I think you should rework the style of the article to remove the “dissing” of the work that established ΛCDM. It is doing the article a disservice, making it sound unprofessional and crackpot-y. If the Blowtorch Theory has merit, it will stand on its own.
Fascinating stuff!
What seems a bit far fetched is that idea that black holes create new universes and in doing so somehow transfer some cosmological constants over.
Is there anything that supports this? That is what the whole 'evolutionary universe' theory hinges on in the end. It certainly is a convenient explanation for the anthropic principle, but if any black hole however small it may be creates a universe - where do these universes go?
The early direct collapse black holes responsible for the formation of galaxies and structure of the universe are certainly more easily digestible.
I really enjoyed this essay. I'm just a cosmology bystander/hobbyist, but your takedown of the dark matter hypotheses was very appealing to me. I was shocked when I got to the section where you talk about all these macro-scale simulations using only dark matter. It's like an ouroboros of cosmological theories eating themselves, totally disconnected from reality. And relates to one of my favorite quotes that "simulations are doomed to succeed". I don't understand physics well enough to really understand black hole jets, but it feels like an elegant theory and I hope you're able to take it somewhere.
This was my first time hearing about the idea of universes producing children inside of black holes that may have slightly different physical properties. This is also really cool and interesting, but clearly a different level of theoretical compared to your first half about the black hole jets. I haven't had time to delve into any of your links, but it seems like you skipped over explaining how a universe would form inside a black hole in the first place. I saw in the comments on substack that someone pointed out the concept of "black hole electrons" and it's like, yeah, if we don't know what's going on inside black holes, then why couldn't they be their own universes? And if that's the case for black holes, then why not also electrons, or protons, or any other sufficiently dense and mysterious object? But then again why would we suppose that another universe would necessarily form inside those things? I'm curious if you could expand on what you think the mechanism would be for universe formation, as well as what you think the mechanism would be for variation/heredity in the child universes.
Have you considered adding a little note or link near the beginning of the article, indicating how you know these jets and so forth will do the work you need them to do? (Or, if you're not sure they will, laying out that uncertainty clearly?)
Apologies if this list is on there and I missed it.
This is interesting, but a few issues jump out at me.
There are fundamental issues mapping Biological Evolution to the formation of the universe. Evolution fundamentally works on 'introduce random variations into an environment with selective pressures and/or competition and if that variation produces a change that benefits the animal relative to those pressures and competition, it will more likely survive and reproduce' and that reproduction ultimately is what defines the fitness of that evolution. How does this apply to a uniform CMB, the sudden collapse to make supermassive black holes? The eventual formation of smaller black holes? The formation of planets? The expanding universe? Where is the competition? Where is the reproduction? Where are the selective pressures that define evolution? Where does this show branching and dead branches of evolution's failed attempts.
You repeatedly refer to evolution directing, favoring, having reproductive strategies etc. showing either a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution or a casual use of the terms that will confuse many readers. Evolution is a random and non-directed process. You describe a singular chain of events where those events are just as likely to be random and unconnected but try to imply strongly directed evolution because you approached it with the view that evolution would optimize this process and combined theories that could indicate a more optimized process (while not actually proving that optimization or any form of selection for it).
It fails to address observations backing the existence of dark matter while criticizing existing theories for failing to address observations that do not line up with their predictions.
Beyond that, are any of the predictions you make novel to just your story, or are they ultimately the combined predictions made by the various theories you are basing this on? I didn't see any that did not lead off the existing work that doesn't always require throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Ultimately this feels like a new interpretation combining a number of exciting and new discoveries that make predictions that JW is backing, approaching them with a philosophical view giving potential novel insights, but failing to disconnect the philosophy before engaging actual science and misunderstanding the difference between a good sounding science story and good science while on-boarding a fair amount of personal skepticism and frustration with the existing methods.
Its not to say that some of the theories its based on aren't correct, or that the existing theories aren't problematic, but it certainly feels like its leveraging the predictive power of other theories to do its heavy lifting.
