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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.

How does "Blowtorch" handle things like the gravitational lensing difference between baryon-only and the fact that dark matter is able to account for it [1]?

I know the theory doesn't do anything mathematically, but I'm curious how you deal with the unexplained mass issues. Does it explain things like galactic rotation [2]?

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-024-01087-w

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve

It’s perfectly fine to point out issues with ΛCDM, how it seems to be inconsistent with certain recent observations, and how the Blowtorch Theory addresses them. That can be done in a neutral, professional, matter-of-fact tone. It’s not okay to belittle the scientists who developed ΛCDM by implying that they should have known better than allegedly deluding themselves into a misguided theory.

Mmmm, I thought I had carefully avoided doing exactly that. I think I say at various points that there were good reasons at the time for the choices they made, and I try to show, as sympathetically as I can, the logic of their thinking.

I certainly tried to attack the current state of the theory, not the scientists whose very understandable and human actions, many of them perfectly sensible at the time, led us to that current state. I am sorry if I failed to bring off that delicate balancing act.

I've read the first third of the article and I don't see anything that I'd call dissing, of anybody. Can you quote some specific examples that you find problematic?

I guess they mean stuff like this:

> That the first basic assumption had turned out to be utterly, eye-wateringly wrong should have led to some introspection in cosmology, astronomy, and astrophysics about the validity of the second, and even more fundamental, unexamined assumption. But it didn’t.

Because it sort of implies that the original scientists coming up with these ideas should have been perfect and went about asking questions in the way the author does. (maybe the author doesn't mean it this way, but that's how it came across to me).

It's strange to me, we don't really have a firm understanding of how to define the edge of our understanding of the universe since by definition that understanding is diffuse. So why should people be perfectly exploring that edge? That is why I think it is better to focus on new ideas and what they add as opposed to criticizing old ideas.

For example, the other day I asked a colleague (who i will name Cooper) about if they had heard about another colleague's work (who I will call Audrey) because it sounded like they were working on something similar to me and might benefit from discussing with each other. Cooper said something to the effect of "everything they are doing is wrong and really just not as good as the work I am doing". And it's like, would you say this to Audrey's face? Does this comment make any kind of constructive arguments as to why your work is better than Audrey's? Isn't this rather anti-intellectual since you simply are dismissing Audrey's work instead of engaging them in a discussion? And my initial reaction to hearing that was to be dismissive of Cooper's work because I thought to myself, "what is Cooper defending right now, his work or his ego?"

To me, a primary goal of a scientist is to convince other people of their ideas through evidenced arguments. To me, if Cooper thinks that Audrey could learn something from Cooper's work, then Cooper should assume there is something to learn from Audrey's work. To me, the process they went about understanding the same/similar problems is as interesting as is whatever their solution ends up being. Perhaps Audrey has some reason to have designed her models differently from Cooper's that isn't apparent to Cooper. By dismissing her work, Cooper dismisses the opportunity to learn anything himself from it. There isn't any universal truth that some how elevates an individual above others because they understand Newton's Laws or whatever. There is simply what we personally understand and our desire to understand new things.

> To me, a primary goal of a scientist is to convince other people of their ideas through evidenced arguments.

That's an idealized version of science that unfortunately rarely holds up in the real world. There's a reason for the old maxim that science advances by the death of old scientists. Science is a human endeavor, massive, complicated, political. Much as we like to imagine scientists as pure and rational beings, that's never a true description of a human being.

For an outsider looking to get attention to their fringe theory, it is never enough to just calmly state it and let people logically accept it. The presentation does matter.

Yes I agree. I have worked as a scientist for many years. I guess my belief is that I try to uphold these ideals not because they are obtainable but because they work towards the world I want to live in. I guess that’s what I was trying to communicate. As you say, presentation matters. You should be arguing for your ideas, not against others. You can give reason why other explanations fail to fully explain the observations. When you tear down others it makes me question your ideas because why would you do that?

A philosophy professor required us to make "charitable interpretations" of the arguments we critiqued. His advice has served me well for many years.

Reading you article made me think that MOND is the cosmological equivalent of The Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster.

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.

