A short, late, but positive update

Blowtorch Theory seems to be having an impact

INTRO: Apparently, in a long running Substack like this one, you should occasionally introduce yourself again, at the start of a post, as most readers, having arrived late, have absolutely no idea who you are. And I did indeed pick up an unusually large number of new subscribers since the last post, so here we go…

I’m the Irish author Julian Gough; in my reckless youth, I recorded four albums, and had a hit single, with the literary indie-pop band Toasted Heretic; I’ve since written four novels, including the near-future science fiction thriller Connect, and six children’s books, including the multiply-award-winning Rabbit’s Bad Habits. The books are published in 37 languages. I also write more esoteric and respectable things, like the Coda to the Routledge Companion to Death and Literature, and more popular and less respectable things, like the ending to the best-selling computer game of all time, Minecraft – a narrative called the End Poem, which I later put into the public domain, and yes there is quite a saga behind that. For the past decade I have been working away quietly researching a non-fiction book about the universe, The Egg and the Rock. This has involved a lot of conversations with scientists across multiple fields, and a lot of frantic studying of their various subjects, to keep up with them. Three years ago, with some financial support from the Irish Arts Council, I started writing it less quietly, online, in public, here. And recently, having made some startlingly successful predictions about the early universe, I received further funding for this project from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures philanthropic fund, and Jim O’Shaughnessy’s O’Shaughnessy Ventures. Which brings us up to date… Now read on.

ACTION

I posted The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe on March 19th, and haven't posted since. Blowtorch Theory is my longest post here, and my best. The gap since is the longest gap here without a post. That's not coincidental. (If you haven’t read Blowtorch Theory yet, go read it now; this post will then make a lot more sense to you.)

REACTION

Publishing Blowtorch Theory kicked off an extraordinary sequence of reactions (most of them extremely positive), which I have been dealing with ever since. Astronomers got in touch. Potential funders got in touch. Media got in touch. I don't want to exaggerate: the weight of gold bars I have been gifted by new admirers of the theory is not going to collapse the floor of my flat and tumble us all into the cellar, and I’m not pulling down my blinds to keep out the paparazzi. It's perfectly manageable. But it's A LOT more attention than the theory had been getting before I put up the post.

EXAMPLES

Some examples, to make this more vivid: The Irish Times ran a splendidly positive piece on the theory, with quotes from a cosmologist, a biologist and a philosopher who all feel there's something worth exploring here. Here’s a quote…

Johannes Jaeger, an evolutionary biologist, systems thinker and philosopher based at the University of Vienna, said Gough’s James Webb predictions “should stand as evidence that he is certainly no crackpot”.

He accepted that while “evolutionary cosmology may be speculative at this point” it could “contain the kind of explanation that could tell us why the parameters of the universe are fine tuned the way they are. At least, it seems to me, somebody in the physics community should be open to having a look at this theory”, and while Gough’s ideas “are no doubt speculative [they] are definitely worthy of checking out. Isn’t this how science was meant to work?”

–Irish Times, April 24th 2025, Beyond the big bang: Irishman’s universal evolution theory challenges accepted cosmology

“No crackpot”! Can there be higher praise for an independent researcher?

My dense, 16,000 word post also, through social and technological dynamics I don't really understand, ended up at number one on Hacker News, the venerable bare-bones Silicon Valley website where tech types share news, then argue over it.

Back at number one! My teenage pop-singer self would be delighted. (“Back” is a little naughty there; my band’s biggest hit peaked at number nine.)

Hacker News can be a pretty savage place to have your ideas discussed (it’s basically a place where thousands of highly intelligent but – let’s put this delicately – socially awkward young men voluntarily take part in often brutal status competition, using ideas as weapons) so I was pleasantly surprised by how seriously these ideas were taken there, and by how positive and engaged the response was.

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.
–An alarmingly reasonable commenter on Hacker News. Truly a sign that we are in the End Times.