I didn't manage to get through all of the text, but it's the most interesting thing on science I've read in quite a while. Orders of magnitude more informative than any pop science news, and readable unlike journal papers.
I think the only thing missing is to mention epicycles of solar system models.
So, life exists to create more universes? It seems, that you've found the meaning of Life, Universe and possible Everything, and turns out it is not 42?
There is no shortage of cranks generating novel cosmological theories, but this writer doesn't seem to be one of them. He's interested in predictive power!
I think it's fascinating and enjoy this theory a lot, but the epistemics strike me a little funny. The mechanism itself can't be tested. If this mechanism exists, these observations would tend to be expected from a random sample of possible universes. There's absolutely no way to evaluate how "representative" our n=1 observation is.
I'm not yet convinced this kind of approach is valid, although I'm almost certain there's nothing better at a certain scale. empiricism is useless if you need a galaxy-scale particle accelerator.
“ It argues that large numbers of extremely early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets actively shaped the universe's structure in its first few hundred million years”
Isn’t the entire problem that there is no known mechanism by which these supermassive black holes would form so early with so much mass?
> (And even as this Blowtorch Theory post was being researched and written, a paper was published detailing an extraordinary blazar – a jet, a blowtorch, pointed straight at the earth from over 13 billion years ago, just 750 million years after the Big Bang – far earlier than Lambda Cold Dark Matter predicted, but slap-bang where the theory outlined here said we would find them. See: A blazar in the epoch of reionization, by Eduardo Bañados et al, Nature, December 17, 2024.)
We don’t know how they form but we do now know they exist through Webb.
Well, Webb has observed SMBHs earlier than current theory would suggest.
But I don't think that's the problem here, it's the opportunity:
ΛCDM was the best model for the cosmic web when we thought that SMBHs could not exist so early. But now that we have observed that they do, it opens the possibility of other theories for the cosmic web, including this one (blow torch) in which the early SMBHs take a role in its creation.
> The second half of this post will outline the parent theory – three stage cosmological natural selection – which successfully predicted these extremely early supermassive black holes, and their jets, plus the associated rapid early galaxy formation, in advance of the first James Webb Space Telescope data.
Let me start by saying there are a lot of false claims in the dark matter section.
It's also filled with self contradiction, announcing that DM as wrong, and later pronouncing LCDM as unfalsifiable.
The pillars of modem cosmology are the ability to quantitatively describe and predict large-scale structure, the expansion history of the universe, the CMB and primordial nucleosynthesis.
Can this "model" calculate any of those things? No. What the author has here is some ideas, not a model.
To demonstrate you can even reproduce the Cosmic Web you have to actually run some calculations, or simulations.
How do you know AGN bubbles produce a universe that looks anything like ours?
The author dismisses simulations as "not science", while paradoxically using them as the only representation of the cosmic web in the article.
These simulations have a lot of value, they demonstrate that standard cosmology and normal gravity has no problem forming voids and filaments.
These simulations have been compared to countless new observations, which this model cannot because it's purely qualitative.
The article says these simulations are worthless because they don't work from first principles, this is a practical limitation that you cannot simulate galaxies down to the resolution of atoms on any existing computer. You have to make some simplifications. The structure of the cosmic web is seen in all of them, even going back to very early simulations, it doesn't depend on these assumptions.
And at the end of the article we go back to the problem of dark matter, and find out the author has no explanation for rotation curves or other classical tests of DM.
So despite bashing DM cosmology, this model explains none of the pillars of evidence for dark matter. At some point in developing an idea like this you need to actually start applying physics, either with calculations or simulations. Every new hypothesis is perfect before it has been subjected to rigor and analysis.
I agree with most of what you've said here, particularly the following line which I'm copying for emphasis because I think it's incredibly important.
> These simulations have a lot of value, they demonstrate that standard cosmology and normal gravity has no problem forming voids and filaments.
That being said, I think the author intends for this article to be more of a call to action than an actual result. Simulations aren't cheap, somebody needs to actually do the work. The point that there aren't any simulations without dark matter is an important one too.