The question was, did you explain it? If you posit an evolutionary mechanism, you need to show how the characteristics of the parent can be propagated to the descendants. If that’s just a hand-wave, then it’s an interesting thought experiment but as a theory there’s an important piece missing.

One of the beautiful things about an evolutionary explanation is that you really just have to show the propagation and selection mechanisms, and the “magic” fine tuning will automatically follow. But it’s less compelling if you have to run that logic backwards (it’s fine tuned so it must have evolved).

I'm not the author (though some are accusing me of being his alt, lol), and I'll agree that Gough doesn't go as deep into the evolutionary mechanism as needed to really sell the idea to someone NOT already looking for an alternative explanation to the current model. Smolin does a better job of this in The Life of the Cosmos, to a degree, but if you guys didn't like how wordy Gough was here, you'd HATE how repetitive Smolin gets with the idea.

That said, I don't think the evolutionary explanation is hand-waved into play at all. I see your point about how it's a reverse approach to how biological natural selection was discovered, but I don't think that decreases its merit in any way, either. Smolin especially takes a deep look at the star formation process, how galaxies work, the structure we see in the cosmic web (and that was 1997!) and makes the comparison to biological organisms in so much as they're dynamic, homeostatic, out-of-equilibrium systems that seem fine tuned to carry out a process of increasing complexification. This, combined with the understanding (just jump on board for the story, you can get off after if you don't like it) that universes reproduce through black holes/big bangs and the similarities are, I think, compelling.

I'm not saying this is 100% definitely the truth and everyone should abandon CDM and string theory. I just think it's a compelling idea that deserves to be considered and discussed honestly, or perhaps even earnestly.

I can buy that stars and star formation processes evolve in this universe.

The only thing I'm complaining about is that if you want to explain the apparent fine-tuning of the parameters of physics, you have to explain what that varation/reproduction process is. Which is the "reproduce through black holes/big bangs thing". That part has to be more than a "story" if you're trying to have an evolutionary theory of universes.

Ah, I've seen that part explained better elsewhere, I guess. The idea was first postulated by John Wheeler that black holes and big bangs are the same phenomenon from opposite sides, and that instead of a singularity the collapse causes a bounce that creates a disconnected spacetime. During that transition phase, when quantum forces are at play, the parameters of the child universe are set randomly to allow for variety in the offspring.

Smolin, a student of Wheeler's, took the idea and understood that the changes would have to be subtle instead of completely random. Within enough generations, more successfully reproducing universes would outnumber those that weren't exponentially, and assuming that we're a typical universe, our constants will be found to be tuned to produce black holes almost as efficiently as possible. His work is absolutely a real theory, is published, offers predictions, and is falsifiable. It's worth checking out, honestly, even if you just want to read about Einstein and Leibniz and all those guys for 300 pages or so.

Gough continues even further, suggesting SMBHs would have to be a trait found in the earliest universes even before they could form stars, which suggests that our universe should have extremely early forming SMBH and that these essentially create the structure we see in the universe. And so far it's looking like he's right. And if we determine concretely that SMBH form via direct-collapse in the early universe, I don't get how we don't just have to start over with a new model of cosmology.

Lastly, and I know this crowd hasn't really been down for natural philosophy sans-math, if black holes are the first thing to form in our universe and, based on what we know about them, they'll be the last thing around, too... Doesn't that make them seem pretty important to the function the universe seems to be performing?

And honestly, just think about how many questions it would answer. Is the universe infinite or finite? Well, it's finite but so massive and expanding at the speed of light so it might as well be? Well if it's finite, what's outside it? The parent universe! But you can't get out there, because the white hole that formed the Einstein-Rosen bridge connecting our spacetimes collapsed immediately. Well why are the constants these values in our universe? Because those values are REALLY good at making black holes so it's super trendy for universes to be more or less those numbers.

(I know I'm oversimplifying to anxiety-inducing levels and quite likely misappropriating terminology I should leave alone, but I'm just trying to illustrate possibilities. Thanks for reading!)

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.

It’s the difference between science and science fiction.

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.

This is a physics thing, and it may well leave laypeople curious. But the specifics are the theory.

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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?

