This was an absolutely delightful roller-coaster of a read (coming in fresh, I'm the person you wrote background for and thank you for that). I can't wait to find out how your predictions do! And I am personally enthused and inspired by your own dripping enthusiasm for the topic, really fantastic to be able to share in your excitement. Hope you get that big ice cream.
Thanks Alaina! Very happy the background was useful! They have just released their papers, early, before the official announcement, and it's looking good for that ice cream...
A little personal 'wow' to top off all those you've already mentioned in the post: when you mentioned Dr. Chiara, I remembered meeting her and her sister Gio *at least* 15 years ago whilst backpacking through Europe. The pair of them were so brilliant and nice and of course we all got sloshed together (well, at least I was definitely sloshed, but then again I am an Australian so...)
Thanks for sparking my journey down the black hole of backpacking in my early twenties! I am so glad to see that a fleeting connection from the past is now making so much of herself in the astrophysics community!
My fingers are crossed for your predictions. Keep the chocolate coming. :-)
Oh, how wonderful! What a wild coincidence... (It's a small universe.) Delighted to hear she was fun to hang out with, back in your mutual back-packing days! Yeah, she's doing really well. Big day for her today, she's put a lot into this project, I'm delighted for her.
Thanks for this long read. Down and dirty is refreshing. Ahhhj. I learned about stuff I never even thought of or knew about. The theory too.
Q.? The universe has baby black holes and this fits into your theory and the Big Bang is the birthing of a new universe from what was sucked up from the black hole of the mothering universe...maybe I have understood this correctly 😶🧐. The age old question... what came first the chicken or the 🥚? Where or how does the first or genesis of the entire cycle happen? Thanks
Yes, that's the cycle. Which came first? I think, at the level of the universe, it escapes the question. There was always something. No genesis required. The idea of "nothing" is just an idea. (We have always experienced something, existed as something, in something; we have never been nothing, experiencing nothing, in nothing. "Nothing" is just an idea we scare ourselves with.) And if you have something, some ur-stuff (nothing like as complex as our modern matter), and an infinite amount of time for it to exist in, extraordinarily unlikely things can occur. If at some point the ur-stuff collapses, changes, in some way... and at some point breaks in two somehow (whatever that means, in an ur-stuff before complicated things like protons even exist... let's say, separates into two parts that can no longer communicate with each other in any way)... and if the two parts are slightly different and have slightly different chances of breaking in two in the infinite future... evolution is off and running. (All this language is highly metaphorical; it's almost impossible for us to image what an ur-stuff of total simplicity would be like.)
What we have ended up with is this complex dance of black holes and big bangs and lots of complicated things made of out a large range of fundamental particles with very specific evolved characteristics..., but they will have emerged from the far more primitive ur-black holes and ur-big bangs of ur-stuff... So, just as you can go back and back with the chicken and the egg until you can't really recognise chickens or eggs, there is no First Chicken, no First Egg, there is a gradual co-emergence from something far simpler... There is likewise no First Black Hole or First Big Bang. There is just evolution, and infinite time.
Thank you for this reply…for now I’m just gonna take your word for it because you are expanding great truth in revelations here. I look forward to more posts from you and to learning from you in the future….. and yes, it is almost impossible to put this sort of thing into words but sometimes it’s fun to try anyway
Hate to nitpick since it doesn't affect your main point, but since you asked for corrections, I should mention your analogy to acoustics is a bit off. We can and do hear wavelengths on the order of meters with our centimeter-sized ears. For example, at sea level where sound travels at 343m/s, the low A note on a grand piano with a frequency of 27.5 cycles/s has a wavelength of 343/27.5=12.5m. Also, plate tectonics would be subsonic (<20Hz) rather than ultrasonic (>20kHz)
Please do nitpick! Delighted you caught those, I think I'll add a comment below the piece with all the corrections. Yes, I was really sloppy there, healthy people can hear sound waves sixty or even (under ideal conditions) a hundred feet long. That was just a fuckup on my part, writing fast without thinking. And I can't believe I wrote "ultrasonic" for plate tectonics, ugh, I really must have been tired by that point... (I suspect that living in Berlin among U-Bahns and other Untergrund phenomena may have caused me to somehow scramble my Unters and Ultras when I get tired.) You're totally right of course, they're subsonic. Appreciate the catch!
For the moment, all I can comment is that I hope no readers call you a dick or an even bigger dick. And that I hope you get to buy yourself that big icecream today.
Well, I could feel I was going a bit too fast, and not explaining everything thoroughly enough for a general audience, so I called myself out on it before anyone else could. But so far today, no one has called me a dick in the real world! Big win. And the results are already leaking out all over the place, I woke up to see they've published their papers in advance of the announcement, and it looks like, yes, there's solid evidence for a gravitational wave background... So I think I WILL have an ice cream today.
