[HN Gopher] Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place insi...
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Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole
Author : zaik
Score : 677 points
Date : 2025-06-11 19:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.port.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.port.ac.uk)
| thrill wrote:
| Maybe it was the repeat.
| karol wrote:
| Beginning is an illusion created by our way of perception. Time
| is neither linear nor real so how can there be a "beginning"?
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| "Your honor, I could not have possibly shot that person,
| because yesterday might not have been before today, or at
| least, there is reasonable doubt that yesterday was before
| today, according to some physicists on crack. I treat those
| physicists with high regard personally though, and they have
| degrees that you don't have, so the court must reasonably
| conclude their opinions should be entertained."
| asveikau wrote:
| I guess that's a joke, but it's actually kind of serious that
| causality, personhood, identity, free will, etc. are all
| social constructs.
|
| They are _useful_ to us, but every now and then it 's helpful
| and humbling to remember it's a fiction we assign, rather
| than fundamental.
|
| Criminal justice or the concept of culpability is one of
| these areas. I know I've seen material by Robert Sapolsky, a
| neuroscientist who does not believe in free will, talking
| about how off the mark criminal justice and punishment for
| crimes can be.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| You're stating this as if determinism has been proven
| beyond a doubt which is not the case.
| asveikau wrote:
| I think it's unclear what kind of determinism you are
| presuming. Determinism in the universe? Determinism in
| consciousness? Certainly a deterministic machine can
| exist in a non-deterministic universe.
|
| However I didn't just assume a lack of free will. I also
| assumed a lack of _identity_. Do you realize that _who
| you are_ is socially defined? When you breathe in, the
| air in the room around you becomes part of you. When you
| breathe out, you lose certain gases. When you eat your
| food, similar story. There 's a good case to be made that
| "you" are in the entire room or the entire food chain.
| That does make causality and culpability hard to assess
| objectively. When we do so, we do so subjectively.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| Ah, so we're playing at being shamans.
|
| In that case I dub you a mushroom.
| asveikau wrote:
| Don't be silly. I didn't say anything about shamans. I'm
| saying human existence is subjective. Culpability, like
| the courtroom joke above, is subjective. They're useful
| models for how the world works but it isn't objective
| reality.
|
| We would do well to remember that every now and then.
| People who get too into pretending their perspective is
| objective reality tend to do stupid things.
| rendx wrote:
| Isn't identity exactly defined as what one perceives as
| part of oneself? Food becomes me as soon as I dis-member
| it to make it to be part of myself. Other food becomes
| you. This doesn't make food not within my sphere of
| perception a part of me; before digestion, it stays
| separate, like a virus doesn't become part of me -- the
| immune system acts a biological discriminator between
| what is part of me, and what is not. You are not me, and
| I am not you; we are physically attached to different
| matter. I understand people play mind games based on
| varying definitions of identity, but ultimately you will
| find that you have control over certain things comprised
| of physical matter, which then together with your mind
| makes up "you", and you're not in control of other
| things, which make them "not you". That's how I would say
| it is defined, after all. I am not in the entire food
| chain, because my perception and control simply doesn't
| reach that far. If I could control objects with my mind,
| it would be reasonable to say that they are a part of "my
| body", which makes them a part of me. If you use these
| language constructs differently, we lose the ability to
| communicate over them?
| asveikau wrote:
| Seems like a long-winded way to say you suffer from
| anxiety.
|
| > like a virus doesn't become part of me -- the immune
| system acts a biological discriminator between what is
| part of me, and what is not
|
| But what about symbiotic organisms? What about your
| microbiome? Or the mitochondria, which began its
| existence as a separate organism? Or, they say our DNA
| includes many viruses that our ancestors contracted. A
| number of these things do stick with us and we sometimes
| even become totally dependent on them to function.
| rendx wrote:
| Exactly? I agree that identity is a fuzzy construct which
| includes socially constructed elements, and is not a
| fundamental "thing" that can be observed externally and
| then named "identity". I disagree that it is therefore
| "fiction"; as a concept, it is very real? My point was
| that I don't see how you can claim that identity is
| nonexistent ("lack of identity"), since the moment I use
| the term, I "create" and "have" it; it is a flexible
| enough umbrella to include the distributed system of my
| body, since I cannot exist separately from it? What
| "belongs to me" contributes to my identity.
|
| To pick one possible simple and broad definition from WP,
| "Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality
| traits, appearance, or expressions that characterize a
| person or a group." -- you made it sound like that set is
| empty, which doesn't make sense to me. My identity is
| part of "I". Every being has an identity; it's not
| something you can get rid of?
| cwmoore wrote:
| Let me strengthen the observation to say they are the
| "social constructs [most] useful to [those who survive]
| us."
| layer8 wrote:
| That doesn't affect time in the sense discussed here,
| though, which is a fundamental dimension in our physical
| theories.
| asveikau wrote:
| It's been several years and I'm not fresh enough to
| summarize it, but some time ago I read Carlo Rovelli's
| "The Order of Time" which is a pop science book on why
| that isn't true. Ymmv. I'm sure many reading this know
| more than I do about the topic.
