[JulianGough123]

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.

[layer8]

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.

[JulianPGough]

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.

[xorbax]

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

[layer8]

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.

[JulianPGough]

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.

[esperent]

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?

[mnky9800n]

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.

[esperent]

> 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.

[scotty79]

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

[pantalaimon]

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.

[JSchneider321]

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.

[wrs]

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).

[JSchneider321]

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.

[wrs]

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.

[JSchneider321]

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!)

[ivan_gammel]

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.

[teamonkey]

It’s the difference between science and science fiction.

[bre1010]

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.

[nyeah]

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.

[JSchneider321]

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.

[nyeah]

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

[uhhhhhhh]

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.

[ddq]

Here's hoping this is the 21st Century Copernican Revolution. Have you played the game Outer Wilds?

[culebron21]

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.

[JulianPGough]

Thanks! Glad you were enjoying it.

Also, if you keep going, epicycles do in fact get a shout out!

[lspears]

Amazing. What caused you to look for a solution without a particle?

[JulianPGough]

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.

[ordu]

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?

[JSchneider321]

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?

[nathan_compton]

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.

[bglazer]

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.

[nathan_compton]

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.

[varunneal]

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

[p1necone]

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.”

[nathan_compton]

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.

[all2]

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?

[pixl97]

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

[jajko]

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.

[nathan_compton]

> 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.

[ordu]

> 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.