As a person with a doctorate in physics who basically totally believes that life has no fundamental meaning at all and that most humans are cursed to believe it does despite it being ultimately harmful to them (from my point of view, I hope that is obvious), I think your take is wrong in a lot of ways.

As far as I can tell very, very few people, scientists or otherwise, feel the way I do about the meaninglessness of the universe. As you might imagine, I know a lot of scientists and I don't think any of them are even soft core nihilists, so your characterization of the reaction of people to some kind of mush of science and philosophy and spirituality seems wrong to me. From my point of view, everyone loves that kind of bullshit. They can't get enough.

You are part of the universe. You can create meaning. So, the universe has meaning if you create it. Meaning is an emergent property of letting hydrogen sit around in a gravity well for a long time.

I guess I just don't see the point of aggrandizing my personal goals and desires as "meaning," at least in the sense that people usually mean it. What I want is just what I want and the world would be a better place if people could just accept that about themselves as well.

isn't this survivorship bias? e.g. people who genuinely feel highly nihilistic, that there is no order, structure, meaning, etc. are very unlikely to be successful--and also unlikely to continue choosing to be alive

I don't see why believing that life has no inherent meaning would lead to not wanting to be alive. I think this is all the result of random cosmic accident yet I'm having plenty of fun.

Kurt Vonnegut said it best: “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.”

Just one more thing you teleologists tell yourselves. I'm alive and successful, I just don't delude myself about the universe giving a shit about it.

It may be that people need to believe nonsense about the cosmos in order to "maximize productivity" but I do not think that is the case.

I see two different assertions

1. The universe doesn't care about you

2. Life has no inherent meaning

Do you mean to conflate these two? Do you find them merely agreeable, or do these propositions depend on each other?

I think they are both true and closely related. Typically and colloquially, when people talk about meaning they are talking about some state of affairs about what is good or bad with respect to the universe (if the universe includes things like God, a world of forms, ideas of perfection, etc).

I think its very reasonable to believe that the universe does not have any of those properties and that life is random and has no inherent or universal meaning.

I guess there could be some kind of subjective meaning but I don't really see the utility of that idea.

In this particular case you would only have to push back the lack of meaning to the ~multiverse or whatever a sequence/family of child universes would be called.

I don't think Tegmark <IV had any simple parameters for goodness or meaning, and neither does logic or mathematics. We assemble our meanings out of more fundamental relationships but I actually think they concretely exist in a real way as real as the matter in this universe, but more in the way that galaxies and other complex structures exist. Meaning is a property of complex self-reflective systems and so inherent meaning will probably always be tied inexorably to context and environment, or in our case meaning is tied specifically to our human nature.

E.g. I will find it fascinating if universes do evolve from progenitor universes and therefore the guiding selection pressure is "make more black holes/universes" but that isn't the same thing as the human concept of "good" since our nature isn't aligned with entire (families of) universes.

But, speaking precisely, there is no human nature at all. You and I have nothing fundamentally in common except that our atoms happen to be organized in a similar way. We have no nature in common except as a coincidence.

It is a coincidence that delights me and I happen to feel quite a lot bonhomie for my fellow human beings and lifeforms, but I don't see how it makes life meaningful in any universal sense.

Do you consider the relationship of two molecules of water to be similarly coincidental or along a continuum from e.g. the nature of two elections all the way to how two universes might be similar? I figure fundamental particle nature is less coincidental than human nature, which is correspondingly less coincidentally related than two heterogenous dust clouds.

I don't see any reason to have a strong belief about why any fundamental constants are what they are. This is so far beyond what even our best physics can say anything meaningful about that I feel an obligation to studiously have no opinion about it.

I will say that I see no compelling reason to believe that the values of fundamental constants are NOT just random.

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That doesn't make you nihilistic, more of an absurdist.

Eh, potato potato.

You overestimate (on purpose for the sake of argument I believe) how much many rational folks dislike spirituality on its own.

Rejecting something we have no way of knowing this or that way is certainly not smart, usually its not more than emotional kneejerk reaction. Einstein too had a very pragmatic approach to all this.

For me personally its an irrelevant topic, acting morally in life should be a basic moral imperative and not caused by fear of some almighty deity that will judge me later, thats a childish view on life and moral values.

