Why Does the Universe Expand?
cosmicave.org
cosmicave.org
Perhaps similar to somebody more famous like Harari in that respect.
The author appears to be legitimate in his scientific background but the repeated implications of the revolutionary nature of his work are somewhat crankish; this is a personal blog so possibly he just needs a good editor (he says he is published elsewhere).
Just something to bear in mind as you read - not that there isn't anything to gain from it; but the boundary between well-grounded theory and speculative philosophic beliefs may not be clear - which to be fair arguably comes somewhat with the territory here.
But how is the "dials" that the author describes, which "science" use to make the theory fit the facts of observation, more grounded?
I think he is trying to say that the fewer things we need to tune the better, but if so that's trivially Occam's razor and a standard part of the scientific toolkit.
It also sounds as if he's discovered that PhDs are rewarded for work that makes their supervisor look good, not for original thinking that rocks the boat. You don't get the right to do that unless you have tenure at an Ivy (or foreign equivalent.)
The theory sounds interesting. I hope there are some testable predictions, and if there are, I hope they're tested.
Yea, that is what I was trying to say in the comment above ...
Why do you need to spell it out like that?
I don't have the math background or a big enough brain to hold so many ideas, and equations, and relationships between all three, to come up with any kind of scientific explanation for why I believe what I believe.
The author seems to have it though.
Classic thinkers like Aristotle could still arrive at something that is true unto itself, without bringing in physics.
Any useful discussion between two entities must begin from some common knowledge: and because you have personal experience, you have knowledge, and therefore some idea of what is true.
Dirac says we should look for beauty in math: he didn't ever provide an explanation for why, just that it seems proper and something Mathematicians know only through experience. Philosophy is at the heart of truth.
We should argue against the author's theories. I can't, but I also won't dismiss his ideas just because it feels bad.
Using Aristotle's deductive reasoning, I also believe we exist within a black hole.
By examining intelligence and time: we can arrive at a conclusion that intelligence arises from observation if order that unfolds into chaos. And anything intelligent, anything able to notice the unfolding must itself resist chaos through localized order: intelligence.
We are the universe observing itself.
Intelligence and imagination allows us to predict future events.
I believe we all would make the exact same choices if we lived the exact same experiences in the same bodies. This makes me feel strangely connected, and keeps me more open-minded.
Science and Religion is a common division among intelligent beings. Sometimes they move forward differently in our minds singularly, and collectively.
You can accept truths like learning, knowledge, roles, collective intelligence, etc., and all the depth of the Science that goes with it, and still use those ideas at a high level in order to to predict future events, to do something 'useful'.
Google just posted a white paper about RSI 'dreaming'.
You take some super complex thing and reduce it within the scope of something bigger. Then you let an observer (self) recursively pick and choose the reduced scopes (like steps in a plan), and by observation of outcomes, pick the 'better path' for the future. It's like dreaming and reflection, considering past and future, and then choosing to learn in a direction that helps you change the future.
By picking and choosing in this way: you can learn and grow into shapes that help you predict the future again and again, to persist.
It's a loop within a loop, and that's neat to me (Cybernetics comes to mind). And so the author's idea tugs at me, because if we really do live in a Black Hole, what's at the end? A spikey but supremely ordered state, yet still a Singularity. What's at the beginning of the Big Bang? Also a Singularity, but extremely smooth. What's in the 'singularity' that is our moment right now: just our minds. The only thing that comes to mind is the 'you', the collective experience that defines your moment.
If you loosely connect the idea of a Big Bang being the beginning, and a Black hole being the end:
At one end: a single idea (low entropy, smooth ordered state: only on predictable event comes next, expansion), at another, many (high entropy, many predictable states if you consider the start, but always the same ending).
Intelligence is about predicting the state of one moment to the other, in order to do something useful about the future.
There's discussions and disruptions in Mathematics about: what makes a 'valid' Math proof? Do we accept only Human understanding, or Machines? Right now we've accepted Human only. The only way it matters, is if the discovery of proof is useful to someone or something.
Imagine an AI proofs out this author's work: If every single AI agreed, would you accept it? Or is AI actually a waste of 'Time' and we should stop using it. Is there beauty in Logic the way Dirac looks at Math?
As it is, we're waiting on some Humans to dig through Math and proof out and 'understand' in some areas, but not in others. We measure the utility of AI: how much time does it save, which means it's a very personal measure.
