The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe
theeggandtherock.com
theeggandtherock.com
I’m happy to answer questions, though I will be dealing with a five-year-old and eating dinner at the same time, which may lead to delayed responses.
The former was clearly actual science: they had a theoretical particle, they knew what it did, it had a place that made sense in the Standard Model, they had an estimate for the energy range in which they could find it, they built an instrument to look for it, and they found it.
The latter... well, it was clearly epicycles. Endlessly tweakable, with six free parameters, not in the Standard Model, a bunch of different guesses as to what it actually was, a bunch of different energies at which it might be found – oh dear, not there, well it must be at a much higher energy then – always on the brink of discovery but never actually discovered...
And then, as I began researching my book on cosmological natural selection, I could see that an evolved, fine-tuned universe was going to have startling emergent-looking properties built into its developmental process. Baryonic matter was going to pull off some weird shit, as the interaction of extremely fine-tuned parameters led to highly unlikely-looking outcomes. These would look like inexplicable anomalies, if your fundamental assumption was that we lived in a random and arbitrary one-shot universe.
And cold dark matter started to look awfully like the kind of think you would have to invent to save the old paradigm...
So as I developed my approach, I assumed dark matter was an error, and did my best to explain everything using fine-tuned parameters, and baryonic matter only.
I immediately felt I was onto something, and have since read Dr. Lee Smolin's The Life of the Cosmos and found it to be as enlightening (if considerably less accessible) and profound. And there absolutely is an implication, explored much deeper by Gough than Smolin (but Smolin is a physicist, so forgive him that), that life fits into the universe not as some random and unlikely accident, but as a natural consequence of the process that we see playing out around us at every level we're capable of looking.
But look at how strongly people react when you suggest that science, philosophy, and spirituality can all exist harmoniously given the right perspective. Who would dare to suggest any sort of meaning in such an environment but a writer?
As far as I can tell very, very few people, scientists or otherwise, feel the way I do about the meaninglessness of the universe. As you might imagine, I know a lot of scientists and I don't think any of them are even soft core nihilists, so your characterization of the reaction of people to some kind of mush of science and philosophy and spirituality seems wrong to me. From my point of view, everyone loves that kind of bullshit. They can't get enough.
It may be that people need to believe nonsense about the cosmos in order to "maximize productivity" but I do not think that is the case.
1. The universe doesn't care about you
2. Life has no inherent meaning
Do you mean to conflate these two? Do you find them merely agreeable, or do these propositions depend on each other?
I think its very reasonable to believe that the universe does not have any of those properties and that life is random and has no inherent or universal meaning.
I guess there could be some kind of subjective meaning but I don't really see the utility of that idea.
I don't think Tegmark <IV had any simple parameters for goodness or meaning, and neither does logic or mathematics. We assemble our meanings out of more fundamental relationships but I actually think they concretely exist in a real way as real as the matter in this universe, but more in the way that galaxies and other complex structures exist. Meaning is a property of complex self-reflective systems and so inherent meaning will probably always be tied inexorably to context and environment, or in our case meaning is tied specifically to our human nature.
E.g. I will find it fascinating if universes do evolve from progenitor universes and therefore the guiding selection pressure is "make more black holes/universes" but that isn't the same thing as the human concept of "good" since our nature isn't aligned with entire (families of) universes.
It is a coincidence that delights me and I happen to feel quite a lot bonhomie for my fellow human beings and lifeforms, but I don't see how it makes life meaningful in any universal sense.
I will say that I see no compelling reason to believe that the values of fundamental constants are NOT just random.
Kurt Vonnegut said it best: “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.”
Rejecting something we have no way of knowing this or that way is certainly not smart, usually its not more than emotional kneejerk reaction. Einstein too had a very pragmatic approach to all this.
For me personally its an irrelevant topic, acting morally in life should be a basic moral imperative and not caused by fear of some almighty deity that will judge me later, thats a childish view on life and moral values.
Its the organized, hierarchical power and control structures that humans created (often) millenia ago around every single religion and spiritual movement, with ossified views on what is moral and what is not, and enforcing that specific view on rest of mankind in some sort of bizzare moral superiority (inferiority?) complex that many many smart folks struggle with.
Tells you how deeply flawed humans are at their deepest core, and absolutely nothing about ie existence of god(s). I personally know a small army of people who are properly disgusted with reality of catholicism for example, to the point they internally fully rejected it, and only keep a small charade for older bits of family or community on few days a year. The sad part is, they often, out of fear of rejection from families and their current social circles, push their own kids on a path of very early indoctrination they themselves dont believe anymore at all, instead of giving them freedom of self-determination later in life when they could actually make decisions for themselves. And this is one of the biggest, if not the biggest item on plates of each of us we have to figure out ourselves.
Sometimes such folks cant shed that indoctrination themselves, and come up with their own version of religion they started with, ignoring some aspects and expanding others... so much for immutable, universal truth.
