I think you should rework the style of the article to remove the “dissing” of the work that established ΛCDM. It is doing the article a disservice, making it sound unprofessional and crackpot-y. If the Blowtorch Theory has merit, it will stand on its own.
I do understand why you are critical of my decision to attack ΛCDM and the work that led to it. I can see your point of view, and indeed I wrestled with that decision. I do realise that a lot of people will be alienated by the "dissing" of ΛCDM, who would otherwise be attracted to Blowtorch Theory.
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:
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.
Fascinating stuff!
What seems a bit far fetched is that idea that black holes create new universes and in doing so somehow transfer some cosmological constants over.
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.
The parameters of the universe we live in seem fine-tuned for creation of stars, galaxies, black holes, and life. If those values change too much, you don't get any of it. That needs to be explained.
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.
Does it really matter though? There’s the scientific part probably worth exploring and the philosophical and engagement part which will spark the imagination of sponsors. The first part can be verified in the foreseeable future. The second part may become falsifiable at rather unimaginable time scale, probably requiring an artificial black hole for experimentation and Kardashev Type II level of technology.
I really enjoyed this essay. I'm just a cosmology bystander/hobbyist, but your takedown of the dark matter hypotheses was very appealing to me. I was shocked when I got to the section where you talk about all these macro-scale simulations using only dark matter. It's like an ouroboros of cosmological theories eating themselves, totally disconnected from reality. And relates to one of my favorite quotes that "simulations are doomed to succeed". I don't understand physics well enough to really understand black hole jets, but it feels like an elegant theory and I hope you're able to take it somewhere.
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.
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.
I'm curious what you mean by this. We already know with confidence that when feeding, black holes emit relativistic jets from their poles that reach distances of tens of millions of light years. How could those not affect the environment around them?
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.
This is interesting, but a few issues jump out at me.
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 didn't manage to get through all of the text, but it's the most interesting thing on science I've read in quite a while. Orders of magnitude more informative than any pop science news, and readable unlike journal papers.
I think the only thing missing is to mention epicycles of solar system models.
I watched the search for the Higgs Boson and the search for Cold Dark Matter carry on in parallel for decades.
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.
So, life exists to create more universes? It seems, that you've found the meaning of Life, Universe and possible Everything, and turns out it is not 42?
I know you're joking, but I was laid off in September and had a bunch of thinking and reading time. I worked my way back to cosmology and philosophy and found myself in a bit of crisis until I discovered, by chance, Julian Gough's post on Blowtorch Theory.
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?
There is no shortage of cranks generating novel cosmological theories, but this writer doesn't seem to be one of them. He's interested in predictive power!
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.
“ It argues that large numbers of extremely early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets actively shaped the universe's structure in its first few hundred million years”
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?
> (And even as this Blowtorch Theory post was being researched and written, a paper was published detailing an extraordinary blazar – a jet, a blowtorch, pointed straight at the earth from over 13 billion years ago, just 750 million years after the Big Bang – far earlier than Lambda Cold Dark Matter predicted, but slap-bang where the theory outlined here said we would find them. See: A blazar in the epoch of reionization, by Eduardo Bañados et al, Nature, December 17, 2024.)
We don’t know how they form but we do now know they exist through Webb.
My take on it is that it's been known for a long time (1970s) that supermassive black holes couldn't possibly have been formed between the big bang and the present, never mind the early times that JWST can see into.
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.
Well, Webb has observed SMBHs earlier than current theory would suggest.
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.
ΛCDM was the best model for a long while because it gave a free mystery variable to generously use as plaster to fill in an innumerable amount of yawing cracks.
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".
> 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.
Let me start by saying there are a lot of false claims in the dark matter section.
It's also filled with self contradiction, announcing that DM as wrong, and later pronouncing LCDM as unfalsifiable.
The pillars of modem cosmology are the ability to quantitatively describe and predict large-scale structure, the expansion history of the universe, the CMB and primordial nucleosynthesis.
Can this "model" calculate any of those things? No. What the author has here is some ideas, not a model.
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.
I agree with most of what you've said here, particularly the following line which I'm copying for emphasis because I think it's incredibly important.
> 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.
One can do simple simulations on a laptop which show the cosmic web. It's not really an excuse for not having tried. There are lots of claims in the article which need to be justified, and in science that comes before making big claims.
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.
Dark matter exists, it is a thing–that thing is a set of observations of the universe. It isn't an understood phenomena but suggesting dark matter does not exist is nonsense, the observations exist–and contradict our understanding of the universe–the question is why they do. Lambda Cold Dark Matter might not be the answer, but it is important not to conflate that with dark matter generally.
