Funny you should mention the Planck thing: I've thought of it myself: I have a feeling that all singularities detonate as soon as they form, having achieved critical mass. However, current theory holds that a singularity has zero size -- but if that were the case, then there would be zero time flow within it, and thus (to the outside observer) the detonation would take an infinite amount of time to occur -- which violates a number of principles, not least that of heat death. So in fact, I think the singularity is probably one Planck length in diameter - which allows the explosion to occur - and, as you say, solves any other number of inconveniences. Talking about singularities is vaguely problematic, in that they're mathematical derivatives rather than observed phenomena: we believe they're there, but theory states that they don't form until after the black hole itself comes into existence: mathematics says they must exist and thus they do... but that's as close as we're going to get - at least for now. I'm not a bona-fide physicist, no - but I am fascinated by the subject and I study it quite a bit. I will, however, admit to being a science-fiction freak -- it's a great genre for getting the mind working... Speaking of the science fiction, and of the Theory of Everything, Greg Egan suggests in his book "Distress" that as soon as anyone is able to explain exactly how the universe works and provide such a grand unifying theory, the universe will rearrange itself spontaneously so that it has always worked that way. Similar quantum theory suggests that a lot of reality exists because we observe it: that, for example, there was no such thing as a quark until someone discovered them, and then, at that point, the universe had always had quarks in it. Unfortunately, quantum theory supports this type of retroactive creation... I wonder what we've done with this conversation!