| layer8 wrote:
| Carlo Rovelli's book is idiosyncratic, it doesn't reflect
| scientific consensus on the matter.
| asveikau wrote:
| Care to give a specific example?
| layer8 wrote:
| It's more a philosophical book than a physics book. I've
| only skimmed it, but it presents philosophical views that
| don't reflect a scientific consensus.
| exe34 wrote:
| An interesting corner of philosophy for me is when people
| worry about perfect clones with all your memories. The only
| reason it bothers us is because we're not used to our
| doppelgangers turning up and claiming our sofas and
| relationships. In a polity where clones are commonplace and
| provision is made to inform the source and the perfect copy
| that their material possess will be divided or some stuff
| will be provided, the shock value would fade away.
| emigre wrote:
| "Objection, your honor. In the many-worlds interpretation
| there is a world in which that happened."
| lazide wrote:
| I wonder how far counsel could take it before the judge hit
| them with contempt for lawyering while Nietzsche.
| layer8 wrote:
| Many-worlds doesn't predict that everything happens
| somewhere; far from it.
| emigre wrote:
| Well, it's just a joke. :) It doesn't necessarily have to
| make a lot of sense.
|
| In any case, I find your comment very interesting. I'm
| studying quantum computing at the moment, and I've had to
| read the different interpretations of quantum mechanics,
| including Everett's many-worlds interpretation. As a non-
| physicist, I've found the different interpretations
| fascinating.
|
| The many-worlds one, as far as I understood it, says that
| all the possible outcomes of a quantum measurement
| actually "happen" in different worlds. I have the
| impression that you would be able to give a much better
| explanation.
|
| In any case, in the joke the gun is shot in the macro
| world, not in a quantum state. It's possible that it is a
| quantum gun, but probably not.
|
| Let's say "overruled" then.
| layer8 wrote:
| The many-worlds theory says that the time-evolution of
| the (universal) wave function according to the
| Schrodinger equation is what's real. Different "slices"
| ("branches") of the wave function correspond to different
| "worlds". (A "world" is basically defined by what is
| quantum-entangled together.) The wave function thus
| decomposes into the different worlds.
|
| Collapse theories, in contrast, state that at specific
| points in time (the "measurements"), the wave function
| stops following the Schrodinger equation, and instead
| collapses to a single slice/branch/world, thus upending
| the natural proliferation of branches implied by the
| normal time-evolution of the wave function according to
| the Schrodinger equation.
|
| Even in many-worlds, however, the wave function doesn't
| necessarily contain all conceivable worlds. It only
| contains the worlds, following from some initial quantum
| state, that follow from the Schrodinger equation. While
| it's true that all possible outcomes of a quantum
| measurement become real (because they are all contained
| in the wave function in superposition), "possible" here
| means specifically what the equations allow, not any
| imaginable world.
| emigre wrote:
| Thank you for the explanation! Your comment has helped me
| with my Master's degree. The magic of Hacker News!...
| 90s_dev wrote:
| xkcd super soaker
| jjallen wrote:
| What if it wasn't the beginning of _our_ universe or wasn 't the
| beginning of everything, including what is probably outside of
| our universe?
| colechristensen wrote:
| Eh, the thing about the statement there is you're redefining
| "universe", which is fine, but restating a definition isn't
| really saying anything new. The literal meaning of "universe"
| especially with respect to the Latin origins is... well...
| everything. It may make sense for physics to separate in to
| separate sets of everything if there's some reasonable
| justification.
| exe34 wrote:
| There's the Universe (everything everywhere everywhen), and
| then there's the observable universe. Most testable theories
| will be referring to the observable universe.
| runarberg wrote:
| As I understand it (I'm not a cosmologist by any means), saying
| that the observable universe began at big bang simply means
| that anything that happened before the big bang has no effect
| on what happens afterwards.
|
| There may be other universes out there, with their own big
| bangs, but that has no effect on ours.
|
| Reading this article, I think they are simply disputing the
| necessity of singularity inside a black hole, and hypothesize a
| universe which expands from non-singularity black hole, while
| staying inside its own event-horizon.
|
| That is how I understood it at least, somebody please correct
| me if I misunderstood it.
| DannyPage wrote:
| Asimov already covered this in The Last Question:
| https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
| JdeBP wrote:
| Not really. Asimov's story did not represent the process as a
| mathematically inevitable consequence of physics. It might not
| even have gone through a second cycle. Cellular life, dollars,
| and teletypes would all have had to come about again. (-:
| xorokongo wrote:
| "Nothing" implies that something exists, this duality creates the
| universe.
| aswanson wrote:
| There is no proof of "nothing " existing. Every observation we
| take, we see "something".
| xorokongo wrote:
| Than why do we need a beginning if there was always
| something.
| roywiggins wrote:
| There is as yet no proof that there was nothing before the
| big bang, it's just a supposition. The hot dense universe
| definitely happened but whether that was the "beginning" is
| essentially unknown.