Tragedy of commons and all. Think how many folks like that you know around you, and multiply by X since shame of being different is one of main drives of societies of humans since forever, and thus a closely guarded secret.
If we have no way of knowing one way or another then we should studiously have no opinion about it whatsoever. But I think people both vastly over estimate and vastly underestimate what we know about with respect to things they might form opinions about.
Well... I am, and I'm not. I like the idea, and I like it even more than 42. 42 is an incomprehensible answer, while life creating black holes which create life are much more interesting. It spawns new thoughts. Like it seems we are doomed to create black holes. I wonder how it will go. Will our descendants start a war using black holes instead of bullets? Or maybe it will be a software bug, that will manifest itself all at once in gazillions of machines turning them into devices spewing 3 black holes each second? Something like that seems to be the most plausible scenario, judging by the history of humankind.
Have you considered adding a little note or link near the beginning of the article, indicating how you know these jets and so forth will do the work you need them to do? (Or, if you're not sure they will, laying out that uncertainty clearly?)
Apologies if this list is on there and I missed it.
As far as if the SPECIFICS of how they work are exactly as the author surmises, I think that's something that has to come in the simulation phase once the theory is adopted and tested more thoroughly, and absolutely shouldn't be something a theory should have to establish before even being properly considered.
I think the only thing missing is to mention epicycles of solar system models.
Also, if you keep going, epicycles do in fact get a shout out!
Is there anything that supports this? That is what the whole 'evolutionary universe' theory hinges on in the end. It certainly is a convenient explanation for the anthropic principle, but if any black hole however small it may be creates a universe - where do these universes go?
The early direct collapse black holes responsible for the formation of galaxies and structure of the universe are certainly more easily digestible.
Observation also reveals startling levels of complexity wherever we look, even in the early universe where our standard model didn't predict it.
The only mechanism we know of that creates Intelligent Design-flavored complexity is natural selection. Black holes and the Big Bang already suggest physics we don't fully understand, but the evidence is compelling that they're the same phenomenon viewed from opposite sides.
CNS gives you a theory that provides both explanatory and predictive power within this framework, and (in my opinion) offers alternative explanations for many of our other cosmological mysteries like dark matter and dark energy. You can just take the direct-collapse SMBH portion if you want to and leave the rest on the table, but I feel that in doing so you're neutering what makes this theory so compelling: how (potentially) easily it can explain a wide range of observed phenomena.
One of the beautiful things about an evolutionary explanation is that you really just have to show the propagation and selection mechanisms, and the “magic” fine tuning will automatically follow. But it’s less compelling if you have to run that logic backwards (it’s fine tuned so it must have evolved).
That said, I don't think the evolutionary explanation is hand-waved into play at all. I see your point about how it's a reverse approach to how biological natural selection was discovered, but I don't think that decreases its merit in any way, either. Smolin especially takes a deep look at the star formation process, how galaxies work, the structure we see in the cosmic web (and that was 1997!) and makes the comparison to biological organisms in so much as they're dynamic, homeostatic, out-of-equilibrium systems that seem fine tuned to carry out a process of increasing complexification. This, combined with the understanding (just jump on board for the story, you can get off after if you don't like it) that universes reproduce through black holes/big bangs and the similarities are, I think, compelling.
I'm not saying this is 100% definitely the truth and everyone should abandon CDM and string theory. I just think it's a compelling idea that deserves to be considered and discussed honestly, or perhaps even earnestly.
The only thing I'm complaining about is that if you want to explain the apparent fine-tuning of the parameters of physics, you have to explain what that varation/reproduction process is. Which is the "reproduce through black holes/big bangs thing". That part has to be more than a "story" if you're trying to have an evolutionary theory of universes.
Smolin, a student of Wheeler's, took the idea and understood that the changes would have to be subtle instead of completely random. Within enough generations, more successfully reproducing universes would outnumber those that weren't exponentially, and assuming that we're a typical universe, our constants will be found to be tuned to produce black holes almost as efficiently as possible. His work is absolutely a real theory, is published, offers predictions, and is falsifiable. It's worth checking out, honestly, even if you just want to read about Einstein and Leibniz and all those guys for 300 pages or so.
Gough continues even further, suggesting SMBHs would have to be a trait found in the earliest universes even before they could form stars, which suggests that our universe should have extremely early forming SMBH and that these essentially create the structure we see in the universe. And so far it's looking like he's right. And if we determine concretely that SMBH form via direct-collapse in the early universe, I don't get how we don't just have to start over with a new model of cosmology.
Lastly, and I know this crowd hasn't really been down for natural philosophy sans-math, if black holes are the first thing to form in our universe and, based on what we know about them, they'll be the last thing around, too... Doesn't that make them seem pretty important to the function the universe seems to be performing?
