The idea of early black hole formation driving later star and galaxy formation a great idea, but I can't think of any reason you need to bring in evolution. If you haul in evolution, you have to come up with a mechanism that preserves some of the laws of physics across the creation of a new one while allowing others to vary. Darwin could…
The idea of early black hole formation driving later star and galaxy formation a great idea, but I can't think of any reason you need to bring in evolution. If you haul in evolution, you have to come up with a mechanism that preserves some of the laws of physics across the creation of a new one while allowing others to vary. Darwin could at least start out with the empirical fact of heredity. New organisms largely resemble their parent organisms. We have nothing like this with regard to universe formation.
This is especially problematic since the whole evolutionary idea is unnecessary. Why not just invoke the anthropic principle? Here we are debating this. That's an empirical fact. Why haul in so much extraneous complexity. Why deal with annoyed evolutionary biologists who have their own philosophical concerns? There's an awful lot of teleology here. We don't know how new universes are formed, and almost by definition we can't know much about them.
It makes much more sense to develop a theory that explains our universe without bonus mysticism, and it looks like you have a good one here. I don't see how it benefits from introducing failed universes and the possibility of super-universes and the like. It offers a good framework for addressing the early galaxy problem, the voids and filaments problem and, for all I know, the rotation curve problem.
P.S. In N-body research, there's a common pattern of increasingly tightly coupled subsystems with their angular momentum dissipated by overall system expansion. This fits very well with that. Complexity develops from the basic mathematics of gravitational attraction in an expanding universe. I took most of The Janus Point with a grain of salt, but I suspect the discussion of the N-body problem is at least aligned.
Thanks for your thoughts on this. I do understand your feeling that the evolutionary stuff isn't needed; and I think you're right that the structure formation ideas I've laid out here could be explored without any reference to evolution of universes. I very much hope that scientists will do that, and I'm happy for them to ignore the evolutionary stuff, as they don't really need it.
The problem is, my initial successful predictions about the early universe, which led to this theory of structure formation, emerged directly from the idea of universes reproducing through black holes/big bangs, with slight variation in the properties of the child universe, leading to increased or decreased reproductive success (more or less black hole formation), and therefore Darwinian evolution of universes.
The prediction that there will be a wave of direct collapse supermassive black hole formation, shortly after the Big Bang, in our universe, is a direct implication of that theory. Primitive early universes would have reproduced by direct collapse (with no complex structure formation required, or indeed possible): those black holes would have been super- or ultramassive (not yet refined or optimised or made more efficient-per-unit-mass in any way, as that could only be done later as the result of evolutionary processes – matter itself is extremely crude at this point, is unstructured – no complex periodic table yet – and can't build structures); therefore, if we look around and see supermassive black holes in our universe, they will have been produced by the same method, direct collapse (because evolution is frugal and will have conserved that method, it won't have pointlessly come up with a more complicated and roundabout route to the same result); the direct collapse of those supermassive black holes will have to have occurred when the universe most resembled a primitive early universe, which means when it was a smooth, undifferentiated gas, before complex structure formation, before star formation, before the building out of the periodic table of elements, etc. So, well before 100 million years, probably before 50 million. (And maybe waaaay earlier, while it was still a hot quark-gluon soup, if there's an imbalance of tau in there, say. In which case the slight density fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background aren't seeds for precipitating direct collapse, they are signs that there WAS a direct collapse, that took out one-hundred-thousandth of the matter in that region while it was still hot quark-gluon soup.)
So, anyway, the initial successful predictions came directly from the evolutionary theory, before we had any observational evidence from the James Webb Space Telescope. That's strong evidence for the theory: it made great predictions! And they form the foundation for Blowtorch Theory. You can see why I can't really throw the evolutionary aspect away. But I am happy to have other scientists ignore that aspect, if it's of no use to them.
The idea of early black hole formation driving later star and galaxy formation a great idea, but I can't think of any reason you need to bring in evolution. If you haul in evolution, you have to come up with a mechanism that preserves some of the laws of physics across the creation of a new one while allowing others to vary. Darwin could at least start out with the empirical fact of heredity. New organisms largely resemble their parent organisms. We have nothing like this with regard to universe formation.
This is especially problematic since the whole evolutionary idea is unnecessary. Why not just invoke the anthropic principle? Here we are debating this. That's an empirical fact. Why haul in so much extraneous complexity. Why deal with annoyed evolutionary biologists who have their own philosophical concerns? There's an awful lot of teleology here. We don't know how new universes are formed, and almost by definition we can't know much about them.
It makes much more sense to develop a theory that explains our universe without bonus mysticism, and it looks like you have a good one here. I don't see how it benefits from introducing failed universes and the possibility of super-universes and the like. It offers a good framework for addressing the early galaxy problem, the voids and filaments problem and, for all I know, the rotation curve problem.
P.S. In N-body research, there's a common pattern of increasingly tightly coupled subsystems with their angular momentum dissipated by overall system expansion. This fits very well with that. Complexity develops from the basic mathematics of gravitational attraction in an expanding universe. I took most of The Janus Point with a grain of salt, but I suspect the discussion of the N-body problem is at least aligned.
Thanks for your thoughts on this. I do understand your feeling that the evolutionary stuff isn't needed; and I think you're right that the structure formation ideas I've laid out here could be explored without any reference to evolution of universes. I very much hope that scientists will do that, and I'm happy for them to ignore the evolutionary stuff, as they don't really need it.
The problem is, my initial successful predictions about the early universe, which led to this theory of structure formation, emerged directly from the idea of universes reproducing through black holes/big bangs, with slight variation in the properties of the child universe, leading to increased or decreased reproductive success (more or less black hole formation), and therefore Darwinian evolution of universes.
The prediction that there will be a wave of direct collapse supermassive black hole formation, shortly after the Big Bang, in our universe, is a direct implication of that theory. Primitive early universes would have reproduced by direct collapse (with no complex structure formation required, or indeed possible): those black holes would have been super- or ultramassive (not yet refined or optimised or made more efficient-per-unit-mass in any way, as that could only be done later as the result of evolutionary processes – matter itself is extremely crude at this point, is unstructured – no complex periodic table yet – and can't build structures); therefore, if we look around and see supermassive black holes in our universe, they will have been produced by the same method, direct collapse (because evolution is frugal and will have conserved that method, it won't have pointlessly come up with a more complicated and roundabout route to the same result); the direct collapse of those supermassive black holes will have to have occurred when the universe most resembled a primitive early universe, which means when it was a smooth, undifferentiated gas, before complex structure formation, before star formation, before the building out of the periodic table of elements, etc. So, well before 100 million years, probably before 50 million. (And maybe waaaay earlier, while it was still a hot quark-gluon soup, if there's an imbalance of tau in there, say. In which case the slight density fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background aren't seeds for precipitating direct collapse, they are signs that there WAS a direct collapse, that took out one-hundred-thousandth of the matter in that region while it was still hot quark-gluon soup.)
So, anyway, the initial successful predictions came directly from the evolutionary theory, before we had any observational evidence from the James Webb Space Telescope. That's strong evidence for the theory: it made great predictions! And they form the foundation for Blowtorch Theory. You can see why I can't really throw the evolutionary aspect away. But I am happy to have other scientists ignore that aspect, if it's of no use to them.