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by throwaway5752 390 days ago
"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.
2 comments
JulianPGough 390 days ago
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.

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throwaway5752 389 days ago
I have to ask. Did you and are you now, using a AI assistant to develop the theory or answer comments here?
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JSchneider321 389 days ago
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.
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marcus_holmes 389 days ago
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.

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JSchneider321 389 days ago
> 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.

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