And honestly, just think about how many questions it would answer. Is the universe infinite or finite? Well, it's finite but so massive and expanding at the speed of light so it might as well be? Well if it's finite, what's outside it? The parent universe! But you can't get out there, because the white hole that formed the Einstein-Rosen bridge connecting our spacetimes collapsed immediately. Well why are the constants these values in our universe? Because those values are REALLY good at making black holes so it's super trendy for universes to be more or less those numbers.
(I know I'm oversimplifying to anxiety-inducing levels and quite likely misappropriating terminology I should leave alone, but I'm just trying to illustrate possibilities. Thanks for reading!)
This was my first time hearing about the idea of universes producing children inside of black holes that may have slightly different physical properties. This is also really cool and interesting, but clearly a different level of theoretical compared to your first half about the black hole jets. I haven't had time to delve into any of your links, but it seems like you skipped over explaining how a universe would form inside a black hole in the first place. I saw in the comments on substack that someone pointed out the concept of "black hole electrons" and it's like, yeah, if we don't know what's going on inside black holes, then why couldn't they be their own universes? And if that's the case for black holes, then why not also electrons, or protons, or any other sufficiently dense and mysterious object? But then again why would we suppose that another universe would necessarily form inside those things? I'm curious if you could expand on what you think the mechanism would be for universe formation, as well as what you think the mechanism would be for variation/heredity in the child universes.
But I feel that there are genuine problems with ΛCDM that are making it hard for the field of cosmology to understand what it is seeing in the early universe, and I hope that my careful description of what I believe has gone wrong over the past few decades might have value for the field.
It's simply impossible to ignore the enormous dark matter elephant in the room, especially given that ΛCDM so comprehensively failed to predict what we are now seeing in the early universe. As I mention in my post, the extended version of cosmological natural selection that Blowtorch Theory emerges from DID predict exactly what we are seeing now. Here are those predictions, if you want to check them out:
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
In that context, it makes no sense to avoid mentioning ΛCDM's recent failures: and if I'm going to do that, I feel I should offer my full diagnosis of what went wrong.
But I have every respect for your position, and I understand it will be distasteful and offputting to many.
> That the first basic assumption had turned out to be utterly, eye-wateringly wrong should have led to some introspection in cosmology, astronomy, and astrophysics about the validity of the second, and even more fundamental, unexamined assumption. But it didn’t.
Because it sort of implies that the original scientists coming up with these ideas should have been perfect and went about asking questions in the way the author does. (maybe the author doesn't mean it this way, but that's how it came across to me).
It's strange to me, we don't really have a firm understanding of how to define the edge of our understanding of the universe since by definition that understanding is diffuse. So why should people be perfectly exploring that edge? That is why I think it is better to focus on new ideas and what they add as opposed to criticizing old ideas.
For example, the other day I asked a colleague (who i will name Cooper) about if they had heard about another colleague's work (who I will call Audrey) because it sounded like they were working on something similar to me and might benefit from discussing with each other. Cooper said something to the effect of "everything they are doing is wrong and really just not as good as the work I am doing". And it's like, would you say this to Audrey's face? Does this comment make any kind of constructive arguments as to why your work is better than Audrey's? Isn't this rather anti-intellectual since you simply are dismissing Audrey's work instead of engaging them in a discussion? And my initial reaction to hearing that was to be dismissive of Cooper's work because I thought to myself, "what is Cooper defending right now, his work or his ego?"
To me, a primary goal of a scientist is to convince other people of their ideas through evidenced arguments. To me, if Cooper thinks that Audrey could learn something from Cooper's work, then Cooper should assume there is something to learn from Audrey's work. To me, the process they went about understanding the same/similar problems is as interesting as is whatever their solution ends up being. Perhaps Audrey has some reason to have designed her models differently from Cooper's that isn't apparent to Cooper. By dismissing her work, Cooper dismisses the opportunity to learn anything himself from it. There isn't any universal truth that some how elevates an individual above others because they understand Newton's Laws or whatever. There is simply what we personally understand and our desire to understand new things.
That's an idealized version of science that unfortunately rarely holds up in the real world. There's a reason for the old maxim that science advances by the death of old scientists. Science is a human endeavor, massive, complicated, political. Much as we like to imagine scientists as pure and rational beings, that's never a true description of a human being.
For an outsider looking to get attention to their fringe theory, it is never enough to just calmly state it and let people logically accept it. The presentation does matter.
I certainly tried to attack the current state of the theory, not the scientists whose very understandable and human actions, many of them perfectly sensible at the time, led us to that current state. I am sorry if I failed to bring off that delicate balancing act.
I know the theory doesn't do anything mathematically, but I'm curious how you deal with the unexplained mass issues. Does it explain things like galactic rotation [2]?