Hey Julian, I am fascinated by general science and cosmology strikes a chord in terms of what we experience as we travel through time and what we experience in terms of spirituality. I’d love to know how you have arrived at your enticing view of the organic nature of the universe and what level I can trust given that you are an arguably gifted musician and person of elevated intellect. Is there a traditional academic basis for your utterances. Gotta say, I’m biased toward mainstream science. Thanks for this alluring view.
Ooooh, how I arrived at my view of the organic nature of the universe... long story. Might make it a post.
Is there a traditional academic basis for my utterances? Short answer: no. Long answer: Nope. In terms of traditional academia, I got a bad bachelor's degree in English and philosophy, and never went back. I just don't like working inside institutions. But I have read widely in these areas over the decades, I am friendly with some real grown-up scientists and discuss this stuff with them, and I do the occasional online university-level course to fill in gaps in my knowledge where reading and chatting isn't enough.
So I am a high-risk follow! Most people outside the academy championing non-standard ideas are wrong, and are deluding themselves. It's perfectly possible I am too. The raw odds would certainly suggest so. But in this particular case, I think (of course) I am right. That's because the idea of an evolved universe exists in a kind of knowledge shadow – there isn't really ANYONE qualified to explore it. It requires knowledge across a bunch of domains that normally don't talk to each other. And it's not just a matter of putting two ideas from different fields together: you have to drag a lot of ideas all the way out of their original domain, and find a way to apply them in a very different one where the rules are subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) very different. So (having dug into this) I believe nobody has engaged deeply enough with the idea of an evolved universe, and the implications across multiple fields of that idea, to say whether or not it can be dismissed yet. It's a part of the intellectual forest that has been astonishingly poorly explored. So, I'm exploring it. And the deeper Into that patch of forest I go, the more diamonds (and exotic new kinds of tree-frog!) I find. There is so much in there. So I've reorganised my life over the past couple of years so that I can go deeper, spend longer there.
I also solicit a lot of feedback from scientists in the relevant fields, and I hope that keeps me from deluding myself that I'm right about things in cases where there is already strong evidence I'm wrong... Certainly it keeps me, I hope, from screwing up the basic science too badly.
OK, that's a long rambly answer, but I only got 4 hours sleep last night...
This was an absolutely delightful roller-coaster of a read (coming in fresh, I'm the person you wrote background for and thank you for that). I can't wait to find out how your predictions do! And I am personally enthused and inspired by your own dripping enthusiasm for the topic, really fantastic to be able to share in your excitement. Hope you get that big ice cream.
Thanks Alaina! Very happy the background was useful! They have just released their papers, early, before the official announcement, and it's looking good for that ice cream...
A little personal 'wow' to top off all those you've already mentioned in the post: when you mentioned Dr. Chiara, I remembered meeting her and her sister Gio *at least* 15 years ago whilst backpacking through Europe. The pair of them were so brilliant and nice and of course we all got sloshed together (well, at least I was definitely sloshed, but then again I am an Australian so...)
Thanks for sparking my journey down the black hole of backpacking in my early twenties! I am so glad to see that a fleeting connection from the past is now making so much of herself in the astrophysics community!
My fingers are crossed for your predictions. Keep the chocolate coming. :-)
Oh, how wonderful! What a wild coincidence... (It's a small universe.) Delighted to hear she was fun to hang out with, back in your mutual back-packing days! Yeah, she's doing really well. Big day for her today, she's put a lot into this project, I'm delighted for her.
Hey Julian! Love the article. When can we expect a results update -- and were you right? I haven't checked yet
Thanks for this long read. Down and dirty is refreshing. Ahhhj. I learned about stuff I never even thought of or knew about. The theory too.
Q.? The universe has baby black holes and this fits into your theory and the Big Bang is the birthing of a new universe from what was sucked up from the black hole of the mothering universe...maybe I have understood this correctly 😶🧐. The age old question... what came first the chicken or the 🥚? Where or how does the first or genesis of the entire cycle happen? Thanks
Yes, that's the cycle. Which came first? I think, at the level of the universe, it escapes the question. There was always something. No genesis required. The idea of "nothing" is just an idea. (We have always experienced something, existed as something, in something; we have never been nothing, experiencing nothing, in nothing. "Nothing" is just an idea we scare ourselves with.) And if you have something, some ur-stuff (nothing like as complex as our modern matter), and an infinite amount of time for it to exist in, extraordinarily unlikely things can occur. If at some point the ur-stuff collapses, changes, in some way... and at some point breaks in two somehow (whatever that means, in an ur-stuff before complicated things like protons even exist... let's say, separates into two parts that can no longer communicate with each other in any way)... and if the two parts are slightly different and have slightly different chances of breaking in two in the infinite future... evolution is off and running. (All this language is highly metaphorical; it's almost impossible for us to image what an ur-stuff of total simplicity would be like.)