| lazide wrote:
| For the same reason the mind seeks for an ending if there
| is something. It's the environment our little neural nets
| trained in.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| We don't. There was never nothing, because there is no
| "before" the big bang. Time as we know it did not exist
| until the big bang. It's not there was nothing, it's that
| there was no there or then.
| ramon156 wrote:
| We don't need it, the same way we don't "need" scientific
| proof about anything. We could live our whole life pleasing
| the stakeholders and be happy about it
| johnea wrote:
| My lay interpretation of this theory is that it says there
| was no beginning.
|
| But a cycling of a previous universe.
|
| I was a little unclear on the ending, where he says this
| theory would place our entire universe "inside" a black
| hole of a parent universe.
|
| All in all, it does seem to tie up some loose ends, and
| suggest some order to what previously required speculation.
| coliveira wrote:
| "beginning" is a misnomer, since time itself started with
| the Big Bang. There is no such thing as "before" the
| singularity, as time and space were curved together.
| xorokongo wrote:
| Time is a map of the states of consciousness, I believe
| consciousness/awareness of the universe has no beginning
| just infinite layers of abstraction.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This is meaningless technobabble.
| daedrdev wrote:
| I'm happy you feel that way
| EasyMark wrote:
| There are many theories that portray time as existing
| before the big bang.
| coliveira wrote:
| Well, do the calculations of how long it takes for all
| mass to move around in the initial moments of the big
| bang. You'll realize that the closer one gets to the
| singularity, the slower time passes due to time dilation,
| which means that you'll get the whole eternity to reach
| the singularity. It only looks like a few seconds from
| our point of view, looking at the big bang.
| Kranar wrote:
| Strictly speaking, modern cosmology does not treat the Big
| Bang as the beginning of all of existence, it's what
| happens when you take observations about large scale
| cosmology and run them backwards in time.
|
| Based on the information we have available about our
| universe, we can't make predictions or formally model
| anything prior to a certain point in time, consequently
| it's convenient to treat this moment as the earliest point
| in time in which physics as we know it makes any sense. So
| while there may have been some kind of existence prior to
| the Big Bang, we have no way to make sense of it even at a
| conceptual level. Given that, we may as well treat this
| special point in time as the beginning of the universe as
| we understand it and can explain it using physics, as
| opposed to some absolute beginning of all of existence.
| xorokongo wrote:
| Thank you for your insightful response.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| That's a boring axiom.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Only if something exists. But both nothing and something could
| not exist, and then there is no duality, just nothingness
| without a something to relate it too.
| xorokongo wrote:
| The concept of Nothing can only exist if Something exists,
| they both exist and are the substance that make up the
| universe.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Nothing is everything
| kgwxd wrote:
| Everything is everything
| mrtksn wrote:
| Isn't time a human invention useful to model the nature? It's
| literally just a defined interaction as a reference, i.e. the sun
| rising up and going down which is the rotation of the earth.
|
| So IRL there's no time, there's no need to have a beginning or an
| end. Whatever happened when all the matter was close together
| isn't the beginning of anything, just a phase.
| tomrod wrote:
| I'm butchering the mythology, but the Greeks had Cronos and
| Kranus. One was measurement, and one best explained as cause
| and effect.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| We have no idea if there is a meaningful beginning or end,
| other than heat death. But time is real in the sense that there
| is an arrow of time, due to entropy.
| Morizero wrote:
| Not true. The arrow of entropy has a direction and it's the
| same as the arrow of time. There's not a good explanation for
| why though.
| mrtksn wrote:
| There's no arrow of entropy, it's an invented useful model to
| describe something that nature does. Everything is like that,
| I.e. there's no electric field, it's a useful way to do
| calculations about particle interactions.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Of course these are models. And to be able to recognise
| that entropy increases with time is an example for their
| usefulness.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Does it increase over time or does it do its thing and in
| our model we decided that stages of it is called time?
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Right, i had the same thought. What we can say is, that
| the quantities we call t and S are correlated.
| Morizero wrote:
| Absolute entropy of a system is calculated either by
| integrating heat capacity/temp at constant pressure from
| 0kelvin to the measured temperature, or by calculating
| via Shannon's method using average amount of information
| in a discrete random variable.
|
| There is no time factor in any absolute entropy equation.
|
| Empirically, if you measure the entropy of a closed
| system at a given time, and you measure the entropy of
| that same closed system at a different time, then
| calculate the deltas of each, their signs match so long
| as the time delta is finite and the system isn't empty.
| So stated plainly, as time increases, so does entropy.
|
| By combining these first principle formulae with the
| empirical results on entropy, you arrive at the second
| law of thermodynamics. However, like I said before, we're
| not really sure why the signs match and it's considered
| to be an unsolved problem in physics.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_i
| n_p...
| Kranar wrote:
| There's a perfectly good explanation for why though, in fact
| the explanation is what motivated the formalism of entropy to
| begin with. There are significantly more ways that the energy
| contained within a closed system can spread throughout that
| system than there are ways for energy contained within a
| closed system to condense, so that if you observe the state
| of a system at two different moments in time, you will expect
| to see it evolve towards the statistically more likely
| outcome than the statistically less likely outcome.