1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-024-01087-w
There are fundamental issues mapping Biological Evolution to the formation of the universe. Evolution fundamentally works on 'introduce random variations into an environment with selective pressures and/or competition and if that variation produces a change that benefits the animal relative to those pressures and competition, it will more likely survive and reproduce' and that reproduction ultimately is what defines the fitness of that evolution. How does this apply to a uniform CMB, the sudden collapse to make supermassive black holes? The eventual formation of smaller black holes? The formation of planets? The expanding universe? Where is the competition? Where is the reproduction? Where are the selective pressures that define evolution? Where does this show branching and dead branches of evolution's failed attempts.
You repeatedly refer to evolution directing, favoring, having reproductive strategies etc. showing either a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution or a casual use of the terms that will confuse many readers. Evolution is a random and non-directed process. You describe a singular chain of events where those events are just as likely to be random and unconnected but try to imply strongly directed evolution because you approached it with the view that evolution would optimize this process and combined theories that could indicate a more optimized process (while not actually proving that optimization or any form of selection for it).
It fails to address observations backing the existence of dark matter while criticizing existing theories for failing to address observations that do not line up with their predictions.
Beyond that, are any of the predictions you make novel to just your story, or are they ultimately the combined predictions made by the various theories you are basing this on? I didn't see any that did not lead off the existing work that doesn't always require throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Ultimately this feels like a new interpretation combining a number of exciting and new discoveries that make predictions that JW is backing, approaching them with a philosophical view giving potential novel insights, but failing to disconnect the philosophy before engaging actual science and misunderstanding the difference between a good sounding science story and good science while on-boarding a fair amount of personal skepticism and frustration with the existing methods.
Its not to say that some of the theories its based on aren't correct, or that the existing theories aren't problematic, but it certainly feels like its leveraging the predictive power of other theories to do its heavy lifting.
I think it's fascinating and enjoy this theory a lot, but the epistemics strike me a little funny. The mechanism itself can't be tested. If this mechanism exists, these observations would tend to be expected from a random sample of possible universes. There's absolutely no way to evaluate how "representative" our n=1 observation is.
I'm not yet convinced this kind of approach is valid, although I'm almost certain there's nothing better at a certain scale. empiricism is useless if you need a galaxy-scale particle accelerator.
I would say it's just not available more than that it's useless—albeit, only not available in theory.
Isn’t the entire problem that there is no known mechanism by which these supermassive black holes would form so early with so much mass?
But I don't think that's the problem here, it's the opportunity:
ΛCDM was the best model for the cosmic web when we thought that SMBHs could not exist so early. But now that we have observed that they do, it opens the possibility of other theories for the cosmic web, including this one (blow torch) in which the early SMBHs take a role in its creation.
The convenience provided by the Dark Plaster theory have meant that despite innumerable failures in actually detecting it have been handwaved off by an equally convenient "it's just a bit darker than expected".
As von Neumann once said, "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
At this point, with ten, it's basically CGI.
And the model gets tweaked afresh to suit each new observational anomaly. So you can tweak it to fit, say, large galaxies, but then it doesn't fit small galaxies. (The cusp/core problem.) But that's OK, because you can tweak it to fit small galaxies! (But then it won't fit large galaxies.) And on it goes.
A key problem is that, after 50 years of tweaking, it still didn't predict the rapid, efficient structure formation of the early universe as revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Three-stage cosmological natural selection (the parent to Blowtorch Theory) did.
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
That is not correct. LCDM as a cosmology is described by 6 parameters mostly for CMB analyses, but this is much more than just CDM. These parameters include the amount of normal matter, the cosmological constant, the amount of dark matter, reionization, the Hubble constant and two parameters which describe the initial fluctuations. CDM only has one parameter in the model, its density. As you can see there aren't many nobs to turn. These parameters are also fixed to observational values. And if you think you can fit all modern cosmological data with a physically-meaningful model and fewer parameters then go ahead.
Charles Ponzi or Bernie Madoff could've had the Nobel Prize in economics had they merely used the same explanation as the lambda-cdm cosmologist do.
We don’t know how they form but we do now know they exist through Webb.
Astronomers will make excuses for that and say that they didn't really prove that galaxies had black holes in them and that they were really massive recently but the tension has existed for a long time because people suspected that galaxies had huge black holes but there was no path to form black holes that big.
I worked for arXiv in the 00's and had a coworker who'd gotten a PhD in astrophysics about accretion disks who was really bitter about how the poor job prospects in astronomy let senior astronomers bully junior astronomers creating a false consensus about how accretion disks and other phenomena worked. When I first heard about ΛCDM my first instinct was that some bullying was going on. [1]
Observations that the "first billion years" might have taken 10 billion years or so have been coming for a while but with JWST there is an absolute flood of them.
[1] The cold dark matter doesn't bug me half as much as the dark energy. I mean, once you look at anything bigger than a star cluster it's obvious that dark matter is there or otherwise gravity works differently in a way that is huge for objects bigger than a star cluster but doesn't show up in precision measurements at all in the solar system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_collapse_black_hole
but the gap between those and supermassive black holes is huge and it is not so probable that 100 or 1000 of those would merge in the time available.