Personally, I love this theory. The thought of natural assembly and selection at the level of Black Holes is alluring. Not sure what The Black Mirror Hypothesis (https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/when-you-fall-into-a-bl...) would have to say about this, though.
I've been calling out the similarity of works done by Barbour, Turok, Farnes & Petit for a long time, and the last developments by Turok's team vindicate this intuition. It is now very close to Jean-Pierre Petit's Janus model. Curt Jaimungal announced he'd interview him soon.
The same but without leaning so heavily on Smolin's cosmological-natural-selection would be quite a bit more compelling. It should not be necessary; if it's true then the physics of our universe alone should predict it.
Agreed, but my interpretation here is that Blowtorch Theory does just that. It just predicts that direct collapse supermassive blackholes determine the large scale structure of the universe using existing physics.
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.
Is there anything inherently requiring the three stage cosmological theory to bring about the Blowtorch theory?
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 believe Gough has expressed properly that you're welcome to consider Blowtorch Theory and ignore CNS entirely and it still works as an astrophysical model. Honestly, the longer process of reading the series of articles on the substack where Gough explains how we got the model of the cosmos we currently have helps to explain some of the strange mismatches we've had to deal with throughout history, and CNS (developed originally by the brilliant physicist Lee Smolin) offers explanatory power using no new physics, no exotic matter, and applies the process of natural selection (which is the only observed way we've identified increasingly complixifying self-organizing systems) to the cosmos, and it works shockingly well.
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.
It is a very interesting idea that cosmologist were wrong to ignore electromagnetic forces when most of the matter in early universe were plasma.
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.
This cosmology strongly reminds me of the last section of Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, which vividly describes a god creating a succession of universes, gradually selecting for and evolving towards consciousness.
That book also has solar blowtorches! Although in a different context, not as the mechanism for generating structure in the early universe.
>For example, it made these predictions in advance of the James Web’s first data:
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.
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
The dark matter and energy and other dark things, at least as described in the article, resemble the numerous epicycles that were needed for geocentric and cycle-based model of planet movements. They did fix trajectories to some extent, but made no sense.
I think the truth is even one step further away from current models in exactly this direction.
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.
This is yet another item on the cosmic formation hypothesis conveyor belt. These types of hypotheses have been coming and will continue to come forever. They are non-falsifiable and are just stories. They will only ever be hypotheses. We cannot visit the past to see what exactly happened and test them to consider them theories. Being a strong skeptic means understanding that a hypothesis does not represent deep truths of the universe and should not be used to inform any decision.
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.
> 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.)
Your suggestion about carbon is not falsifiable observationally. With real data you can only place an observational upper limit, you cannot measure the abundance is exactly zero. Without a quantitative calculated prediction of the carbon abundance it cannot be falsified. Similarly you can only test direct collapse black holes if you have some way of finding them, their observational properties depend on the formation scenario. You also need the expected number density and redshifts of such objects to reject anything.
> What’s novel in my theory is the idea that all the supermassive black holes must form first, by direct collapse – before galaxies
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.
Cosmology, like many sciences, is about learning the scientific truth through the remnants left behind. Just like we can see an early earth by digging, we can see an early universe by zooming.
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's in human nature to need origin stories. Science's current one is the Big Bang.
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.
That isn't quite right. The Big Bang is farther than we can look. We can only look as far as the CMB, some 380.000 years after the Big Bang. The timing of the Big Bang instead comes from calculating the density evolution of the universe backwards. Unless you define "look" as "calculate".
Currently the most enduring theory of galactic formation is how some kids showed up on Charn and rang a bell, awakening the White Witch; then they all witness a lion singing in the dark until it’s not so dark anymore.
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.
You're smart to be skeptical, read Thomas Aquinas he gives real proofs for his beliefs and demonstrated that there has to be a Prime Mover. God bless you.
So many private TOEs out there, it's not at all obvious why this one merits special examination here or anywhere else.
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.
I get so much value out of this site in all sorts of important fields (to my career, or to my interest) where I am playing catch-up.
But every couple of months a thread pop up in a field I am closer to state of the art, giving me a helpful reminder about the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect. I am sure others with variety of "Before Hacker" backgrounds experience the same in their own fields.
"accepted mechanisms of scrutiny and peer review" have produced very little value in physics for 50+ years. We've picked all the low hanging fruit we can reach with that epistemic framework. We should probably expect future developments to happen elsewhere.