|
| And from first principles, that's what entropy is, a measure
| of how energy is dispersed throughout a system. Of course
| once you have that first principle understanding of entropy
| then you can come up with more rigorous formalisms to
| properly quantify what it means for energy to be distributed
| throughout a system, such as measuring the number of
| microstates that correspond to a macrostate, and other
| various formalisms that are more or less equal to each
| other... but fundamentally they all start from this basic
| principle.
| majoe wrote:
| If time were running against the arrow of entropy, nobody
| could perceive or measure it, right? Remembering something is
| per se an increase in entropy, so the universe could run in
| negative time direction, but we would simply forget, what had
| happened.
|
| That said, I personally think such thought experiments are
| futile and the nature of time has to be understood by its
| connection to causality and information.
| Kranar wrote:
| Of course you could perceive it, measure it and record it.
| The entropy of your body or your brain is not necessarily
| increasing, nor is the entropy of your computer or other
| information storage systems.
|
| Entropy only statistically tends towards an increase in
| closed systems and neither your computer or your brain are
| closed systems. They are both constantly getting energy
| from an external source of power and in turn dispersing
| previously consumed energy out into their environment.
|
| And yet you still manage to perceive things just fine... in
| fact your perception of the world is unlikely to change
| whether or not the entropy in your brain increases or
| decreases by some bounded amount (of course too much of
| either an increase or decrease will destroy your brain).
|
| Your claim about remembering an event, which likely alludes
| to Laplace's demon [1], requires an overall increase in
| entropy in the system as a whole, but does not require an
| increase in entropy in the specific part of the system that
| is recording the event.
|
| Every time your computer calls a function like memset(dst,
| 0), or sorts a list, or arranges data into some kind of
| structured binary tree, your computer is decreasing its own
| internal entropy by taking a statistically likely
| arrangement of bits and transforming it into a very
| unlikely arrangement of bits. The decrease in the internal
| entropy of your computer is more than offset by an increase
| in global entropy but that global entropy is radiating way
| out into the cosmos and has no impact on your computer's
| ability to register information.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| No, time is what the clock measures. Consciousness does not
| collapse the wave function meaning clocks exists without humans
| and time exists without humans.
| lazide wrote:
| The second, however, is a purely human invention.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Exactly, time is whatever the clock measures and the clock
| does it through some defined physical interaction. Can be a
| swing of a pendulum, can be vibration of an atom, flow of
| sand, unwinding of a spring etc.
|
| It's useful because its quantifiable.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The hot dense universe caused our current cool universe, and
| not the other way around, which makes the two states of the
| universe quite different.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Time is the coordinate of spacetime that has a different sign
| in the metric than the other three.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Try writing a computer program that has side effects without
| time existing.
| lloeki wrote:
| This has been one of my pet theories for a while.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39271752
| xutopia wrote:
| I love that theory. I very much spent time thinking that it
| would be cool if we were inside a black hold after reading A
| Brief History of Time.
| paxys wrote:
| There are countless versions of this theory out there. Basically,
| a universe existed, then collapsed down to a single point, and
| then expanded again (the big bang). Rinse and repeat.
| tomrod wrote:
| Or a universe expanded inside a black hole and we are holograms
| on the shell.
| Antipode wrote:
| In this version we're still inside the black hole.
| wa2flq wrote:
| "Tau Zero" by Poul Anderson
|
| Is it the same universal every time? If so, see you later
| alligator.
| carbocation wrote:
| I think it's neat that this summary is written by an author of
| the scientific manuscript. Oversimplification is a risk, but this
| approach eliminates the possibility that the writer did not
| understand the underlying science.
| n2d4 wrote:
| Yea, and it was a great read too. I wish more researchers would
| publish blog posts alongside their technical whitepapers,
| although I acknowledge that not everyone involved in science
| has or wishes to acquire the skills needed to write blog-form
| content.
|
| (I'd also be worried about a world where researchers are
| evaluated based on the virality of their blog posts, vs. how
| impactful their work was.)
| pkaodev wrote:
| Be worried then because that is the reality of the vast vast
| vast vast vast vast vast majority of research. At this point
| academia is a massive lumbering beast that exists and must be
| fed because it's become a big part of the economy. Most
| research being produced isn't really research, just people
| keeping busy.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Can you cite your sources please?
| johnisgood wrote:
| Most jobs are really not important either, they just keep
| people busy. Do you need sources for this claim, too?
| lukas099 wrote:
| Yes. Who are these people paying for jobs that don't do
| anything, and why are they more concerned about "keeping
| people busy" than their own profits?
| ckdot wrote:
| I'm not the one you were referring to, but I have similar
| experiences. I'm living in Germany, and most bigger
| companies here have such issues. I also worked for
| companies in Netherlands and Island, so I assume it's an
| European, if not global problem. No one is concerned
| about keeping people busy. It's a systemic problem. And
| there are multiple reasons for it. One reason is that the
| bigger a company grows, the more hierarchy is necessary.
| But increasing hierarchy will lead to people doing the
| work are not the people that are most responsible for it.