In my idea "Where did the supermassive black holes came from?" is the same kind of question like "Where did the universe came from?" The fact that in current Big Bang model we can imagine simple, mathematical origins (point like beginning of spacetime) doesn't make it more likely to be true. There's no doubt that Big Bang was a very energetic event, but you could get very energetic events without invoking creation. Just imagine two very dense black hole clusters, slamming into each other at relativistic speeds, each consisting of trillions (or more) of supermassive black holes.
What's great about this Blowtorch Theory is that it connects things we can actually observe, large scale structure of the universe, with the activity of those very early supermassive black holes (wherever they came from) in a measurable way thus potentially providing evidence of their very early existence. I hope it catches on because it's huge step in the right direction.
"Bañados and his team..." searched systematically "...for objects that were redshifted so far that they did not even show up in the usual visible light (of the Dark Energy Legacy Survey, in this case) but that were bright sources in a radio survey (the 3 GHz VLASS survey)."
So the redshift is very solidly established. And the light from the blazar simply has to be that far back, if it's that far redshifted.
SOURCE: https://www.mpg.de/23880270/record-discovery-points-to-parti...
> The second half of this post will outline the parent theory – three stage cosmological natural selection – which successfully predicted these extremely early supermassive black holes, and their jets, plus the associated rapid early galaxy formation, in advance of the first James Webb Space Telescope data.
The mechanism suggested is Direct Collapse Black Hole formation, not the "three stage cosmological natural selection" model I quoted.
Direct Collapse[1] models provide candidates for this, no?
Of course this begs the next question of how didn't the universe just collapse back in on itself!
Cosmological natural selection provides an explanation for this, too.
This is the biggest reach in your entire essay, that black wholes create new universes. The event horizon is complete cut off from this universe and speculating that generations upon generations of universes are created from black holes is fanciful. Your just shoehorn what is basically a massive anthropic principle onto an interesting cosmology theory unnecessarily.
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
No other theory made such accurate predictions. So it might be worth at least exploring the theory and its implications further. Certainly, there is a funding and research mismatch between ΛCDM (which did not predict what we are now seeing) and three-stage cosmological natural selection (which did) that is... startling.
It's an explanation, it fits the observed data. It can't be tested, and the predictions it makes can't be verified. So until we can verify that new universes are created from black holes, with properties inherited from the parent universe, then it's just speculation. But interesting speculation.
And it's a real question that does need some kind of answer.
To be clear, both Smolin's CNS and Gough's uptake of the theory make predictions and offer ways to be falsified, with Gough making accurate predictions of early galactic structure that Webb would see.
It's good to see people expecting predictions and falsifiability, but I'm curious why that requirement isn't being upheld against the standard model (which has been predicting more and more incorrectly) and string theory (which is unable to offer any predictions and also expects you to believe there are 9 or 11 dimensions or something). In my view, CNS requires the fewest logical leaps of faith.
To demonstrate you can even reproduce the Cosmic Web you have to actually run some calculations, or simulations. How do you know AGN bubbles produce a universe that looks anything like ours? The author dismisses simulations as "not science", while paradoxically using them as the only representation of the cosmic web in the article. These simulations have a lot of value, they demonstrate that standard cosmology and normal gravity has no problem forming voids and filaments. These simulations have been compared to countless new observations, which this model cannot because it's purely qualitative. The article says these simulations are worthless because they don't work from first principles, this is a practical limitation that you cannot simulate galaxies down to the resolution of atoms on any existing computer. You have to make some simplifications. The structure of the cosmic web is seen in all of them, even going back to very early simulations, it doesn't depend on these assumptions.
And at the end of the article we go back to the problem of dark matter, and find out the author has no explanation for rotation curves or other classical tests of DM. So despite bashing DM cosmology, this model explains none of the pillars of evidence for dark matter. At some point in developing an idea like this you need to actually start applying physics, either with calculations or simulations. Every new hypothesis is perfect before it has been subjected to rigor and analysis.
> These simulations have a lot of value, they demonstrate that standard cosmology and normal gravity has no problem forming voids and filaments.
That being said, I think the author intends for this article to be more of a call to action than an actual result. Simulations aren't cheap, somebody needs to actually do the work. The point that there aren't any simulations without dark matter is an important one too.
https://alvinng4.github.io/grav_sim/examples/cosmic_structur...
These simulations take their simple initial conditions from the Cosmic Microwave Background fluctuations, but models without dark matter fail to match the observed CMB. There are no major baryon-only simulations because cosmology doesn't work without DM, and you have nothing to start from. You need a quantitative model which works on some level to even begin, people have tried with modified gravity models.
Apologies, I know this is typically considered bad form, but have you gotten to the following section in the article?[2] It appears to directly contradict your claims.
> MOND’s also been around since the early 1980s, but, in 2021, it finally developed a model – the Aether-Scalar-Tensor framework, or AeST – which ALSO maps perfectly onto the acoustic peaks revealed by WMAP and Planck. (It does it by proposing a new vector field and scalar field that duplicate the effects of Cold Dark Matter in the early universe...