Dark matter exists, it is a thing–that thing is a set of observations of the universe. It isn't an understood phenomena but suggesting dark matter does not exist is nonsense, the observations exist–and contradict our understanding of the universe–the question is why they do. Lambda Cold Dark Matter might not be the answer, but it is important not to conflate that with dark matter generally.
Personally, I love this theory. The thought of natural assembly and selection at the level of Black Holes is alluring. Not sure what The Black Mirror Hypothesis (https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/when-you-fall-into-a-bl...) would have to say about this, though.
I've been calling out the similarity of works done by Barbour, Turok, Farnes & Petit for a long time, and the last developments by Turok's team vindicate this intuition. It is now very close to Jean-Pierre Petit's Janus model. Curt Jaimungal announced he'd interview him soon.
The same but without leaning so heavily on Smolin's cosmological-natural-selection would be quite a bit more compelling. It should not be necessary; if it's true then the physics of our universe alone should predict it.
Agreed, but my interpretation here is that Blowtorch Theory does just that. It just predicts that direct collapse supermassive blackholes determine the large scale structure of the universe using existing physics.
The parent theory leans on Cosmological Natural Selection to explain away the anthropic principle, but it's a separate theory not required by Blowtorch Theory.
> Blowtorch theory works, and can be explored, independently of its parent theory: however, three-stage cosmological natural selection gives an important and useful framework for more deeply understanding blowtorch theory and its implications.
Is there anything inherently requiring the three stage cosmological theory to bring about the Blowtorch theory?
I find the Blowtorch theory very compelling - but the cosmological/evolution argument seems qualitatively... less scientific, or at least less physics-related. It is very interesting! But, I think its association would damage the pair.
Anything stopping Blowtorch theory from standing on it's own?
I believe Gough has expressed properly that you're welcome to consider Blowtorch Theory and ignore CNS entirely and it still works as an astrophysical model. Honestly, the longer process of reading the series of articles on the substack where Gough explains how we got the model of the cosmos we currently have helps to explain some of the strange mismatches we've had to deal with throughout history, and CNS (developed originally by the brilliant physicist Lee Smolin) offers explanatory power using no new physics, no exotic matter, and applies the process of natural selection (which is the only observed way we've identified increasingly complixifying self-organizing systems) to the cosmos, and it works shockingly well.
I felt the same way when I first read the theory, and the idea of being inside a black hole sounded silly. But the more I read, the less crazy it sounded, and I'm at the point now where it feels crazier to ignore all this evidence.
It is a very interesting idea that cosmologist were wrong to ignore electromagnetic forces when most of the matter in early universe were plasma.
On the other hand the notion of evolution implies the existence of global time ordering. Yet black holes makes this impossible. So I am very skeptical about any theory that tries to bring the notion of evolution to the universe.
Also the notion that there can be another universe with different physical constants is even worse than the ever changing notion of dark matter. At least the latter gives a plausible mechanism about why that matter does not interact with normal matter while the notion of changing constants does not even attempt to provide a mechanism.
This cosmology strongly reminds me of the last section of Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, which vividly describes a god creating a succession of universes, gradually selecting for and evolving towards consciousness.
That book also has solar blowtorches! Although in a different context, not as the mechanism for generating structure in the early universe.
There's also this research (cited by the author of Blowtorch Theory, if I'm not mistaken) supporting direct-collapse SMBH in the early cosmos here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04042
The dark matter and energy and other dark things, at least as described in the article, resemble the numerous epicycles that were needed for geocentric and cycle-based model of planet movements. They did fix trajectories to some extent, but made no sense.
I think the truth is even one step further away from current models in exactly this direction.
Blowtorch Theory posits that supermassive black holes formed very early, before the stars. I believe they didn't just form early, but that they were always there and the smoothness of the CMB doesn't come from natural isotropy of 'creation'. In my opinion it's so smooth because on the way to us the light was thoroughly mixed by the chaotic gravity (and now possibly electromagnetism) of all the supermassive black holes of the observable universe and the 'dust' swirling between them that were at the time that CMB light originated, crammed into a bubble of the size of merely 100 mln light-years. The relationship between CMB and supermassive blackholes exists but it's the other way around. It's not CMB that spawned black holes. It's black holes that generated the smoothness of CMB. The smoothness comes from overlapping gravitational lensing of trillion galaxies in concentrations ranging form 100 mln light years to 13 bln and acting for 13 bln years.