| So we have people that should do the work but they aren't
| too motivated because they are not responsible enough -
| they are too low in hierarchy level. And we have people
| that are responsible but don't do the work. They
| delegate. If something goes wrong or takes too long, they
| will have enough time and skill to find an excuse.
| Another issue is that you need more people to get
| specific things done. At some point in time these things
| have been done, and you actually don't need the amount of
| people anymore. But you can't quit them because of
| worker's laws. You maybe even don't want to quit them
| because you think you still need them. People, of course,
| tend to find reasons why their own work is important. And
| they will communicate that. And the chance is good you'll
| believe that and don't question it enough. There are more
| reasons for that. But it's a fact that in many, many
| companies the economical results of a lot of employees is
| almost zero. If you don't believe this, just google the
| biggest companies in Germany, pick one, apply for an
| office job and start to work there. It won't take a month
| until you'll find out. Btw. I don't want to criticize the
| situation too much. Probably it's good that people are
| employed, even if they don't work efficiently. Otherwise
| the unemployment rate would be much higher. Then again,
| Germany's economy is flatlining and a crash is not
| unlikely.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Sounds like you're describing the principal-agent
| problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-
| agent_problem
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > But you can't quit them because of worker's laws
|
| This is generally not a problem in the US.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Why do you think profits are important?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I would think that profits are important to investors,
| since that's why they invest in the first place. Maybe
| not though.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The original claim was "Most jobs are really not
| important either, they just keep people busy." Causing
| numbers to change on a balance sheet is not important,
| unless that corresponds to actual worthwhile work - in
| which case, the worthwhile work is what matters, and the
| balance sheet is just an artefact of accounting for it.
| LPisGood wrote:
| The people doing the hiring are typically not the people
| concerned about profits at medium and large sized
| companies. Sure someone has to approve the headcount
| numbers, but realistically this is an extremely flawed
| process.
| leereeves wrote:
| Most people involved like hiring more people.
|
| Workers generally like jobs where the workload is low.
| Managers gain status by having bigger teams, whether they
| need the extra people or not. Even investors often prefer
| hiring (a sign of growth) to layoffs, and executives are
| mostly concerned with pleasing investors.
|
| Even well run tech companies with money to burn hired
| more people than they needed.
| chucksmash wrote:
| It's like saying "if you know half of your advertising
| dollars are wasted, why don't you just cut your ad buy in
| half?"
|
| I still remember the joke from my first job:
|
| Q: How many people work at this office?
|
| A: About half.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| An apt analogy. Circling back to scientific research, I'm
| sure an investigator would be more than happy not to
| spend the time, effort, and grant money on a project that
| wasn't going to produce worthwhile results. If only we
| could know in advance without doing the work.
|
| That does not, of course, mean that "most research being
| produced isn't really research, just people keeping busy"
| or whatever other nonsense an uninformed outsider feels
| like spewing.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| Companies can lay off thousands of employees and not have
| it affect growth, profits or, really, the workload of
| remaining employees. How could that be possible if
| everyone's work is so crucial?
| daedrdev wrote:
| The Bullshit Jobs jobs theory has been widely discredited
| by researchers, but you probably won't believe them.
| Consider that most business is B2B so it makes sense that
| the casual observer would not know what it's for.
| Additionally, the Bullshit Jobs book relies on a magazine
| survey, actual studies shows that the percent of people
| who consider their jobs meaningless is very low and also
| decreasing over time
| dguest wrote:
| I think you're right, but it's not how I remember it for
| some reason.
|
| I didn't read the book "Bullshit Jobs" [1] as an attempt
| to quantify how many jobs were bullshit. The author was
| an anthropologist with no interest in quantifying the
| economic impact. It's lots of amusing anecdotes from
| frustrated workers and a nudge for people to question the
| efficiency of capitalism.
|
| At least that's how I read it. But reading the wikipedia
| page it sounds like a lot of people fixated on the idea
| that society could double its efficiency. Hard to know if
| there's a correct interpretation of the book's claims,
| and unfortunately we can't ask: the author David Graeber
| died in 2020.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
| johnisgood wrote:
| > while he claims that 50% of jobs are useless, less than
| 20% of workers feel that way, and those who feel their
| jobs are useless do not correlate with whether their job
| is useless. (Garbage collectors, janitors, and other
| essential workers more often felt like their jobs were
| useless than people in jobs classified by Graeber as
| useless.)
|
| Well, again, there is a huge difference between one's own
| perception of their job being useful or not. I believe
| garbage collectors, janitors, and nurses, are not
| examples of useless jobs. Useless jobs are mainly in the
| office, called "paper pushers". I mean come on, have you
| not been to any jobs (nor heard of any) where you had to
| pretend you were busy just to get paid? I saw plenty of
| cases.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > the percent of people who consider their jobs
| meaningless
|
| Worth to point out that there is a huge difference
| between people considering their jobs meaningless AND
| their job being meaningless, though.
| rcxdude wrote:
| No, but it's a core part of the Bullshit Jobs theory,
| that the jobs are obviously bullshit to everyone
| involved. I would suggest that most jobs that aren't
| particularly valuable are probably not locally recognised
| as such (i.e. by the person or by their manager).
