Comment by JulianPGough
4 days ago
Definitely worth toying with. Lee Smolin's original idea of cosmological natural selection, of the Darwinian evolution of universes, is about the same age as string theory, and it's just as powerful and interesting a speculative idea. Yet it has received far less attention, I think because it fell between the disciplines, so no field felt qualified to explore it, and thus no field took responsibility for it. I think it's possibly the most neglected major idea in science, and it's almost purely for those sociological reasons, not scientific.
> Yet it has received far less attention, I think because it fell between the disciplines
It’s unfalsifiable with known methods. Until we can experimentally manipulate black holes, this is all philosophy. Not science.
Well, that's a purely physics argument. You need to think instead about the information about an evolutionary history that can be extracted from an evolved organism (and the implications thereof), even if you only have one example. There's a surprising amount. As an evolutionary theory, it therefore makes predictions about the order of structure formation in the early universe. Which are working out pretty well so far.
Implications: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-key-implication-of-cosmol...
Predictions thereof: https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
From your first source: “One was a black hole, where mass/energy collapsed rapidly to a point…”
That is a false description of black holes in GR. It’s colloquially correct. But if we’re saying this is a rigorous argument, it’s a red flag.
Black holes are regions of spacetime within which space and time reverse. We don’t know what the singularity is—it’s a mathematical anomaly almost by definition—but the best models don’t suggest anything collapsing to a “point.”
> evolutionary history that can be extracted from an evolved organism (and the implications thereof), even if you only have one example
We can do this because we understand chemical biology. When we’re talking about non-chemical extradimensional processes, pretending we can reason from first principles is philosophy. Not physics. Not science.
Fundamentally physics is what logic permits. You can't falsify ontology from the inside. Kind of like proving a negative. These evolutionary universe theories take analogy too literally. You can not have selection outside of time. What you can have and what our lawful, conservation abiding physics suggests is a natural (mathematical) fixed point outside of which alternatives are zero measure. Liebniz was right this is in a sense the best of possible worlds. It is funny to me people have no problem accepting mathematical constants as natural (e.g. e, or pi) but assume that natural constants are not actually mathematical equilibria but instead selected contingencies. What in the world would be doing the selection? This is god of the gaps applied to science: we can't accept there is nothing more to reality than persistence of non contradiction so we reach for mystery or brute facts. Meanwhile in another area stuff like the mandelbrot set or even the distribution of primes show that great complexity can arise from simple rules or constraints This may not be falsifiable, as no view from no where is attainable but it is logical and parsiminous. What can persist across scales (renormalization) is physics is math is the world.