Its the organized, hierarchical power and control structures that humans created (often) millenia ago around every single religion and spiritual movement, with ossified views on what is moral and what is not, and enforcing that specific view on rest of mankind in some sort of bizzare moral superiority (inferiority?) complex that many many smart folks struggle with.

Tells you how deeply flawed humans are at their deepest core, and absolutely nothing about ie existence of god(s). I personally know a small army of people who are properly disgusted with reality of catholicism for example, to the point they internally fully rejected it, and only keep a small charade for older bits of family or community on few days a year. The sad part is, they often, out of fear of rejection from families and their current social circles, push their own kids on a path of very early indoctrination they themselves dont believe anymore at all, instead of giving them freedom of self-determination later in life when they could actually make decisions for themselves. And this is one of the biggest, if not the biggest item on plates of each of us we have to figure out ourselves.

Sometimes such folks cant shed that indoctrination themselves, and come up with their own version of religion they started with, ignoring some aspects and expanding others... so much for immutable, universal truth.

Tragedy of commons and all. Think how many folks like that you know around you, and multiply by X since shame of being different is one of main drives of societies of humans since forever, and thus a closely guarded secret.

> Rejecting something we have no way of knowing this or that way is certainly not smart

If we have no way of knowing one way or another then we should studiously have no opinion about it whatsoever. But I think people both vastly over estimate and vastly underestimate what we know about with respect to things they might form opinions about.

> I know you're joking

Well... I am, and I'm not. I like the idea, and I like it even more than 42. 42 is an incomprehensible answer, while life creating black holes which create life are much more interesting. It spawns new thoughts. Like it seems we are doomed to create black holes. I wonder how it will go. Will our descendants start a war using black holes instead of bullets? Or maybe it will be a software bug, that will manifest itself all at once in gazillions of machines turning them into devices spewing 3 black holes each second? Something like that seems to be the most plausible scenario, judging by the history of humankind.

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.

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.

Yes, basically black holes growing speed is limited since when they eat they push away the surrounding matter so there isn't enough time. There are also no black holes in between normal size and super massive, both nearby or far away (in the past because of the speed of light)

There is the possibility that black holes larger than the usual stellar size black holes could have formed early on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_collapse_black_hole

but the gap between those and supermassive black holes is huge and it is not so probable that 100 or 1000 of those would merge in the time available.

Blowtorch theory requires trillions of them

Where does it say it REQUIRES trillions? The way it reads to me, it's just associating the number of SMBHs to the number of galaxies we observe and postulates that number as a trillion, which I don't think is unreasonable given the sheer volume we see in the observable universe alone.

I was merely relaying the content of the article, I was not doubting it.

its a cool theory and very appealing to me personally but how confident are we about the age of the blazar?

Glad you like the theory! As for the age of the blazar... Pretty confident.

"Bañados and his team..." searched systematically "...for objects that were redshifted so far that they did not even show up in the usual visible light (of the Dark Energy Legacy Survey, in this case) but that were bright sources in a radio survey (the 3 GHz VLASS survey)."

So the redshift is very solidly established. And the light from the blazar simply has to be that far back, if it's that far redshifted.

SOURCE: https://www.mpg.de/23880270/record-discovery-points-to-parti...

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".

A single variable to fill innumerable cracks? How would that work? All the cracks just happen to line up so the same value of the variable fills each one? Wouldn't that mean there's just one crack?

Currently, Cold Dark Matter, as used in simulations etc, usually has six free parameters. Most simulations of structure formation at the level of the universe as a whole ONLY model Cold Dark Matter (i.e., they treat baryonic matter as a rounding error, and leave it out: that's partly understandable, as baryonic matter is much harder to model than Cold Dark Matter, and trying to model it eats compute.) And when they DO add baryonic matter to simulations (usually of smaller-scale structure formation), that usually has four free parameters, which are also not based on observation, but can be tuned to fit. So you can end up with 10 free parameters in the simulations.

As von Neumann once said, "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

At this point, with ten, it's basically CGI.

And the model gets tweaked afresh to suit each new observational anomaly. So you can tweak it to fit, say, large galaxies, but then it doesn't fit small galaxies. (The cusp/core problem.) But that's OK, because you can tweak it to fit small galaxies! (But then it won't fit large galaxies.) And on it goes.