In my idea "Where did the supermassive black holes came from?" is the same kind of question like "Where did the universe came from?" The fact that in current Big Bang model we can imagine simple, mathematical origins (point like beginning of spacetime) doesn't make it more likely to be true. There's no doubt that Big Bang was a very energetic event, but you could get very energetic events without invoking creation. Just imagine two very dense black hole clusters, slamming into each other at relativistic speeds, each consisting of trillions (or more) of supermassive black holes.
What's great about this Blowtorch Theory is that it connects things we can actually observe, large scale structure of the universe, with the activity of those very early supermassive black holes (wherever they came from) in a measurable way thus potentially providing evidence of their very early existence. I hope it catches on because it's huge step in the right direction.
[+] [-] JulianGough123|10 months ago|reply
I’m happy to answer questions, though I will be dealing with a five-year-old and eating dinner at the same time, which may lead to delayed responses.
[+] [-] layer8|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pantalaimon|10 months ago|reply
Is there anything that supports this? That is what the whole 'evolutionary universe' theory hinges on in the end. It certainly is a convenient explanation for the anthropic principle, but if any black hole however small it may be creates a universe - where do these universes go?
The early direct collapse black holes responsible for the formation of galaxies and structure of the universe are certainly more easily digestible.
[+] [-] bre1010|10 months ago|reply
This was my first time hearing about the idea of universes producing children inside of black holes that may have slightly different physical properties. This is also really cool and interesting, but clearly a different level of theoretical compared to your first half about the black hole jets. I haven't had time to delve into any of your links, but it seems like you skipped over explaining how a universe would form inside a black hole in the first place. I saw in the comments on substack that someone pointed out the concept of "black hole electrons" and it's like, yeah, if we don't know what's going on inside black holes, then why couldn't they be their own universes? And if that's the case for black holes, then why not also electrons, or protons, or any other sufficiently dense and mysterious object? But then again why would we suppose that another universe would necessarily form inside those things? I'm curious if you could expand on what you think the mechanism would be for universe formation, as well as what you think the mechanism would be for variation/heredity in the child universes.
[+] [-] nyeah|10 months ago|reply
Have you considered adding a little note or link near the beginning of the article, indicating how you know these jets and so forth will do the work you need them to do? (Or, if you're not sure they will, laying out that uncertainty clearly?)
Apologies if this list is on there and I missed it.
[+] [-] uhhhhhhh|9 months ago|reply
There are fundamental issues mapping Biological Evolution to the formation of the universe. Evolution fundamentally works on 'introduce random variations into an environment with selective pressures and/or competition and if that variation produces a change that benefits the animal relative to those pressures and competition, it will more likely survive and reproduce' and that reproduction ultimately is what defines the fitness of that evolution. How does this apply to a uniform CMB, the sudden collapse to make supermassive black holes? The eventual formation of smaller black holes? The formation of planets? The expanding universe? Where is the competition? Where is the reproduction? Where are the selective pressures that define evolution? Where does this show branching and dead branches of evolution's failed attempts.
You repeatedly refer to evolution directing, favoring, having reproductive strategies etc. showing either a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution or a casual use of the terms that will confuse many readers. Evolution is a random and non-directed process. You describe a singular chain of events where those events are just as likely to be random and unconnected but try to imply strongly directed evolution because you approached it with the view that evolution would optimize this process and combined theories that could indicate a more optimized process (while not actually proving that optimization or any form of selection for it).
It fails to address observations backing the existence of dark matter while criticizing existing theories for failing to address observations that do not line up with their predictions.