[0] https://astro.theoj.org/article/93065-an-analytic-model-for-...
[1] https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/cosmic-simulation-reveals...
[2] https://theeggandtherock.com/i/158515951/more-matter-or-less...
> MOND’s also been around since the early 1980s, but, in 2021, it finally developed a model – the Aether-Scalar-Tensor framework, or AeST – which ALSO maps perfectly onto the acoustic peaks revealed by WMAP and Planck. (It does it by proposing a new vector field and scalar field that duplicate the effects of Cold Dark Matter in the early universe
This doesn't contradict what I said. These models are not simply removing DM, I said people have tried with modified gravity models like these. First the models which fit the CMB were engineered to do, and each model has many more free parameters than dark matter. And note they have replaced invisible matter with an invisible matter-like field, it's not a simplification. Remembering that cold dark matter predicted these features, with fewer parameters and it is a physical model, not merely a fit. People have run simulations with the more basic MOND models, to find it cannot form realistic structure. Generally it forms structure more quickly than standard cosmology. Finding they need to add dark matter to their already modified gravity models to get something reasonable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00555
> Generally [MOND] forms structure more quickly than standard cosmology.
Magnetohydrodynamics, not just hydrodynamics. It would need some type of restoring force similar to how the black hole simulation was found to behave when it included magnetic fields.
> People have run simulations with the more basic MOND models, to find it cannot form realistic structure.
Neither does ΛCDM though, right? It matches the CMB, sure, but it doesn't match the many of the observed properties of the universe either. The observed voids and over-densities are significantly larger than predicted, nor is the observed distribution of dark matter in galaxies what we predict.
> And note they have replaced invisible matter with an invisible matter-like field, it's not a simplification.
Great point, and I'm happy to admit I missed this.
But I'm not actually a proponent of MOND, nor even an opponent of ΛCDM. It's the best we got. I just feel it's not quite as accepted as current consensus seems to, so I'm glad there's people out here still trying to poke holes in it and find alternatives.
https://januscosmologicalmodel.com
Petit's models implies negative masses that would sit at the center of the cosmic voids, giving it structure.
Someone wrote simulation showcasing this emergent phenomenon a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtcbBpieR5U
> Feel free to check: Predictions here.
[0] https://theeggandtherock.com/p/predictions-what-the-james-we...
The parent theory leans on Cosmological Natural Selection to explain away the anthropic principle, but it's a separate theory not required by Blowtorch Theory.
> Blowtorch theory works, and can be explored, independently of its parent theory: however, three-stage cosmological natural selection gives an important and useful framework for more deeply understanding blowtorch theory and its implications.
I find the Blowtorch theory very compelling - but the cosmological/evolution argument seems qualitatively... less scientific, or at least less physics-related. It is very interesting! But, I think its association would damage the pair.
Anything stopping Blowtorch theory from standing on it's own?
I felt the same way when I first read the theory, and the idea of being inside a black hole sounded silly. But the more I read, the less crazy it sounded, and I'm at the point now where it feels crazier to ignore all this evidence.
On the other hand the notion of evolution implies the existence of global time ordering. Yet black holes makes this impossible. So I am very skeptical about any theory that tries to bring the notion of evolution to the universe.
Also the notion that there can be another universe with different physical constants is even worse than the ever changing notion of dark matter. At least the latter gives a plausible mechanism about why that matter does not interact with normal matter while the notion of changing constants does not even attempt to provide a mechanism.
That book also has solar blowtorches! Although in a different context, not as the mechanism for generating structure in the early universe.
Modern cosmology requires simulations, simulations require mathematical models.
It’s well researched and points out legitimate shortcomings in current theories.
But without the math you don’t know if everything is really adding up and we’re kind of left with cool story bro.
For example, it made these predictions in advance of the James Web’s first data:
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
And these were later validated by the James Webb:
https://theeggandtherock.com/p/killer-new-evidence-that-supe...
This isn't how any of this works. Actual models predict things by being models, you know, equations and numbers that output more equations and numbers.
What you have is vague speculation and hand waving ideas.
The math would allow for the predictions to be precise, quantifiable, and directly falsifiable.
As is the predictions qualify as interesting, but there are also weaknesses. Some of it was already predicted by others, some needs more verification, some of the claims were more broad “lots of jets, lots of quasars” so they say less than more precise predictions would.
