Hi Julian, thank you for working in public. Its great to hear that you are starting to get a positive reception.
I was one of those people that had trouble with reading blowtorch theory the first time around. Its much longer than a blogpost and is worth reading on paper while jotting notes rather than on a screen. However, substack does not make printing easy.
Do you have a pdf in a more printable layout that would make it easier to read it off of a computer?
Thanks Yaakov. Yes, a PDF version is a great idea. I will see about making a nice PDF of it, and might then make that a post. (Another excuse to nudge people into reading it!) Hmmm, I might also do a free Kindle version (with the original Predictions post as an appendix)... Thanks for the idea.
Meanwhile, I think people can generate (and print, or not) a PDF themselves in Chrome, and most other browsers, but it's not entirely obvious how to do so, so nobody ever does. Let me find the workflow for that and post it here...
OK, here's a link to a fairly reliable ChatGPT o3 guide to all the ways you can generate (and print, if you want to) a 16,000 word PDF from a looooong webpage...
"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" reminds me a bit of my friend group.
Having met a significant number of your friends by this point... Yeah, accurate! But they are doing it with slightly more charm than the average guy on Hacker News (bless him).
(If YOU, reading this, are a Hacker News guy, I didn't mean you! You are far above average, in this as in everything else!)
I love the theories you are working out here. I was reading an interview with Nozick and some of his language struck me as relevant to your project
“I came to see scientific laws of the universe as something like the genetic constitution of the universe. If these universes were going to evolve and give rise to a large number of things, these features like the scientific laws would have to have a high degree of heritability. Meaning that whatever changes were made as a universe gave birth to an offspring, to use that biological language, the offspring would have to have the same feature as the parent universe, which meant that that feature was invariant under the transformation involved in giving rise to a new universe, whatever that transformation was, and whatever differences it made.”
Hi Julian. I'm "surprisetalk" on HN... Sorry for posting Blowtorch and throwing you to the wolves! I'm a huge fan of your work, and I'm so glad to hear that some of the attention was positive :)
Blowtorch theory seems obviously true, assuming the Big Bang and redshifts being almost entirely due to distance (extremely questionable, if not thoroughly refuted assumptions -- see my comment on your OSV podcast appearance: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/the-egg-and-the-rock-ep-249/comment/84352578). Astrophysics theory acceptance is primarily political, even more so than most scientific fields. You seem to be doing well on that crucial front, but it's very easy to get blackballed if you fillow the evidence wherever it leads. Mentioning Arp (highly relevant to black-hole jets), or even noting that all large-scale magnetic fields can ONLY be due to large electrical currents in plasma, (which isn't "gas") could well sink your acceptance. I'm a bit surprised that your skepticism regarding dark matter hasn't done so by itself. Kudos on phrasing things carefully and citing only the right people.
Interesting theory but had to switch off your interview with O’Shaughnessy when you joined him in upholding Rupert Sheldrake as a credible scientist. Your Blowtorch stuff is fine but cosmological natural selection is Sheldrakian woo. We can’t access other universes nor cosmological finches or fossils in our own to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
To encourage more people to finish the theory, I would have appreciated a few more directly-related images, graphs, and charts, etc. For instance, showing visually the differnt predictions for the structure of the universe and how these differ from observed reality. Or a graphic of the electromagnetic filaments, "skin," and transition zones. Black hole jets, which are mentioned right at the start, aren't shown until the end of "MORE MATTER, OR LESS GRAVITY?" and could be shown earlier. Of course, good graphics require more time to make, but for me at least, they provide huge benefits to comprehension.
Congratulations on all this! Been so fun following development ever since finding you from the Minecraft Poem post. Hope you may your way back out to the Bay again, soon :)
Regarding your theory helping re-enchant the universe: do you think at all about the question of where the *first* universe came from? It seems as if we could launch ourselves into the same old nihilism, at larger scale, if we assume it came from some random fluctuation in some meta-primordial ooze.
Hi Julian, thank you for working in public. Its great to hear that you are starting to get a positive reception.
I was one of those people that had trouble with reading blowtorch theory the first time around. Its much longer than a blogpost and is worth reading on paper while jotting notes rather than on a screen. However, substack does not make printing easy.
