relative to you.
If you are travelling away from an object at c, you will be able to see the object, but to you it will seem to be frozen in time - the light coming from it set off in the same direction as you at the same time as you, so will remain in the exact condition, to you, as it did when you set off. Thus your perception is that IT is frozen in time.
He knows that the key words here are "not be able to
see it", "
seem to be frozen in time", "
perception is that it is frozen in time".
Time 'slowing down' represents that the
observation of movement is distorted by speed of movement. In the end it's like claiming a watch doesn't run if you throw it into an absolutely dark room.
As for the multiple dimensions, I think we should distinguish factors from dimensions, but it is understandable these things are taken into account. Say you take a snapshot of two starts under influence of each other, planets, or a black hole. If you wanted to know what that snapshot actually represents, you'd have to factor in among other time (what you see is what happened long ago) and gravity (what you see is distorted by gravitational effects). You could call these the 4th and 5th dimensions, and you can come up with many other things.
You can come up with tons of stuff that you could call dimensions, and some have. In my humble opinion, I think you're fooling yourself if you think a clear distinction can be made in Hawking's work between philosophy and science, and I doubt he would claim otherwise.
J/K that was a little weird.