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 am going to nitpick this but I’ve come to expect this kind of posting style from medium, substack and others.
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.
I'm not sure I agree. The first few sections are clear, concise, supported by links to observations you expect, and cover exactly what you say is missing:
This doesn't feel like a good faith engagement with the ideas presented in the theory.
> 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?
There is so much anger in this thread because someone is making qualitative predictions instead of quantitative predictions (except there are some statistical predictions, albeit based around correlations to existing observational phenomenon, but that seems valid to me?).
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.
Those are not the comments I'm talking about. There are some in this thread that are derisive due to its focus on qualitative theory and predictions instead of a mathematical foundation.
It strikes me similar to something that is LLM generated. It relies very much on the relationship between words, like how a non-practitioner in a field might develop a fatuous proof or theory.
I'm not saying it is wrong, either. But it's not quantitative and makes weak predictions with very little work into the roadmap to experimentally validate the ideas.
I’m slightly startled to see my Blowtorch Theory post at number one here. (A friend sent me a screenshot, so I came over to check if he was joking.)
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.
I think you should rework the style of the article to remove the “dissing” of the work that established ΛCDM. It is doing the article a disservice, making it sound unprofessional and crackpot-y. If the Blowtorch Theory has merit, it will stand on its own.
I do understand why you are critical of my decision to attack ΛCDM and the work that led to it. I can see your point of view, and indeed I wrestled with that decision. I do realise that a lot of people will be alienated by the "dissing" of ΛCDM, who would otherwise be attracted to Blowtorch Theory.
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.
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Fascinating stuff! What seems a bit far fetched is that idea that black holes create new universes and in doing so somehow transfer some cosmological constants over.
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.
The parameters of the universe we live in seem fine-tuned for creation of stars, galaxies, black holes, and life. If those values change too much, you don't get any of it. That needs to be explained.
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.
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Does it really matter though? There’s the scientific part probably worth exploring and the philosophical and engagement part which will spark the imagination of sponsors. The first part can be verified in the foreseeable future. The second part may become falsifiable at rather unimaginable time scale, probably requiring an artificial black hole for experimentation and Kardashev Type II level of technology.
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I really enjoyed this essay. I'm just a cosmology bystander/hobbyist, but your takedown of the dark matter hypotheses was very appealing to me. I was shocked when I got to the section where you talk about all these macro-scale simulations using only dark matter. It's like an ouroboros of cosmological theories eating themselves, totally disconnected from reality. And relates to one of my favorite quotes that "simulations are doomed to succeed". I don't understand physics well enough to really understand black hole jets, but it feels like an elegant theory and I hope you're able to take it somewhere.
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.
It's a very enjoyable read.
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.
I'm curious what you mean by this. We already know with confidence that when feeding, black holes emit relativistic jets from their poles that reach distances of tens of millions of light years. How could those not affect the environment around them?
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.
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This is interesting, but a few issues jump out at me.
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.
Here's hoping this is the 21st Century Copernican Revolution. Have you played the game Outer Wilds?
I didn't manage to get through all of the text, but it's the most interesting thing on science I've read in quite a while. Orders of magnitude more informative than any pop science news, and readable unlike journal papers.
I think the only thing missing is to mention epicycles of solar system models.
Thanks! Glad you were enjoying it.
Also, if you keep going, epicycles do in fact get a shout out!
Amazing. What caused you to look for a solution without a particle?
I watched the search for the Higgs Boson and the search for Cold Dark Matter carry on in parallel for decades.
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.
So, life exists to create more universes? It seems, that you've found the meaning of Life, Universe and possible Everything, and turns out it is not 42?
I know you're joking, but I was laid off in September and had a bunch of thinking and reading time. I worked my way back to cosmology and philosophy and found myself in a bit of crisis until I discovered, by chance, Julian Gough's post on Blowtorch Theory.
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?
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There is no shortage of cranks generating novel cosmological theories, but this writer doesn't seem to be one of them. He's interested in predictive power!
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.
> 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.
The Xeelee would like a word.
“ It argues that large numbers of extremely early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets actively shaped the universe's structure in its first few hundred million years”
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?
> (And even as this Blowtorch Theory post was being researched and written, a paper was published detailing an extraordinary blazar – a jet, a blowtorch, pointed straight at the earth from over 13 billion years ago, just 750 million years after the Big Bang – far earlier than Lambda Cold Dark Matter predicted, but slap-bang where the theory outlined here said we would find them. See: A blazar in the epoch of reionization, by Eduardo Bañados et al, Nature, December 17, 2024.)