A key problem is that, after 50 years of tweaking, it still didn't predict the rapid, efficient structure formation of the early universe as revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Three-stage cosmological natural selection (the parent to Blowtorch Theory) did.

https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...

>Cold Dark Matter, as used in simulations etc, usually has six free parameters.

That is not correct. LCDM as a cosmology is described by 6 parameters mostly for CMB analyses, but this is much more than just CDM. These parameters include the amount of normal matter, the cosmological constant, the amount of dark matter, reionization, the Hubble constant and two parameters which describe the initial fluctuations. CDM only has one parameter in the model, its density. As you can see there aren't many nobs to turn. These parameters are also fixed to observational values. And if you think you can fit all modern cosmological data with a physically-meaningful model and fewer parameters then go ahead.

How about dark dollars that can be freely adjusted up and down in density to balance the books, that any and all auditors will have to accept as real because it's written down to satisfy calculations but can not directly be observed?

Charles Ponzi or Bernie Madoff could've had the Nobel Prize in economics had they merely used the same explanation as the lambda-cdm cosmologist do.

Only if you can observe the dark dollars bending the trajectories of the bright dollars

According to the article, the plaster changes properties based on the crack it's currently filling, which is the whole problem.

Yes. (See longer version of this "yes" above!)

> 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!

Inflation seems to have been tuned to ensure this didn't happen, giving the cosmos time to grow while ensuring it didn't grow so quickly that galaxies couldn't form.

Cosmological natural selection provides an explanation for this, too.

"Cosmological natural selection provides an explanation"

This is the biggest reach in your entire essay, that black wholes create new universes. The event horizon is complete cut off from this universe and speculating that generations upon generations of universes are created from black holes is fanciful. Your just shoehorn what is basically a massive anthropic principle onto an interesting cosmology theory unnecessarily.

I understand your skepticism. But the awkward fact remains that three-stage cosmological natural selection made accurate predictions about the early universe, in advance of the James Webb Space Telescope data.

https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...

No other theory made such accurate predictions. So it might be worth at least exploring the theory and its implications further. Certainly, there is a funding and research mismatch between ΛCDM (which did not predict what we are now seeing) and three-stage cosmological natural selection (which did) that is... startling.

I have to ask. Did you and are you now, using a AI assistant to develop the theory or answer comments here?

The man is an accomplished novelist, lol. The kind of ego they typically have, he'd probably rather die than allow LLM-generated content be associated with his writing.

As I understand it, it's answering the question of why there's so much fine-tuning in the universe.

It's an explanation, it fits the observed data. It can't be tested, and the predictions it makes can't be verified. So until we can verify that new universes are created from black holes, with properties inherited from the parent universe, then it's just speculation. But interesting speculation.

And it's a real question that does need some kind of answer.

> It can't be tested, and the predictions it makes can't be verified.

To be clear, both Smolin's CNS and Gough's uptake of the theory make predictions and offer ways to be falsified, with Gough making accurate predictions of early galactic structure that Webb would see.

It's good to see people expecting predictions and falsifiability, but I'm curious why that requirement isn't being upheld against the standard model (which has been predicting more and more incorrectly) and string theory (which is unable to offer any predictions and also expects you to believe there are 9 or 11 dimensions or something). In my view, CNS requires the fewest logical leaps of faith.

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.

We need a model that includes electromagnetism. The author isn't the only one making this claim. When we do magnetohydrodynamic cosmological sims we consistently find surprising effects. The recent simulation showing that black hole accretion disks are supported by magnetism comes to mind.[0][1]

Apologies, I know this is typically considered bad form, but have you gotten to the following section in the article?[2] It appears to directly contradict your claims.

> MOND’s also been around since the early 1980s, but, in 2021, it finally developed a model – the Aether-Scalar-Tensor framework, or AeST – which ALSO maps perfectly onto the acoustic peaks revealed by WMAP and Planck. (It does it by proposing a new vector field and scalar field that duplicate the effects of Cold Dark Matter in the early universe...

[0] https://astro.theoj.org/article/93065-an-analytic-model-for-...

[1] https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/cosmic-simulation-reveals...