There's also this research (cited by the author of Blowtorch Theory, if I'm not mistaken) supporting direct-collapse SMBH in the early cosmos here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04042
Blowtorch Theory posits that supermassive black holes formed very early, before the stars. I believe they didn't just form early, but that they were always there and the smoothness of the CMB doesn't come from natural isotropy of 'creation'. In my opinion it's so smooth because on the way to us the light was thoroughly mixed by the chaotic gravity (and now possibly electromagnetism) of all the supermassive black holes of the observable universe and the 'dust' swirling between them that were at the time that CMB light originated, crammed into a bubble of the size of merely 100 mln light-years. The relationship between CMB and supermassive blackholes exists but it's the other way around. It's not CMB that spawned black holes. It's black holes that generated the smoothness of CMB. The smoothness comes from overlapping gravitational lensing of trillion galaxies in concentrations ranging form 100 mln light years to 13 bln and acting for 13 bln years.
In my idea "Where did the supermassive black holes came from?" is the same kind of question like "Where did the universe came from?" The fact that in current Big Bang model we can imagine simple, mathematical origins (point like beginning of spacetime) doesn't make it more likely to be true. There's no doubt that Big Bang was a very energetic event, but you could get very energetic events without invoking creation. Just imagine two very dense black hole clusters, slamming into each other at relativistic speeds, each consisting of trillions (or more) of supermassive black holes.
What's great about this Blowtorch Theory is that it connects things we can actually observe, large scale structure of the universe, with the activity of those very early supermassive black holes (wherever they came from) in a measurable way thus potentially providing evidence of their very early existence. I hope it catches on because it's huge step in the right direction.
It's in human nature to need origin stories. Science's current one is the Big Bang. It is only a hypothesis and will never get to the next level of scientific rigor because it's impossible to test. I only believe in falsifiable theories. A good skeptic should realize the differences in scientific rigor and know that this is just a story with no truth behind it.
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
And how they were validated later by the James Webb.
https://theeggandtherock.com/p/killer-new-evidence-that-supe...
A well reasoned theory in any science should include and test for implications in the past and present. We can't just ignore time if we want a proper understanding of the universe.
It makes a falsifiable prediction:
> What’s novel in my theory is the idea that all the supermassive black holes must form first, by direct collapse – before galaxies form, and indeed before there’s any significant number of stars, or (probably) any stars at all. This emerges directly from the application of Darwinian evolutionary logic to universes. It’s not predicted by any other theory, and if I’m wrong, my theory wobbles badly and a wheel falls off. So the theory is falsifiable.
And in the other post
> Most of the first generation of stars will, if I am right, contain traces of carbon at formation, because early quasars make it by fusion and distribute it into the clouds to seed star formation. And such stars will therefore be relatively efficient at fusion, element formation, etc. (They will still be very low in carbon, and other elements such as oxygen, relative to later stars; but not completely lacking, as Population III stars are theorised to be.)
with more predictions: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/predictions-what-the-james-we...
That's not novel. In quantum cosmology there are theories where primordial black holes appeared as fluctuations of some quantum field. In cyclical universe models primordial black holes are leftovers from previous cycle.
One could re-postulate the theory as the innumerable tiny hands of god pushing on mass in the divinely chosen direction and nothing really changes but the name it theory.
The hands are there, they're just smaller than the resolving power.
At some point it's time to admit fault, but so far that's not happening despite the ever accumulating pile of evidence against DM. For a supposedly mature main stream theory the proponents are surprisingly fragile.
This theory has been widely accepted in the English speaking world for 70 years, and provided a model for expanding the theory sixfold. However a competing theory was introduced there at Oxford, which was more complex and had something to do with Illuvitar.
Novelty and Theory are mutually exclusive to scientists. Likewise with Obscurity. Now a lack of empiricism and even less falsifiablilty has never stopped them. Paleontologists love to play Mad Libs with sedimentary layers and connect the dots with mythical lost worlds.
If scientists want to weave myths to share with one another and entertain 8-year-old STEM aspirants, that’s fine, but we’ve boldly gone where Theories and Scientific Facts fear to tread.
Isn't it funny how we always make the "true source of creation" just nearly outside of our observational capabilities? The God was just on top of the mountain, just behind the ocean, just behind clouds ... and now the creation was right before 13bln years ago, because that's how far we can look.
The guy is calling for funding and support with an evangelistic fervour classically associated with those reluctant to pursue their case through accepted mechanisms of scrutiny and peer review.
Yeah, I think cosmology has very slowly walked into a swamp with ΛCDM. And it's having enormous trouble backing out of the swamp, even though the James Webb Space Telescope is screaming at them that they need to. But ΛCDM is now baked into every simulation, and is assumed up front by pretty much every paper in the field. So they're in a very difficult situation. New ideas, and change, will have to come, initially, from outside the field. Which will liberate a lot of very brilliant people who are trapped in the old paradigm.
I guess the entire field of solid state physics and materials science doesn't exist?
It has no coherent thesis, it throws way too many links, it uses meta titles that reference memes. The SNR is incredibly low for what should be a technical synopsis because the words get in the way of information.
What I want to see: I don’t care what you call it, “blowtorch” is meaningless. Tell me concretely what is it, what does it address, and how does the current widely accepted theory fail to account for certain things. I don’t need detours into minutae so the author can have their r/iamverysmart moment. I want to see the list of experiments with data points that validate hunches and disprove others. We can reduce it down to simpler terms for laymen if we start with good information. As it stands, it’s noise.