Beyond that, are any of the predictions you make novel to just your story, or are they ultimately the combined predictions made by the various theories you are basing this on? I didn't see any that did not lead off the existing work that doesn't always require throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Ultimately this feels like a new interpretation combining a number of exciting and new discoveries that make predictions that JW is backing, approaching them with a philosophical view giving potential novel insights, but failing to disconnect the philosophy before engaging actual science and misunderstanding the difference between a good sounding science story and good science while on-boarding a fair amount of personal skepticism and frustration with the existing methods.
Its not to say that some of the theories its based on aren't correct, or that the existing theories aren't problematic, but it certainly feels like its leveraging the predictive power of other theories to do its heavy lifting.
[+] [-] ddq|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] culebron21|10 months ago|reply
I think the only thing missing is to mention epicycles of solar system models.
[+] [-] lspears|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ordu|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aradox66|10 months ago|reply
I think it's fascinating and enjoy this theory a lot, but the epistemics strike me a little funny. The mechanism itself can't be tested. If this mechanism exists, these observations would tend to be expected from a random sample of possible universes. There's absolutely no way to evaluate how "representative" our n=1 observation is.
I'm not yet convinced this kind of approach is valid, although I'm almost certain there's nothing better at a certain scale. empiricism is useless if you need a galaxy-scale particle accelerator.
[+] [-] growlNark|10 months ago|reply
I would say it's just not available more than that it's useless—albeit, only not available in theory.
[+] [-] eskatonic|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] moi2388|10 months ago|reply
Isn’t the entire problem that there is no known mechanism by which these supermassive black holes would form so early with so much mass?
[+] [-] vlovich123|10 months ago|reply
We don’t know how they form but we do now know they exist through Webb.
[+] [-] CGMthrowaway|10 months ago|reply
But I don't think that's the problem here, it's the opportunity:
ΛCDM was the best model for the cosmic web when we thought that SMBHs could not exist so early. But now that we have observed that they do, it opens the possibility of other theories for the cosmic web, including this one (blow torch) in which the early SMBHs take a role in its creation.
[+] [-] magicalhippo|10 months ago|reply
Direct Collapse[1] models provide candidates for this, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_collapse_black_hole
[+] [-] itishappy|10 months ago|reply
> The second half of this post will outline the parent theory – three stage cosmological natural selection – which successfully predicted these extremely early supermassive black holes, and their jets, plus the associated rapid early galaxy formation, in advance of the first James Webb Space Telescope data.
[+] [-] thicktarget|10 months ago|reply
To demonstrate you can even reproduce the Cosmic Web you have to actually run some calculations, or simulations. How do you know AGN bubbles produce a universe that looks anything like ours? The author dismisses simulations as "not science", while paradoxically using them as the only representation of the cosmic web in the article. These simulations have a lot of value, they demonstrate that standard cosmology and normal gravity has no problem forming voids and filaments. These simulations have been compared to countless new observations, which this model cannot because it's purely qualitative. The article says these simulations are worthless because they don't work from first principles, this is a practical limitation that you cannot simulate galaxies down to the resolution of atoms on any existing computer. You have to make some simplifications. The structure of the cosmic web is seen in all of them, even going back to very early simulations, it doesn't depend on these assumptions.
And at the end of the article we go back to the problem of dark matter, and find out the author has no explanation for rotation curves or other classical tests of DM. So despite bashing DM cosmology, this model explains none of the pillars of evidence for dark matter. At some point in developing an idea like this you need to actually start applying physics, either with calculations or simulations. Every new hypothesis is perfect before it has been subjected to rigor and analysis.
[+] [-] itishappy|10 months ago|reply
> These simulations have a lot of value, they demonstrate that standard cosmology and normal gravity has no problem forming voids and filaments.
That being said, I think the author intends for this article to be more of a call to action than an actual result. Simulations aren't cheap, somebody needs to actually do the work. The point that there aren't any simulations without dark matter is an important one too.
[+] [-] unknown|10 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] myko|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] oscarmoxon|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Xmd5a|10 months ago|reply
https://januscosmologicalmodel.com
Petit's models implies negative masses that would sit at the center of the cosmic voids, giving it structure.
Someone wrote simulation showcasing this emergent phenomenon a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtcbBpieR5U
[+] [-] surprisetalk|10 months ago|reply
> Feel free to check: Predictions here.