|
| (In general I think while plenty of people are familiar
| with varying levels of pointless effort in their jobs,
| it's rare that a whole job consists of that, at least as
| far as the person doing it and the person hiring for it
| are concerned)
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _The Bullshit Jobs jobs theory has been widely
| discredited by researchers, but you probably won 't
| believe them. Consider that most business is B2B so it
| makes sense that the casual observer would not know what
| it's for._
|
| I'm not sure how it's possible that anyone over the age
| of 30 can say something like this with a straight face.
| Have you ever worked _anywhere_? I 'd love to know how
| the "researchers" have discredited this. I'd also love to
| see their other papers (likely, also, bullshit).
| hippari2 wrote:
| Ever since I first read this theory, I have always been
| wondering how credible is this. Where have you heard it
| from ?
| LPisGood wrote:
| There have been countless academics who have discussed
| this topic, occasionally not behind closed doors.
| Regardless, it's certainly my observation as well.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Countless academics have leveled targeted criticisms at
| various practices and gone on to back those up. They are
| targeted, actionable objections; not vague blanket
| dismissals.
| NL807 wrote:
| Sabine Hossenfelder has a few comments on this topic in
| her YT channel.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Sabine Hossenfelder cast herself out from academia and
| took a recent turn to monetizing laundering peoples vague
| understanding string theory is a waste of time (cannot be
| proven empirically) into academia is doing fake work and
| if they'd apologize and own up to it, maybe we would
| trust them again.
|
| Most famously, through a bizarrely written letter from an
| anonymous whistleblower pleading that she not topple the
| academy, as it would ruin the lives of thousands of
| academics making up things to get grant money to survive.
| adwn wrote:
| I can't parse either of your sentences. Maybe you could
| introduce some intermediate variables, or use parentheses
| to give them structure?
| refulgentis wrote:
| I can't parse what you're asking for :|
|
| Ran my comment + your reply through AI and asked it to
| respond to you, as I do want to help. Let me know if
| there's other instructions I can give it, it may have
| taken your variable ask too literally? :(
|
| Here's its output:
|
| Sabine Hossenfelder, after distancing herself from
| academia, has recently pivoted to monetizing a specific
| narrative: Let's define Premise A as "String theory is a
| waste of time because it cannot be empirically proven."
|
| She generalizes from Premise A to a broader Claim B:
| "Academia, more broadly, is producing fake work."
|
| Her argument seems to imply that:
|
| If academia were to publicly acknowledge this, or
| apologize for promoting unverifiable theories, then the
| public might begin to trust it again.
|
| This general thrust reached a kind of crescendo in one of
| her more notorious moments: -- An oddly written letter,
| allegedly from a whistleblower within academia,
| essentially begging her not to "bring down the system."
| The letter's rationale? That dismantling the status quo
| would destroy the livelihoods of thousands of academics
| who, according to the letter, are fabricating just enough
| plausible-sounding work to secure grants and stay afloat.
| nwienert wrote:
| Pretty valuable to have people who see A to be true, have
| presumably seen some of B to be true too (trivial to see
| with the many replication crises) - and then to do their
| best to disseminate that to the general public so change
| can be made. I see no problem there, and I'd hate for the
| case where people were afraid to make content covering it
| because they were waiting for years for huge studies
| (which could also be poorly done) to 'prove' it.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Hossenfelder feels like a fraud. She likely is.
| jandrese wrote:
| Sabine is an asshole. Doesn't mean she is wrong, and I
| appreciate when she reads some paper that has made a
| bunch of headlines to figure out if they're full of crap
| or not (spoiler alert: the answer is usually yes), but
| while she can identify the problem she's not part of the
| solution. Her divorce from academia means she has little
| power to affect change for the better given how the
| incentives are currently aligned. She can make a lot of
| noise, but the people actually pulling the levers have
| rigged the system in their favor enough to not care.
| NL807 wrote:
| So she is an arsehole for exposing bullshit? I don't see
| the problem. I think people take issue with her because
| of her confrontational persona.
|
| >while she can identify the problem she's not part of the
| solution
|
| Does she have to be, in principle?
|
| > Her divorce from academia means she has little power to
| affect change for the better given how the incentives are
| currently aligned.
|
| Wouldn't be so sure about that. She is getting more
| public exposure than most academic would in their
| lifetime. More importantly, exposure to audience
| _outside_ of academia. Voters. Her effort in creating
| public awareness has certainly stirred the nest in some
| academic circles.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| This is a good thing. This is where the economy surplus
| went. Not to 5 days of leisure for everyone. But to jobs
| that keep us occupied, engaged, and motivated but aren't
| strictly required. The alternative is just either starving
| everyone to death, except for a few elite and their slaves,
| or everyone being bored out of their minds and wondering
| what the point of life is.
| inimino wrote:
| If the solution is ever more manuscripts that solve no
| interesting problems and that nobody will ever read,
| let's find another solution.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Why would you assume someone would write the paper at
| all, if the problem was uninteresting?
| friendzis wrote:
| That's literally the basis of employment. People write
| papers, they get paid. Science does not get done.