> THE PROBLEM
> THE CURRENT, PASSIVE, ANSWER
> AN ALTERNATIVE, ACTIVE, ANSWER
> A MORE FRUGAL ANSWER
> SUPPORTIVE EVIDENCE
Here's a direct link to that last section:
https://theeggandtherock.com/i/158515951/supportive-evidence
Edit: Alright, as I get further into the article I see more and more what you're mentioning...
I was waiting for this edit but didn’t want to be mean about it :-)
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
And those predictions were later confirmed by the James Webb:
Https://theeggandtherock.com/p/killer-new-evidence-that-supermassive
Which is a data point worth pondering.
> It has no coherent thesis
It's literally in the subtitle: How early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets carved out cosmic voids, shaped filaments, and generated magnetic fields
> it throws way too many links
It cites its sources and provides links to the referenced research or other writings on the subjects. I suspect if it didn't do this, that might be a criticism as well?
> it uses meta titles that reference memes
Alternatively, it could've been written in the jargon of a specific subfield of science that very few people understand, but that doesn't seem like the most effective way of sharing ideas across broad audiences.
Everything you've asked for in the last paragraph is provided in the article you're discrediting, which makes it clear you didn't read it. Ostensibly, this is because the "words get in the way of information," but I'm not sure how the ideas being explored here could be expressed using only pictures and mathematical formulas.
Perhaps you could explain why you feel alternatives to the "widely accepted" theory that fails to accurately model cosmology as we're observing it aren't worth being explored? Or maybe what specific format those ideas should be expressed that don't involve too many words for people to have to read?
There is no math in this article. In the fields of physics, how else do you explore an idea other than building models to test if those ideas hold any water?
How do you propose we get to a mathematical model or testable simulation without considering the theory first? Must all theories be mathematically complete before they're presented to the world?
1. I suppose there could be some kind of high concept sci-fi rigmarole that could be arrived at via cosmology or perhaps it could inform exotic material construction in particle accelerators or something like that. I suppose by “application” I mean something more down to earth like building a new kind of computer, solving climate change, producing a fusion reactor, etc.
I'll admit, I tend to get excited by things and lean into them harder than what most people do. However, I've taken time to consider WHY I'm so excited by this theory, and I believe it's because it has the feel to me of a solid idea that just needs the weight of the scientific community behind it.
String theory is some impressive math, and it's usefulness for practical applications really only extends as much as to say that "math is useful." If it offers predictive or explanatory powers, they're far beyond my layperson's understanding, as I can't conceptualize any part of it in a way that I apply to the world I observe. I'm not saying we don't need string theory by any means, but I do feel that CNS (and Gough's additions to it) offer more in that regard, and the postulates of the theory should be examined and tested thoroughly as a result.
I guess what I'm saying is it's not some crazy idea a wacky writer had while working on a sci-fi book. It's not some CTMU nonsense that requires its own language and mental gymnastics to process. It's applying principles we've learned in other sciences to cosmology in an attempt to understand the structure we see at all levels and to explain why the fundamental constants are what they are. Smolin presents the idea within the framework of science and society in a fascinating way, while Gough presents it the way you'd expect a writer to, so it's got even more human scent all over it, but I don't believe that should be discrediting in any way.
In your opinion, what would be the best way for Gough -- as a novelist -- to get enough experts onboard with the idea to put in the requisite research and development of the idea so that it can be improved to the level this audience is suggesting it should be? And how should he do that in a way that doesn't draw the immediate and reflexive derisive snort we've seen from this crowd?
Thanks again for responding! I really do appreciate the opposing perspective!
However, the question remains as to how to gather experts and convince them to work towards this without some sort of ideation phase, which is, to my understanding, the phase this work is currently being presented as. A "Hey Science, come look at this, please!" invitation.
I have no idea if this theory (or fun idea or whatever people want to derisively call it) is correct, but it's wild how unwilling people are to even consider alternative ideas when there are unquestionably issues with the current prevailing theory.
I've read a great deal of Julian's substack, watched a few interviews, and I find him to be deeply thoughtful and quite entertaining, and I'll admit I do find it frustrating to see people dismiss or berate him as just a crazy idea guy without having a good sense of how much has actually gone into this. It's seriously the same thing that happened to Smolin when Susskind brought his weak arguments against CNS and the theory just gathered dust.
Anyway, feel free to write me off as a bot, alt, or some rabid idiot fanboy. As a cosmology enthusiast (but certainly not a scientist by any definition) I was hoping for a discussion of the ideas in the post, but this has been enlightening in other ways, which is not without value.
In some ways, it is a symptom of the success of science so far that we consider that the baseline for credibility.
If the predictive observations from this theory hold true, then it's possible a mathematical framework can be developed for it.