[2] https://theeggandtherock.com/i/158515951/more-matter-or-less...

Many state of the art galaxy formation simulations use MHD, it does not however affect the formation of the Cosmic Web.

> MOND’s also been around since the early 1980s, but, in 2021, it finally developed a model – the Aether-Scalar-Tensor framework, or AeST – which ALSO maps perfectly onto the acoustic peaks revealed by WMAP and Planck. (It does it by proposing a new vector field and scalar field that duplicate the effects of Cold Dark Matter in the early universe

This doesn't contradict what I said. These models are not simply removing DM, I said people have tried with modified gravity models like these. First the models which fit the CMB were engineered to do, and each model has many more free parameters than dark matter. And note they have replaced invisible matter with an invisible matter-like field, it's not a simplification. Remembering that cold dark matter predicted these features, with fewer parameters and it is a physical model, not merely a fit. People have run simulations with the more basic MOND models, to find it cannot form realistic structure. Generally it forms structure more quickly than standard cosmology. Finding they need to add dark matter to their already modified gravity models to get something reasonable.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00555

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05696

https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.6094

> Many state of the art galaxy formation simulations use MHD...

> Generally [MOND] forms structure more quickly than standard cosmology.

Magnetohydrodynamics, not just hydrodynamics. It would need some type of restoring force similar to how the black hole simulation was found to behave when it included magnetic fields.

> People have run simulations with the more basic MOND models, to find it cannot form realistic structure.

Neither does ΛCDM though, right? It matches the CMB, sure, but it doesn't match the many of the observed properties of the universe either. The observed voids and over-densities are significantly larger than predicted, nor is the observed distribution of dark matter in galaxies what we predict.

> And note they have replaced invisible matter with an invisible matter-like field, it's not a simplification.

Great point, and I'm happy to admit I missed this.

But I'm not actually a proponent of MOND, nor even an opponent of ΛCDM. It's the best we got. I just feel it's not quite as accepted as current consensus seems to, so I'm glad there's people out here still trying to poke holes in it and find alternatives.

I think the point is that for filaments to form in simulations you have to assume dark matter to be so abundant that it stops explaining other things that are explained with it. Basically you can adjust dark matter parameters to explain everything but you can't find a single set of parameter values to explain all the things at the same time.

That's not the case. The hydrodynamical simulations mentioned use the same cosmological value set by CMB data. The ratio is not the same in every galaxy, because matter and DM behave differently on small scales, but this variation comes out naturally in simulations.

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.

To be fair, predictions are the final gold standard, but not all predictions are equal.

The math would allow for the predictions to be precise, quantifiable, and directly falsifiable.

As is the predictions qualify as interesting, but there are also weaknesses. Some of it was already predicted by others, some needs more verification, some of the claims were more broad “lots of jets, lots of quasars” so they say less than more precise predictions would.

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No?

Im not sure what you’re disagreeing with. It seems like selective quoting to sidestep my point about quality of predictions and pivot to ridiculing the original theory which I actually was originally critical of.

I don’t feel any need to shame the author. There’s clearly a good faith effort to contribute and I think the most constructive feedback is to suggest how it could be stronger.

Predictions – quantifiable predictions based on mathematical models – are not the final gold standard, they are the admission for entry.

Perhaps if you are an established physicist with a history of significant contributions then your vague predictions might hold some interest, but the author studied English and philosophy and has a career to match, and it is clear from reading that they have no actual experience developing physics theory.

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@dang there are several brand new accounts created today which have only commented on this post which I find rather suspicious

I'd never heard of the site before yesterday. Doesn't some day need to be the first day everyone starts posting? And can't a theory someone read about months ago and finds compelling be reason enough to seek out others to engage with on the subject?

Are you suggesting I'm a bot or an alt from the author or something? Because that feels like an illogical leap to make based on someone posting enthusiastically about a subject. I do wonder if you'd suspect these accounts equally if the viewpoint expressed aligned with yours.

Actual models do usually start as speculation and hand waving. As others have pointed out, it seems like the LCDM models actually never STOPPED being speculation and hand waving. Lots of math can hide the fact that a theory is literally just handwaving (LCDM) and a lack of math can indicate a robust theory is in its infancy and needs more math people working on it (blowtorch).

