“We can imagine that for a sufficiently massive and concentrated body, the escape velocity could exceed even the velocity of light! When this happens, we have a black hole.”

It can be argued that the most interesting discovery would be that we cannot find the higgs proving practically that it isn't there. That would mean that we really haven't understood something, that's a very good scene for science. Revelations sometimes come from the fact you hit a wall and you realize that you truly haven't understood anything.

That's why I said earlier that such advanced theories are currently not much more than playing around with some advanced mathematics without any factual base.

As the gap between the plates is narrowed (to a few nanometers), fewer waves can contribute to the vacuum energy and so the energy density between the plates falls below the energy density of the surrounding space. The result is a tiny force trying to pull the plates together – a force that has been measured and thus provides proof of the existence of the quantum vacuum.

No. The universe as a whole came into existence about 13.7 billion years ago. We know that, because no light older than that had the chance to reach us so far.

Looks like you mix up now quite some stuff. Hawking had nothing to do with the Big Bang idea for instance and he didn't invented the singularities either.

M-theory won't explain how the universe came to existence. Furthermore, it first has to grow into a consistent theory (which it isn't currently).

There is some concept named energy conservation which is generally fullfilled except on very short time scales. That is where the vacuum fluctuations come into the game. And by the way, the total energy of the universe may be zero ;)

It is possible to settle the issue by a simple calculation. Astronomers can measure the masses of galaxies, their average separation, and their speeds of recession. Putting these numbers into a formula yields a quantity which some physicists have interpreted as the total energy of the universe. The answer does indeed come out to be zero within the observational accuracy.

In 2007 the Keck telescope, a team from California Institute of Technology found six star forming galaxies about 13.2 billion light years (light travel distance) away and therefore created when the universe was only 500 million years old.

Hartle and Hawking's new theory treated the universe like a quantum particle. As a result, they created a wave function that describe all possible universes. The wave function is assumed to have a large value for our own universe, and small, non-zero values for an infinite number of other possible, parallel universes. The other universes are expected to have different physical constants than our universe and are believed to be devoid of life.

The problem with Hartle and Hawking's theory is that it predicted the universe is "closed." Consider a closed universe to be the surface of an inflating balloon. Objects such as galaxies on the surface of the balloon would move away in one direction as the balloon inflates, and eventually end up at their initial positions. In addition, the concept of a closed universe implies that the universe will one day stop expanding, and collapse under the force of its own gravity.

Observations suggest that there is insufficient matter in the universe to create enough gravity to recollapse it. In fact, there is evidence predicting the universe to be expanding at a faster rate than the inflationary theory predicts. Thus, observations favor the idea of an "open" universe, a universe that will continue to expand.

You are making the common mistake of trying to look at the universe from the outside. But this doesn't make any sense as a hypothetical observer outside would be completely disconnected from our spacetime inside (remember the hypothetical vaccum fluctuation which inside growed into our universe while it simply disappered in the other spacetime?).

There is a reason I wrote that there is not even an outside.

And how do you come to the conclusion that gravitation is far to weak to influence the expansion? There is experimental evidence for about 27% of the mass needed to asymptotically stop the expansion. The open question is if we find the missing 73% or if those are comprised of the still hypothetical dark energy.