Conversations with the astronomers who got in touch, and with funders likewise, are ongoing. (I will tell you more about all that later; I don’t want to jinx things right now by talking too soon.) But it was a thrill to discover that there are astronomers that I admire, whose papers I've quoted, who are now taking these ideas seriously. And it was startling to discover that some pretty influential and interesting people from other fields too (tech, philanthropy), had been quietly following me here for some time, and now wanted to get involved, help financially, etc. This has all done wonders for my faith in humanity. Good ideas do get noticed, eventually! People are in fact nice, and helpful!

NAVIGATING THE AFTERMATH

But dealing with all this stuff is not the only reason I haven't posted. Writing Blowtorch Theory was simply all-consuming, for months. There was a staggering amount of research, and writing, and rewriting, required to finalise those 16,000 words. (Plus all the work involved in asking for, and receiving, and responding to, and incorporating, feedback and critique from over a dozen wonderful beta-readers from assorted fields.) So I was pretty fried after putting it up, and I needed a little recovery time. Additionally, I’d neglected my wonderful wife Solana for those months, and I really hadn't spent enough time with my son. (They had both been very understanding and supportive, and tell me they had a great time together while I was racking up hours in the office – almost certainly better than if I’d been hanging around the playground brooding about the universe – but I felt bad about it anyway.) So I needed to get my life back into balance.

But there's another factor behind the long silence. Blowtorch Theory contained so many exciting new ideas, and covered so much territory, that anything else I found myself writing in the aftermath just seemed unimportant and inadequate in comparison. So I started several posts but didn't finish them.

That is not a long-term viable situation! Trying to come up to that standard every time is absurd: I might never write anything as exciting and original as that post again. So if this Substack is to continue, I need to get back to the intention with which I began it, which was just to show you the process behind the writing of a book. To show you stuff that isn't quite finished – but is fresher, or more revealing, perhaps, as a result of that – and get feedback, to make the book better.

I am aware that some of you are busy people, just here for the big, ambitious, finished posts; whereas others are here for the whole experience – the rough edges and behind-the-scenes glimpses, the notes and drafts and sick notes and stuff about my dad and casual emails and all. And those two audiences are, unavoidably and properly, in some tension. For the next while, I’m going to try to please both (always dangerous!) by upping my cadence of publication (which should please those who want more insight into the process – the thinking aloud – and are happy if it's not all as polished as Blowtorch Theory), while clearly labeling the importance of each post, so that those interested only in the fully articulated highlights of the theory can skip the non-core stuff. So: no need to unsubscribe; just don’t read the ones that clearly aren’t for you.

And, as ever, I want to express my appreciation to all of you, paid and unpaid subscribers alike. It is delightful to have so many companions on this journey.

A LONGER UPDATE BY ZOOM

I will email two Zoom invites at some point in the next week or so, one to all subscribers (both free and paid) and a second to paid subscribers only, inviting you to an informal Zoom call, where I can update you more personally, and at greater length, and far less discreetly, than in this brief public-facing post. I can also answer your questions on the call. (Paid subscribers can attend either or both; the only difference is that, with the smaller numbers on the paid subscriber call, there’s more opportunity for us to talk directly to each other.)

AN IMPASSIONED CALL TO ACTION! (WELL… MORE ACCURATELY… TO SIT DOWN AND DO SOME READING)

And now… if you haven’t read Blowtorch Theory yet, or you started it a couple of months ago and didn’t finish it…. Can I urge you to read it, in full? Yes, all 16,000 words. If you are interested in my writing and my ideas (and I assume you are, at least a little bit, given that you have read this far), then this is the big one. I think it’s the breakthrough post that this Substack has been groping towards for three years. It’s the post where the theory I have been exploring (three-stage cosmological natural selection, building on Lee Smolin’s original theory) explodes upward and outward in explanatory power. It might, as you begin it, seem a little dry, a little technical, a little removed from the core concerns of your life; but I don’t think it is. It paints a picture of a highly evolved and fine-tuned universe that starts a process of dynamic self-assembly almost immediately after the Big Bang. Energy is controlled and directed through simple, powerful, early processes, as sustained relativistic jets in the dense, compact early universe carve out the body plan of voids and filaments that, vastly expanded by the later expansion of the universe, we see all around us today. Those filaments form the reservoirs, and circulatory system, that ensure the longterm flow of fresh hydrogen that spiral galaxies require for multiple rounds of star formation over many billions of years. Those multiple rounds of star formation allow the steady building out (by fusion in stars) and distribution (by supernovae explosions) of the full suite of elements in the periodic table. That full suite of elements allows for the eventual production of planets, moons, and ultimately life and technology, on countless worlds as weird and wonderful as our own, around those third- and fourth-round stars; stars which could not form, were it not for the hydrogen stored for billions of years, and then delivered when needed, by the filaments – and enriched on arrival by the supernovae.