[0] https://theeggandtherock.com/p/predictions-what-the-james-we...
[+] [-] sixo|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] itishappy|10 months ago|reply
The parent theory leans on Cosmological Natural Selection to explain away the anthropic principle, but it's a separate theory not required by Blowtorch Theory.
> Blowtorch theory works, and can be explored, independently of its parent theory: however, three-stage cosmological natural selection gives an important and useful framework for more deeply understanding blowtorch theory and its implications.
[+] [-] eximius|10 months ago|reply
I find the Blowtorch theory very compelling - but the cosmological/evolution argument seems qualitatively... less scientific, or at least less physics-related. It is very interesting! But, I think its association would damage the pair.
Anything stopping Blowtorch theory from standing on it's own?
[+] [-] JSchneider321|9 months ago|reply
I felt the same way when I first read the theory, and the idea of being inside a black hole sounded silly. But the more I read, the less crazy it sounded, and I'm at the point now where it feels crazier to ignore all this evidence.
[+] [-] fpoling|10 months ago|reply
On the other hand the notion of evolution implies the existence of global time ordering. Yet black holes makes this impossible. So I am very skeptical about any theory that tries to bring the notion of evolution to the universe.
Also the notion that there can be another universe with different physical constants is even worse than the ever changing notion of dark matter. At least the latter gives a plausible mechanism about why that matter does not interact with normal matter while the notion of changing constants does not even attempt to provide a mechanism.
[+] [-] nyeah|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Mr_Eri_Atlov|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] iainmerrick|9 months ago|reply
That book also has solar blowtorches! Although in a different context, not as the mechanism for generating structure in the early universe.
[+] [-] WhitneyLand|10 months ago|reply
Modern cosmology requires simulations, simulations require mathematical models.
It’s well researched and points out legitimate shortcomings in current theories.
But without the math you don’t know if everything is really adding up and we’re kind of left with cool story bro.
[+] [-] JulianGough123|10 months ago|reply
For example, it made these predictions in advance of the James Web’s first data:
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
And these were later validated by the James Webb:
https://theeggandtherock.com/p/killer-new-evidence-that-supe...
[+] [-] JSchneider321|10 months ago|reply
There's also this research (cited by the author of Blowtorch Theory, if I'm not mistaken) supporting direct-collapse SMBH in the early cosmos here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04042
[+] [-] culebron21|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|9 months ago|reply
Blowtorch Theory posits that supermassive black holes formed very early, before the stars. I believe they didn't just form early, but that they were always there and the smoothness of the CMB doesn't come from natural isotropy of 'creation'. In my opinion it's so smooth because on the way to us the light was thoroughly mixed by the chaotic gravity (and now possibly electromagnetism) of all the supermassive black holes of the observable universe and the 'dust' swirling between them that were at the time that CMB light originated, crammed into a bubble of the size of merely 100 mln light-years. The relationship between CMB and supermassive blackholes exists but it's the other way around. It's not CMB that spawned black holes. It's black holes that generated the smoothness of CMB. The smoothness comes from overlapping gravitational lensing of trillion galaxies in concentrations ranging form 100 mln light years to 13 bln and acting for 13 bln years.
In my idea "Where did the supermassive black holes came from?" is the same kind of question like "Where did the universe came from?" The fact that in current Big Bang model we can imagine simple, mathematical origins (point like beginning of spacetime) doesn't make it more likely to be true. There's no doubt that Big Bang was a very energetic event, but you could get very energetic events without invoking creation. Just imagine two very dense black hole clusters, slamming into each other at relativistic speeds, each consisting of trillions (or more) of supermassive black holes.
What's great about this Blowtorch Theory is that it connects things we can actually observe, large scale structure of the universe, with the activity of those very early supermassive black holes (wherever they came from) in a measurable way thus potentially providing evidence of their very early existence. I hope it catches on because it's huge step in the right direction.
[+] [-] 3abiton|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mickey475778|10 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] bglazer|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kristel100|9 months ago|reply
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