When it comes time to do this exercise where Science and Religion meet: we don't know if we should 'trust' an AI's understanding of Math over our own. We measure its utility differently in some areas than others...and so it becomes a very personal subject and is my 'stuff' to believe. My personal truth, as gross as it is. My 'shit to believe'.
To end this argument on a spiritual note that is also grounded in personal truth: consider loops once again.
And this time, probably the most important agent, the outer loop that matters most: Your beginning, and your ending. Your moment, is a collection of choices you make based on your own personal observation.
Whatever you believe: prepare for your own ending properly. Criticize when you feel it's proper, and help, when you see fit. Your choices.
Wut
Singularities are interesting 'moments': places where timelines converge. One of these seems to exist at the 'Big Bang', and one seems to exist at the center of a 'Black Hole'.
This man's 'math' suggests we live in a black hole.
I choose deductive reasoning from Aristotle and apply it to my own experience to reach my own conclusions. But you're right, he believed many things that turned out not to be true, and it reduces his credentials and should lessen how much belief I give to his ideas. Was the opening idea I left there 'useful' to you? I have no idea, it was useful to me.
But, if the tool is extremely useful, and feels elegant, perhaps there is some 'truth' to the tool itself and it should be considered carefully....
Someone literally posted an article about Dirac and 'beautiful math' here the other day. He suggested Einstein's special relativity persists today and spread because the idea was beautiful, and sake of beauty itself helped it to spread and be more 'true'.
Is this proper? I don't know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon
I also understand that there is a cosmological (event) horizon, where galaxies freeze, then rapidly redshift in the same way. This happens because these distant objects are accelerated away from us faster than light.
It appears to me that we are seeing black hole event horizons from the outside, and the cosmological event horizon is seen from the inside.
The similarities do give one pause.
The mechanisms are different; one is gravity, and the other is dark energy.
As this happens, what you see is a very hard dimming of the emited light and a very hard redshift because everything takes so long now (from the perspective of a far away observer) that the frequency of the light emitted and the luminous power emited basically go to zero (along with everything that has time in the denominator).
There is nothing preventing spin from being zero, as far as I know.
Absolutely wild, thanks for sharing.
> Any model of the observable universe being the interior of a black hole requires that the Hubble radius of the universe be equal to its Schwarzschild radius, which is proportional to its mass. This is indeed observed to be nearly satisfied, but might be a coincidence.
> The only way to test the idea that black holes create new universes is to measure the observable universe. Inflation generated by spin and torsion is consistent with the cosmic microwave background data from the Planck satellite.
And there is also one huge reason to not think such models are viable. The Wikipedia article skates right by it:
"According to such scenarios, our observable universe was born in a black hole existing in a larger universe, where this black hole may, at some point, appear as a white hole."
The problem with this is, a white hole has a past horizon. In other words, it is an isolated system with a horizon around it, and infinite empty space outside the horizon. We have no evidence for any such thing, and how would it be possible anyway? The past horizon would have had to be "built in" to the universe from the start. It's not something that can be produced by a physical process, the way a black hole, with its future horizon, can be formed by gravitational collapse.
So what then, is it black holes all the way down?
With the blackhole universe picture, causal boundaries and spacetime's evolution aren't properly accounted for once we step out of a static picture.
Incidentally, the cosmic object we are more likely to be inside of is a white-hole.
Inflation is accelerating because as the black hole grows it eats more.
Don’t know how crackpot this is. From what I’ve read it actually can be coaxed into fitting observation but there’s just no possible way to test it.
When I think about things at this scale, it really makes me feel minuscule.
That or that it's all a fractal!
> “In physics, description is explanation” (author quoting his PhD advisor)
Yes, i have always hated this about physics. It is the only scientific field that apparently feels no responsibility to explain “why”, deciding that “what” is sufficient.
I wish the author all success so that i can someday read a satisfying answer to some of the “whys” of physics.
Psychology explains why you feel tired by pointing to biology. Biology explains why cells need ATP by pointing to chemistry. Chemistry explains why ATP releases energy by pointing to physics. Physics explains that by pointing to some higher level form of physics like thermodynamics, which points to statistical mechanics, which point to quantum laws. When you get down to a certain level you simply have nothing left to punt to. You simply accept it because it's what's observed and makes reproducible predictions or you don't and go study philosophy or religion or something.
So they goes round and round, using more and more "dials" to stay within their framework, always kicking the can down the road a bit (its turtles all the way down), but never really answering the core questions...
> Psychology is really biology; biology is really chemistry; chemistry is really physics; physics is really math; and math is really hard.