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.

Dark matter is also not falsible observationally, every time a supposed DM effect fails to be observed it's just assumed it's darker than expected.

One could re-postulate the theory as the innumerable tiny hands of god pushing on mass in the divinely chosen direction and nothing really changes but the name it theory.

The hands are there, they're just smaller than the resolving power.

At some point it's time to admit fault, but so far that's not happening despite the ever accumulating pile of evidence against DM. For a supposedly mature main stream theory the proponents are surprisingly fragile.

> 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.

Are primordial black holes supermassive?

Don't know anything about the topic but saw you downvoted for asking a question so went down the rabbit hole. Turns out that no, primordial black holes aren't supermassive. In fact one could call them superlight since they could be the size of an atom.

Yeah I think I was downvoted because that’s fairly well known in cosmology and is a refutation of the parent comment.

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".

I think 380000 when compared to 13000000000 counts as "nearly outside". Also math is definitely a way of looking even if it can lead you astray when you extrapolate your mathematical model beyond its range of applicability.

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?

Solid state/matsci is 90% driven by corpo/DoD R&D, not academic "accepted mechanisms of scrutiny and peer review"

In relation to cosmology, that's mostly correct?

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 :-)

Appreciate your patience! :-)

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?

I missed the part where Gough claimed to be a mathematician.

How do you propose we get to a mathematical model or testable simulation without considering the theory first? Must all theories be mathematically complete before they're presented to the world?

I find it strange that an account created 21 hours ago and which has seemingly only commented on this post is so adamantly defending the author and their work. It's almost like someone created a second account to help shush naysayers?

I follow Julian on substack and found out about this discussion from there. I read this post months ago and have been itching to discuss it with people since, so I jumped at this chance. I didn't have an account yet, so I had to make one to comment. I do think it's strange that adamant defense draws suspicion, but adamant criticism does not.

I have no idea if this theory (or fun idea or whatever people want to derisively call it) is correct, but it's wild how unwilling people are to even consider alternative ideas when there are unquestionably issues with the current prevailing theory.

I've read a great deal of Julian's substack, watched a few interviews, and I find him to be deeply thoughtful and quite entertaining, and I'll admit I do find it frustrating to see people dismiss or berate him as just a crazy idea guy without having a good sense of how much has actually gone into this. It's seriously the same thing that happened to Smolin when Susskind brought his weak arguments against CNS and the theory just gathered dust.

Anyway, feel free to write me off as a bot, alt, or some rabid idiot fanboy. As a cosmology enthusiast (but certainly not a scientist by any definition) I was hoping for a discussion of the ideas in the post, but this has been enlightening in other ways, which is not without value.

Without math, a physical theory is not a theory, it's just a story, a speculative hypothesis at best.

Okay, let's call it a speculative hypothesis. What do you think of it? Or each part separately, if you prefer. Could it be something worth pursuing to see if the math works out?

I think if someone thinks it’s interesting they can throw money at it to hire physicists to explore the idea properly. Everyone has a substack. I’m not even saying that there needs to be a peer reviewed article. But if you could build a simulation that could be used to test the hypothesis and throw that on GitHub then others could play around with the ideas. Currently that’s not possible but seems like an obvious next step when trying to convince others of the idea. It would also allow you to explore the failure modes in the theory because that’s something that’s hard to do when you are constructing thought experiments of your pet theory. Because that’s all this really is, there’s no application [1] to cosmology except our understanding of large scale evolution of the universe. So it’s just bragging rights that others accept your explanation.

1. I suppose there could be some kind of high concept sci-fi rigmarole that could be arrived at via cosmology or perhaps it could inform exotic material construction in particle accelerators or something like that. I suppose by “application” I mean something more down to earth like building a new kind of computer, solving climate change, producing a fusion reactor, etc.

I see what you're saying, and I appreciate your thoughtful response.

I'll admit, I tend to get excited by things and lean into them harder than what most people do. However, I've taken time to consider WHY I'm so excited by this theory, and I believe it's because it has the feel to me of a solid idea that just needs the weight of the scientific community behind it.