Do you have a pdf in a more printable layout that would make it easier to read it off of a computer?
Thanks Yaakov. Yes, a PDF version is a great idea. I will see about making a nice PDF of it, and might then make that a post. (Another excuse to nudge people into reading it!) Hmmm, I might also do a free Kindle version (with the original Predictions post as an appendix)... Thanks for the idea.
Meanwhile, I think people can generate (and print, or not) a PDF themselves in Chrome, and most other browsers, but it's not entirely obvious how to do so, so nobody ever does. Let me find the workflow for that and post it here...
OK, here's a link to a fairly reliable ChatGPT o3 guide to all the ways you can generate (and print, if you want to) a 16,000 word PDF from a looooong webpage...
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68658e8f6c9c819184e3ef9fd40a269a
Hope that's useful for now...
Thank you. For helping me evolve.
Thank you for such lovely feedback.
"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" reminds me a bit of my friend group.
Come visit Ireland soon!!
Having met a significant number of your friends by this point... Yeah, accurate! But they are doing it with slightly more charm than the average guy on Hacker News (bless him).
(If YOU, reading this, are a Hacker News guy, I didn't mean you! You are far above average, in this as in everything else!)
Hi Julian,
I love the theories you are working out here. I was reading an interview with Nozick and some of his language struck me as relevant to your project
“I came to see scientific laws of the universe as something like the genetic constitution of the universe. If these universes were going to evolve and give rise to a large number of things, these features like the scientific laws would have to have a high degree of heritability. Meaning that whatever changes were made as a universe gave birth to an offspring, to use that biological language, the offspring would have to have the same feature as the parent universe, which meant that that feature was invariant under the transformation involved in giving rise to a new universe, whatever that transformation was, and whatever differences it made.”
not sure whether youve read this already! https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/robert-nozicks-final-interview
Julian, I hope you put out a video explanation (or long form podcast?) of Blowtorch Theory one day as well!
Hi Julian. I'm "surprisetalk" on HN... Sorry for posting Blowtorch and throwing you to the wolves! I'm a huge fan of your work, and I'm so glad to hear that some of the attention was positive :)
Blowtorch theory seems obviously true, assuming the Big Bang and redshifts being almost entirely due to distance (extremely questionable, if not thoroughly refuted assumptions -- see my comment on your OSV podcast appearance: https://newsletter.osv.llc/p/the-egg-and-the-rock-ep-249/comment/84352578). Astrophysics theory acceptance is primarily political, even more so than most scientific fields. You seem to be doing well on that crucial front, but it's very easy to get blackballed if you fillow the evidence wherever it leads. Mentioning Arp (highly relevant to black-hole jets), or even noting that all large-scale magnetic fields can ONLY be due to large electrical currents in plasma, (which isn't "gas") could well sink your acceptance. I'm a bit surprised that your skepticism regarding dark matter hasn't done so by itself. Kudos on phrasing things carefully and citing only the right people.
Interesting theory but had to switch off your interview with O’Shaughnessy when you joined him in upholding Rupert Sheldrake as a credible scientist. Your Blowtorch stuff is fine but cosmological natural selection is Sheldrakian woo. We can’t access other universes nor cosmological finches or fossils in our own to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
To encourage more people to finish the theory, I would have appreciated a few more directly-related images, graphs, and charts, etc. For instance, showing visually the differnt predictions for the structure of the universe and how these differ from observed reality. Or a graphic of the electromagnetic filaments, "skin," and transition zones. Black hole jets, which are mentioned right at the start, aren't shown until the end of "MORE MATTER, OR LESS GRAVITY?" and could be shown earlier. Of course, good graphics require more time to make, but for me at least, they provide huge benefits to comprehension.
Congratulations on all this! Been so fun following development ever since finding you from the Minecraft Poem post. Hope you may your way back out to the Bay again, soon :)
Regarding your theory helping re-enchant the universe: do you think at all about the question of where the *first* universe came from? It seems as if we could launch ourselves into the same old nihilism, at larger scale, if we assume it came from some random fluctuation in some meta-primordial ooze.