But on the other hand I do feel there are cases where other fields have true explanations without punting. It’s not all the time but sometimes. My favorite example is evolution. We observe evidence that species evolve over long periods. Why? Natural selection. It’s the entire explanation. And I suppose in some senses it punts on the mechanisms of natural selection - genes and molecular biology rest on physics and chemistry after all. But in terms of the why, why does evolution happen, I feel we have a complete answer that has that feeling of intellectual satisfaction and completeness that is, at least from my lay perspective, lacking in physics.
Whys are teleological. No one knows why anything.
Hows are working models. And, as per Kuhn, they get updated regularly, but people get attached to them and they often need to die out before progress happens.
But really we're dealing with metaphors in mathematical form. There's likely some underlying ultimate substrate, but it's possible we may never understand it because it just won't fit inside our minds.
You can explain "the sun goes around to Earth" to almost anyone. "Orbits are ellipses" is high school level. Orbital perturbation theory is undergrad, and you've already lost maybe 90% of the population. The Einstein field equations are PhD level, and maybe a few thousand people out of a population of eight billion understand them.
If there's a level beyond that - and there probably is - we won't be able to access it bare-brained. The underlying metaphor may be explainable, possibly, but the math won't be.
And one of the defining features of science is that scientifc metaphors are counter-intuitive. Our brains evolved to understand spear throws, so we've built physics on physical experiences like mass, velocity, direction, and so on.
That gets really strained and broken in both relativity and quantum mechanics. In relativity spacetime is a bendy thing in its own right and 'time' doesn't work like normal clock time. And in QM all you really have are probability clouds that literally don't seem to have a physical foundation interacting with each other in very unintuitive ways.
No scientist can explain the why, and most can't even explain the how (Heisenberg uncertainty, for one accessible example).
In the second comment: my first comment was getting downvoted heavily by the pseudo-quacks whose religion is science.
Well - the Big Bang theory could be wrong. Yes, one can assume it is logical, if everything expands then at one point it must have been closer together, a single point (though, has anyone determined this center yet?). But one could have different explanations. What if everything consists of strings of different energy streams? One could avoid having a Big Bang as theory there. Also, gravity has not yet been unified with other parts of the laws of physics, so realistically we don't fully understand gravity yet either. You have theories that right now do not explain everything.
Anyway, can some please validate my memory? I do not want to experience this Mandela effect alone.
>Looks inside.
>Zero math.
Zero effort slop.
Einstein GR → Friedmann eqns → universe can be expanding or contracting
Rest of this amounts to "what about initial conditions? things become divergent at t→0"
Yes, this is called the Big Bang singularity, GR breaks down there. You are not the first person to notice this. It is considered one of the biggest open problems in the field.
The stuff about accelerating expansion is confused (AI?) slop which eventually gets around to admitting that there's no problem at t>0 and no change to the existing problem at t=0, so I don't know why you didn't just cut it.
This is some real "unsolicited snail mail to physics departments"-tier content, even for HN I think it's embarrassing to have this on the front page.
I guess because every code monkey in Silicon Valley has wet dreams about overthrowing the hidebound physics establishment for some reason
While this is true, it's also true that out of all of his published work in physics (which you can find at the "Google Scholar" link on the Author page of his log), none of it, as far as I can see, is about the hypothesis described in this article. All his writings about that appear on his blog. Which means that, if he has tried to get any of this published in peer-reviewed journals, he's failed.
This could mean that he is a visionary whose insight is not recognized by the establishment, which is the story he tells. It could also mean that his speculations actually don't lead anywhere useful. My Bayesian prior is heavily on the latter.
Sounds lot like you are using appeal to authority.
As for the actual article, I think it's too vague to even be able to criticize anything specific. It's words strung together, but no actual testable model that I can see. (One key red flag: the page where he says the "mathematical details" are--does not even have a single equation.)
You should remember that the groundwork on which all the scientific pursuits stands on was built by curious laymen ...Today it seems that without a Phd (apparently even that is not enough, given the reactions to this post), you are not allowed to ponder about such things...
Too much focus on the tech in Star Trek when you're a kid, I imagine. Shoulda focused on the morality.
Also, there is always the alternative explanation that the reason other physicists have not paid any real attention to the author's claims is that those claims are, as I said in another post upthread, too vague even to criticize. (Wolfgang Pauli used the phrase "not even wrong".)
Wolfram didn't get the memo
Only in models that actually have such an initial singularity. Not all models do. Eternal inflation models, for example, do not.
Would Ramanujan's unsolicited letter to Hardy be one of the kind that you describe here?