| inimino wrote:
| For one thing, because I watch the AI and ML categories
| on arxiv.org.
| superb_dev wrote:
| Is this a joke or so wildly out of touch? Both of your
| alternatives sounds very much like the world today, but
| we're all still working anyways
| bdbenton wrote:
| It's a controversial observation, but it is very true. I
| work with AI models and have to read recently published
| research to work with the latest developments in the field.
|
| Do a quick keyword search on papers related to the subject.
| So much of it is completely useless. It is clearly written
| to keep people busy, earn credentials, boost credibility.
| Papers on the most superfluous and tangential subjects just
| to have a paper to publish.
|
| Very little of it is actually working with the meat of the
| matter: The core logic and mathematics. It is trend
| following and busywork. Your sentiment is controversial
| because people are religiously loyal to the intellectual
| authorities of these credentialed systems, but a lot of
| published research does not push any boundaries or discover
| anything new. This paper seems to be an exception.
|
| I would argue that a lot of the research published in the
| social sciences also falls under this category. It is there
| so that someone has a job. I'm not discrediting social
| sciences in general, am just pointing out that there is a
| lot of ways to creatively take advantage of academia to
| secure a paycheck and this is certainly exploited. The
| kneejerk reaction to reasonable criticism just proves this
| point even further.
| graemep wrote:
| I think the benefits greatly outweigh any dangers. I far
| prefer to read something like this than something written up
| by a journalist.
|
| > I acknowledge that not everyone involved in science has or
| wishes to acquire the skills needed to write blog-form
| content.
|
| They should. If your research is publicly funded you should
| make it as available to be public as possible. Academics
| should be able to communicate, and I very much doubt they are
| unable to acquire the skills
|
| > I'd also be worried about a world where researchers are
| evaluated based on the virality of their blog posts, vs. how
| impactful their work was
|
| Given how bad the measures of impact and the distorted
| incentives this produces I am not even sure this would even
| be a bad thing.
|
| If nothing else it improves transparency about what they are
| doing, again with public money.
| quantum_magpie wrote:
| >They should. If your research is publicly funded you
| should make it as available to be public as possible.
| Academics should be able to communicate, and I very much
| doubt they are unable to acquire the skills
|
| So in addition to being:
|
| -professional researchers
|
| -professional teachers
|
| -professional project managers
|
| -professional budget specialists
|
| -professional scientific writers
|
| -a failed idea away from losing it all
|
| They should _also_ become:
|
| -professional PR managers
|
| -professional popular writers
|
| While still being paid (poorly) for a single job of all of
| these.
| graemep wrote:
| They should not being doing a lot your first list, and
| should have specialist help available for some of the
| rest.
|
| I am not suggesting they become PR managers, and the
| writing skills I am suggesting they acquire is simply
| that required to do things like blogging. I am not
| suggesting they achieve the standards a professional
| writer would have, just the ability to write clearly and
| make the effort to do so.
|
| Academics should be highly skilled people.
|
| In fact a lot of the problem is not they cannot do it,
| but of distribution. A lot of universities to have
| academic blogs and subsites about departments and
| individuals research. Its not anything like as visible as
| the journalists write ups about it
| Elextric wrote:
| yes
| ericmay wrote:
| We have similar demands for folks in other professions. I
| know software engineers who are still coding day to day
| who also have to manage team budgets and track
| hours/projects, write patents, write blog posts to make
| the company look good, mentor juniors, sometimes teach
| internally or even to external audiences, present at
| conferences, etc.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| Yes, in a perfect world there would be professionals
| doing this instead of putting it all on the academic.
|
| However, we live in an imperfect world. When people say
| "should" in these contexts, they're not describing some
| ideal way the world works. They're prescribing actions
| that are realistic based on the current system we live
| in.
|
| The world sucks. It's more useful to work with the small
| amount of control one has, than to do nothing because the
| action doesn't solve a wider systemic problem.
| rendaw wrote:
| Communication skills are often missing in engineering too,
| but I think I'd argue they should be required - all work is
| fundamentally collaborative.
|
| Being able to effectively communicate to different people on
| your team, outside your team, managers, business people, etc
| is not optional and more than once I've seen things get
| stalled or turn into a mess because communication didn't
| happen.
|
| STEM is often a haven for neurodivergence but I think
| communication skills are something that is largely learned
| and not something that comes naturally _for everyone_. People
| who are good at communicating spend a fair amount of effort
| rewriting, trying different wordings, different
| introductions, getting feedback from people, etc.
|
| FWIW I see things like being able to sell a proposal,
| managing expenses, planning, etc as optional - these are good
| to have, but someone else can do them _if_ you can
| communicate well, but in the end the only person who can
| communicate what you 're thinking is you.
| gms7777 wrote:
| A few years ago, at least in my field, there was definitely a
| trend of people at least doing twitter threads explaining the
| key findings of their papers. It's obviously less in-depth
| than a blog post would be, but it was still usually a far
| more accessible version of the key ideas. Unfortunately, this
| community has basically dissolved in the last few years due
| to the changes in twitter and to my knowledge hasn't really
| converged on a new home.