We don’t know how they form but we do now know they exist through Webb.
My take on it is that it's been known for a long time (1970s) that supermassive black holes couldn't possibly have been formed between the big bang and the present, never mind the early times that JWST can see into.
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.
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its a cool theory and very appealing to me personally but how confident are we about the age of the blazar?
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Well, Webb has observed SMBHs earlier than current theory would suggest.
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.
ΛCDM was the best model for a long while because it gave a free mystery variable to generously use as plaster to fill in an innumerable amount of yawing cracks.
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".
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> 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?
Direct Collapse[1] models provide candidates for this, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_collapse_black_hole
With the size of quasars we're seeing in the early universe, direct collapse seems likely.
Of course this begs the next question of how didn't the universe just collapse back in on itself!
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This post is suggesting just such a mechanism:
> 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.
I want to correct a misunderstanding I had when reading the article the first time:
The mechanism suggested is Direct Collapse Black Hole formation, not the "three stage cosmological natural selection" model I quoted.
Let me start by saying there are a lot of false claims in the dark matter section. It's also filled with self contradiction, announcing that DM as wrong, and later pronouncing LCDM as unfalsifiable. The pillars of modem cosmology are the ability to quantitatively describe and predict large-scale structure, the expansion history of the universe, the CMB and primordial nucleosynthesis. Can this "model" calculate any of those things? No. What the author has here is some ideas, not a model.
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.
I agree with most of what you've said here, particularly the following line which I'm copying for emphasis because I think it's incredibly important.
> 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.
One can do simple simulations on a laptop which show the cosmic web. It's not really an excuse for not having tried. There are lots of claims in the article which need to be justified, and in science that comes before making big claims.
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.
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Dark matter exists, it is a thing–that thing is a set of observations of the universe. It isn't an understood phenomena but suggesting dark matter does not exist is nonsense, the observations exist–and contradict our understanding of the universe–the question is why they do. Lambda Cold Dark Matter might not be the answer, but it is important not to conflate that with dark matter generally.
Personally, I love this theory. The thought of natural assembly and selection at the level of Black Holes is alluring. Not sure what The Black Mirror Hypothesis (https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/when-you-fall-into-a-bl...) would have to say about this, though.
I've been calling out the similarity of works done by Barbour, Turok, Farnes & Petit for a long time, and the last developments by Turok's team vindicate this intuition. It is now very close to Jean-Pierre Petit's Janus model. Curt Jaimungal announced he'd interview him soon.
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
> By contrast, the model I’m exploring actually predicts shit in advance.
> Feel free to check: Predictions here.
[0] https://theeggandtherock.com/p/predictions-what-the-james-we...
The same but without leaning so heavily on Smolin's cosmological-natural-selection would be quite a bit more compelling. It should not be necessary; if it's true then the physics of our universe alone should predict it.
Agreed, but my interpretation here is that Blowtorch Theory does just that. It just predicts that direct collapse supermassive blackholes determine the large scale structure of the universe using existing physics.
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.
Is there anything inherently requiring the three stage cosmological theory to bring about the Blowtorch theory?
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 believe Gough has expressed properly that you're welcome to consider Blowtorch Theory and ignore CNS entirely and it still works as an astrophysical model. Honestly, the longer process of reading the series of articles on the substack where Gough explains how we got the model of the cosmos we currently have helps to explain some of the strange mismatches we've had to deal with throughout history, and CNS (developed originally by the brilliant physicist Lee Smolin) offers explanatory power using no new physics, no exotic matter, and applies the process of natural selection (which is the only observed way we've identified increasingly complixifying self-organizing systems) to the cosmos, and it works shockingly well.
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.
It is a very interesting idea that cosmologist were wrong to ignore electromagnetic forces when most of the matter in early universe were plasma.
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.
Is there some math to go with this?
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I think the ideas are presented in a clear manner, but we're talking cosmology and physics, a theory needs a mathematical model for it to be evaluated
What a fascinating concept! I look forward to these predictions being evaluated in the future with additional data. It's certainly an elegant idea.
This cosmology strongly reminds me of the last section of Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, which vividly describes a god creating a succession of universes, gradually selecting for and evolving towards consciousness.
That book also has solar blowtorches! Although in a different context, not as the mechanism for generating structure in the early universe.
There’s no math.
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.