What we have ended up with is this complex dance of black holes and big bangs and lots of complicated things made of out a large range of fundamental particles with very specific evolved characteristics..., but they will have emerged from the far more primitive ur-black holes and ur-big bangs of ur-stuff... So, just as you can go back and back with the chicken and the egg until you can't really recognise chickens or eggs, there is no First Chicken, no First Egg, there is a gradual co-emergence from something far simpler... There is likewise no First Black Hole or First Big Bang. There is just evolution, and infinite time.
Thank you for this reply…for now I’m just gonna take your word for it because you are expanding great truth in revelations here. I look forward to more posts from you and to learning from you in the future….. and yes, it is almost impossible to put this sort of thing into words but sometimes it’s fun to try anyway
Hate to nitpick since it doesn't affect your main point, but since you asked for corrections, I should mention your analogy to acoustics is a bit off. We can and do hear wavelengths on the order of meters with our centimeter-sized ears. For example, at sea level where sound travels at 343m/s, the low A note on a grand piano with a frequency of 27.5 cycles/s has a wavelength of 343/27.5=12.5m. Also, plate tectonics would be subsonic (<20Hz) rather than ultrasonic (>20kHz)
Please do nitpick! Delighted you caught those, I think I'll add a comment below the piece with all the corrections. Yes, I was really sloppy there, healthy people can hear sound waves sixty or even (under ideal conditions) a hundred feet long. That was just a fuckup on my part, writing fast without thinking. And I can't believe I wrote "ultrasonic" for plate tectonics, ugh, I really must have been tired by that point... (I suspect that living in Berlin among U-Bahns and other Untergrund phenomena may have caused me to somehow scramble my Unters and Ultras when I get tired.) You're totally right of course, they're subsonic. Appreciate the catch!
Eagerly awaiting your update! This was a super fun read the night of 😊
For the moment, all I can comment is that I hope no readers call you a dick or an even bigger dick. And that I hope you get to buy yourself that big icecream today.
Well, I could feel I was going a bit too fast, and not explaining everything thoroughly enough for a general audience, so I called myself out on it before anyone else could. But so far today, no one has called me a dick in the real world! Big win. And the results are already leaking out all over the place, I woke up to see they've published their papers in advance of the announcement, and it looks like, yes, there's solid evidence for a gravitational wave background... So I think I WILL have an ice cream today.
Hey Julian, I am fascinated by general science and cosmology strikes a chord in terms of what we experience as we travel through time and what we experience in terms of spirituality. I’d love to know how you have arrived at your enticing view of the organic nature of the universe and what level I can trust given that you are an arguably gifted musician and person of elevated intellect. Is there a traditional academic basis for your utterances. Gotta say, I’m biased toward mainstream science. Thanks for this alluring view.
Tom
Ooooh, how I arrived at my view of the organic nature of the universe... long story. Might make it a post.
Is there a traditional academic basis for my utterances? Short answer: no. Long answer: Nope. In terms of traditional academia, I got a bad bachelor's degree in English and philosophy, and never went back. I just don't like working inside institutions. But I have read widely in these areas over the decades, I am friendly with some real grown-up scientists and discuss this stuff with them, and I do the occasional online university-level course to fill in gaps in my knowledge where reading and chatting isn't enough.
So I am a high-risk follow! Most people outside the academy championing non-standard ideas are wrong, and are deluding themselves. It's perfectly possible I am too. The raw odds would certainly suggest so. But in this particular case, I think (of course) I am right. That's because the idea of an evolved universe exists in a kind of knowledge shadow – there isn't really ANYONE qualified to explore it. It requires knowledge across a bunch of domains that normally don't talk to each other. And it's not just a matter of putting two ideas from different fields together: you have to drag a lot of ideas all the way out of their original domain, and find a way to apply them in a very different one where the rules are subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) very different. So (having dug into this) I believe nobody has engaged deeply enough with the idea of an evolved universe, and the implications across multiple fields of that idea, to say whether or not it can be dismissed yet. It's a part of the intellectual forest that has been astonishingly poorly explored. So, I'm exploring it. And the deeper Into that patch of forest I go, the more diamonds (and exotic new kinds of tree-frog!) I find. There is so much in there. So I've reorganised my life over the past couple of years so that I can go deeper, spend longer there.
I also solicit a lot of feedback from scientists in the relevant fields, and I hope that keeps me from deluding myself that I'm right about things in cases where there is already strong evidence I'm wrong... Certainly it keeps me, I hope, from screwing up the basic science too badly.
OK, that's a long rambly answer, but I only got 4 hours sleep last night...