Note that, at all points, just as in a biological organism with its metabolic pathways, the energy that moves through the system organizes the system. The movement of gas is not random, and the structures produced are not arbitrary. Just as in a biological organism, in embryogenesis, the body plan and circulatory system are laid down as early as possible (and then, later, expand and grow), because that is the necessary (and of course most efficient) time to do that. Just as a biological organism maintains its vital organs while replacing the individual cells, important structures in our universe (such as spiral galaxies) build, maintain, and repair themselves over time (replacing all the stars while maintaining the structure).

And of course, the universe assembles itself into many, many discrete membrane-bound structures, at all scales: galaxies; stars, and planets, and moons; biospheres; animals, and plants; aircraft, and skyscrapers, and whatever device you are reading this on. Dynamic, homeostatic, out-of-equilibrium systems that maintain themselves over time, like the discrete, membrane-bound cells of a body, forming the discrete, membrane-bound organs of that body – forming, in total, that discrete, membrane-bound body itself…

It’s a remarkably odd thing for a universe to do; build all these discrete, nested, membrane-bound structures. (If this is an arbitrary universe with random characteristics, why doesn’t it just collapse into one big ball of sludge? Or disintegrate into countless atomic fragments? Give arbitrary values to the basic parameters of matter, and you will almost always get one or the other of those results.) Discrete, nested, orderly, structured, membrane-bound parts? Hmmmm. That’s the sort of thing evolved organisms develop…

And so Blowtorch Theory puts all these parts back together, and shows you how they work, and why. It’s systems cosmology, or if you prefer process cosmology – analogous to the systems biology developed over the past few decades by wonderful interdisciplinary biologists like Leroy Hood, Denis Noble, and Stuart Kauffman, or the splendid (and slightly more philosophical) process biology of John Dupré, Alan Love and Daniel Nicholson (building on the work of earlier thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead, just as I am building on the work of physicists like John Wheeler and Lee Smolin). You could call this new field Evolutionary Cosmology. It’s a coherent description of our universe as a self-assembling system of systems; as an evolved organism traveling along a developmental path, with intelligent life, and the products of intelligent life, as part of that developmental process. To quote myself in meme form:

Yes, I want these ideas to spread, so I’m experimenting with memes. Feel free to put this on a t-shirt: “Biology is the first part of the periodic table coming to life; technology is the second part of the periodic table coming to life.”

It’s a fundamental break with the passive, arbitrary, random, meaningless, going-nowhere universe pictured by our current mainstream cosmological models.

And, crucially, this new approach has already made far better predictions about the early universe than the mainstream did. And it now makes a bunch more predictions, which we can go look for. (Astronomers, get in touch! We have important work to do!)

Once you see the universe this way, you can’t unsee it. And you won’t want to. It’s not just a better theory, with considerably better predictive and explanatory power than the old one; it also provides a far more satisfying vision of this impossibly peculiar universe and our place in it. This theory improves the quality of your life. Goodbye to being an arbitrary accident at the edge of clouds of meaningless gas drifting in a random void; hello to being the growing, conscious tip of a living, developing, universe; the point where it comes to know itself, and act.

So, go read (or re-read, if it bewildered you slightly the first time) the full account: The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe. There is nothing more important you could be doing right now. (OK, OK, except maybe playing with your kids. But they won’t miss you for an hour…)

See you back here soon.