I understand your critique. But it proposes a sequencing of events which is novel, and testable.
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...
>For example, it made these predictions in advance of the James Web’s first data:
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.
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Oh man, if you like math, you should check out this paper by Gardner and Conlon: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cplx.21446 where they did the math for CNS. I'll admit, it's beyond me.
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
The dark matter and energy and other dark things, at least as described in the article, resemble the numerous epicycles that were needed for geocentric and cycle-based model of planet movements. They did fix trajectories to some extent, but made no sense.
I think the truth is even one step further away from current models in exactly this direction.
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.
I can't wait for the modified gravity folks to pitch in on this.
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Stop posting llm slop
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This is yet another item on the cosmic formation hypothesis conveyor belt. These types of hypotheses have been coming and will continue to come forever. They are non-falsifiable and are just stories. They will only ever be hypotheses. We cannot visit the past to see what exactly happened and test them to consider them theories. Being a strong skeptic means understanding that a hypothesis does not represent deep truths of the universe and should not be used to inform any decision.
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.
If it will help, you can check out the predictions this approach was able to make before the James Web space telescope sent back any data.
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...
Do you have a link to the journal article?
> They are non-falsifiable and are just stories.
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...
Your suggestion about carbon is not falsifiable observationally. With real data you can only place an observational upper limit, you cannot measure the abundance is exactly zero. Without a quantitative calculated prediction of the carbon abundance it cannot be falsified. Similarly you can only test direct collapse black holes if you have some way of finding them, their observational properties depend on the formation scenario. You also need the expected number density and redshifts of such objects to reject anything.
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> What’s novel in my theory is the idea that all the supermassive black holes must form first, by direct collapse – before galaxies
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.
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Cosmology, like many sciences, is about learning the scientific truth through the remnants left behind. Just like we can see an early earth by digging, we can see an early universe by zooming.
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's in human nature to need origin stories. Science's current one is the Big Bang.
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.
That isn't quite right. The Big Bang is farther than we can look. We can only look as far as the CMB, some 380.000 years after the Big Bang. The timing of the Big Bang instead comes from calculating the density evolution of the universe backwards. Unless you define "look" as "calculate".
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Currently the most enduring theory of galactic formation is how some kids showed up on Charn and rang a bell, awakening the White Witch; then they all witness a lion singing in the dark until it’s not so dark anymore.
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.
You're smart to be skeptical, read Thomas Aquinas he gives real proofs for his beliefs and demonstrated that there has to be a Prime Mover. God bless you.
So many private TOEs out there, it's not at all obvious why this one merits special examination here or anywhere else.
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.
I get so much value out of this site in all sorts of important fields (to my career, or to my interest) where I am playing catch-up. But every couple of months a thread pop up in a field I am closer to state of the art, giving me a helpful reminder about the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect. I am sure others with variety of "Before Hacker" backgrounds experience the same in their own fields.
"accepted mechanisms of scrutiny and peer review" have produced very little value in physics for 50+ years. We've picked all the low hanging fruit we can reach with that epistemic framework. We should probably expect future developments to happen elsewhere.
>have produced very little value in physics for 50+ years
I guess the entire field of solid state physics and materials science doesn't exist?
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I like you, wyager. Marry me.
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 am going to nitpick this but I’ve come to expect this kind of posting style from medium, substack and others.
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.
It also made predictions about the early universe, in advance of the James Webb space telescope sending back any data:
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.
I'm not sure I agree. The first few sections are clear, concise, supported by links to observations you expect, and cover exactly what you say is missing:
> 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...
> 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 :-)
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This doesn't feel like a good faith engagement with the ideas presented in the theory.
> 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?
>aren't worth being explored
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?
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I feel it is more likely for me to be a NPC in someone else's simulation game
There is so much anger in this thread because someone is making qualitative predictions instead of quantitative predictions (except there are some statistical predictions, albeit based around correlations to existing observational phenomenon, but that seems valid to me?).
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.
I consider it underhanded to label reasonable disagreement as "anger."
Those are not the comments I'm talking about. There are some in this thread that are derisive due to its focus on qualitative theory and predictions instead of a mathematical foundation.
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Apart from reasonable disagreement, there's a lot of downvotes and flagged posts here.
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It strikes me similar to something that is LLM generated. It relies very much on the relationship between words, like how a non-practitioner in a field might develop a fatuous proof or theory.
I'm not saying it is wrong, either. But it's not quantitative and makes weak predictions with very little work into the roadmap to experimentally validate the ideas.
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