String theory is some impressive math, and it's usefulness for practical applications really only extends as much as to say that "math is useful." If it offers predictive or explanatory powers, they're far beyond my layperson's understanding, as I can't conceptualize any part of it in a way that I apply to the world I observe. I'm not saying we don't need string theory by any means, but I do feel that CNS (and Gough's additions to it) offer more in that regard, and the postulates of the theory should be examined and tested thoroughly as a result.

I guess what I'm saying is it's not some crazy idea a wacky writer had while working on a sci-fi book. It's not some CTMU nonsense that requires its own language and mental gymnastics to process. It's applying principles we've learned in other sciences to cosmology in an attempt to understand the structure we see at all levels and to explain why the fundamental constants are what they are. Smolin presents the idea within the framework of science and society in a fascinating way, while Gough presents it the way you'd expect a writer to, so it's got even more human scent all over it, but I don't believe that should be discrediting in any way.

In your opinion, what would be the best way for Gough -- as a novelist -- to get enough experts onboard with the idea to put in the requisite research and development of the idea so that it can be improved to the level this audience is suggesting it should be? And how should he do that in a way that doesn't draw the immediate and reflexive derisive snort we've seen from this crowd?

Thanks again for responding! I really do appreciate the opposing perspective!

Today's theories are constrained by so much observational data that an idea sounding "solid" or plausible at first glance just isn't enough. There are many plausible ideas that have been and are being tried all the time. The proof is in the pudding, however, which is the math. You have to show that the physical model actually predicts what we observe in quantitative terms, and is in better accordance with the observational data than the existing established theories. If you can do that, great. Otherwise, mere ideas don't yet amount to much.

See, I think that's where things just need to be cleaned up and pieced together here. Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan (https://physics.yale.edu/people/priyamvada-natarajan) proved mathematically that direct-collapse SMBH in the early cosmos is possible, which Gough mentions and links to. But I agree that these elements need to be assembled into a larger, cohesive model that can be studied and ran through simulations.

However, the question remains as to how to gather experts and convince them to work towards this without some sort of ideation phase, which is, to my understanding, the phase this work is currently being presented as. A "Hey Science, come look at this, please!" invitation.

The way you convince scientists to work on something is to convince them they can get grant money to do it. fyi calling scientists Dr. Is weird. I have a PhD but If someone called me Dr. mnky9800n I would tell them to stop. Honorifics don’t respect me they alienate me and I prefer to feel like everyone is colleagues and equals.

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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.

I can't quite see why complaints about the lack of quantitative support are unreasonable. They sound reasonable to me. In fact there seems to be a very broad consensus that the article lacks supporting numbers.

Apart from reasonable disagreement, there's a lot of downvotes and flagged posts here.

I agree that reasonable dissenting posts have been flagged here. If that's what you're saying?

Both sides. I expressed some modest support in 2 short posts, and got downvoted twice.

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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.

I might be more forgiving if it didn't literally start with

>For scientists interested in citation

which is so pretentious and amateurish it's laughable. If the whole thing was written in the tone of "I'm an amateur and this is my pet theory" it would be fine, not interesting to me but whatever, fanfiction is a thing. If it was curious "could this be it?", sure. But it's pretending very much to be legitimate scientific work which is just strange behavior and it's pulling people in who don't know any better who are taking it seriously.

Intentionally fooling people for your own ego is gross.

I generally agree. If I had been ask to review this, I would have pushed very, very hard on whether "cosmological natural selection assumes that universes reproduce via black holes and big bangs" and most of what follows was necessary. Even if it's true I wouldn't have mentioned that Tyler Cowen was solicited for a review. And not having any math, at all, makes me think the author is not committed enough to their own idea to put in the hard work.

It was a very interesting piece, and something to be proud of. So far nobody has figured out the TOE so they are in good company. On the other hand I see no reason for them to believe they are in a position to be as dismissive as they are of existing theory.

> it's pretending very much to be legitimate scientific work

I don't know what that means.

It's describing an idea (poorly, imo). It's not a whitepaper. The blogpost isn't pretending to be anything but a blogpost. I'm not inclined to believe this has any more weight than any other random blogpost. It is a fun thought experiment.

> it's pulling people in who don't know any better who are taking it seriously.

This is one of the least important things to be concerned about.