| beloch wrote:
| It's far preferable to having university PR people write some
| hype piece. Where they'd spend the whole time gushing about it
| being a world first, paradigm shifting, blah blah blah, the
| author focuses on things that actually matter. e.g. Is it
| testable? Yes, here's what to look for.
| fracus wrote:
| Yeah, wow. That was great. His solution seems so simple and
| clears all the previous model's problems. I guess every black
| hole could contain its own universe.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Too bad the author didn't explain more the concept of the
| "parent" universe and how our own (contracting & expanding)
| universe got created. Nice things to read/consider/ponder
| late at night :-)
| csours wrote:
| Unfortunately, it appears that the universe does not care
| very much about human satisfaction. Fortunately, other
| humans do.
| ivape wrote:
| What makes you say that? This feels like a very
| convenient planet.
| alkyon wrote:
| I would be surprised if the size doesn't matter in this case.
| On the one hand, tiny black holes tend to be rather short-
| lived. On the other, I suppose some threshold mass/energy is
| needed to generate a child universe that doesn't collapse
| immediately.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Ironically that was basically the first thought many had when
| it was clear we cannot explain what happens in the edge case
| of a singularity. It was always "perhaps another unsiverse or
| a way into a parallel one".
|
| It still leaves a lot of questions though, especially if you
| try to marry quantum mechanics to these makroscopic models.
| Where did the initial black hole come from and should a
| corresponsing anti matter black hole exist?
| oreilles wrote:
| Well that's an indsight bias if I've seen one. This is the
| first time I ever read that the "bottom" of a black hole
| could be a entirely new universe. If there ever "always
| was" a common hypothesis, it was the wormhole.
| torial wrote:
| There used to be a common practice of scientists writing
| summaries of their research for lay people. I think they viewed
| it as their civic duty. I had a collection called the World of
| Physics which included essays written by various scientists. I
| originally had it in the 90s and found it again after many
| decades. Would highly recommend.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/World-Physics-Library-Literature-Anti...
| bmacho wrote:
| > The Big Bang is often described as the explosive birth of the
| universe - a singular moment when space, time and matter sprang
| into existence.
|
| It is indeed "often described" in the media as such. However,
| that is _not_ the currently accepted theory. "What if there were
| no space and time before the Big Bang" is just Stephen Hawking's
| pet theory.
| twodave wrote:
| Might as well believe in God if you're going to believe in
| spontaneous accidental creation...
| kibwen wrote:
| Why not? If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it,
| then it lies outside the realm of science and in the realm of
| belief. Until someone figures out a way to experimentally
| verify the big bang hypothesis (or any other explanation for
| the origin of the universe or what came "before"), it's
| entirely fair to attribute it to whatever you feel like, be
| it a god or anything else. There is no law of the universe
| that guarantees that science is capable of answering all
| questions.
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| Well, I think surely the entirely fair thing to do is to
| just admit we don't know rather than make any attribution
| or imply any possession of an answer to those questions?
| kibwen wrote:
| Certainly, that's also perfectly fair. The thing to keep
| in mind is that some people derive utility from belief in
| some sort of creator, so ultimately it's an argument of
| values (specifically, you're looking to argue that people
| should prefer uncertainty to unprovable (but also
| undisprovable!) certainty).
| tstrimple wrote:
| Humans have created models for things they don't
| understand throughout human history. Certainly throughout
| any recorded history. We don't know, but we have a model
| that fits pretty well and we can guess at the underlying
| causes. We'll be wrong more often than right, but over
| time as we get more data and we can test more things, we
| get a more accurate model. Not necessarily the right
| model. We may never get that. But based on those models,
| "guesses" are far more reliable than "The Sun is a god
| who circles the world".
|
| While we don't "know" how gravity works we can explain it
| and model it much more accurately now than when logos was
| the explanation. Providing those details is far more
| useful than a simple "we don't know."
| mjh2539 wrote:
| If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it
| lies outside of the realm of (natural) science and may lie
| within the realm of mathematics, philosophy, or (gasp)
| theology.
|
| > There is no law of the universe that guarantees that
| science is capable of answering all questions.
|
| There's a name for a more nuanced version of this "law" and
| there's a good amount of work being done arguing for and
| against weaker and stronger versions of it:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/
| kibwen wrote:
| I think it's important to clarify that the question of
| whether or not everything _has_ a cause is itself outside
| of science. Science is about determining _what_ a cause
| is likely to be, using the universe itself as a source of
| truth, and constrained by fundamental limits on our
| ability to observe and experiment. Which is to say, even
| if the philosophers conclude that everything must have a
| cause, there is still no law that says that we (as
| scientific agents of a universe that is attempting to
| understand itself) are capable of determining every
| possible cause.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Belief in anything is completely trivial unless you act based
| on those beliefs. No one is going to waste time worshiping,
| or murder someone over, the "nothing" from before
| "something".
| arbll wrote:
| Anything outside of what we can observe will always be based
| on faith anyway. We'll probably never understand what's
| "before" the big bang, wether it make sense to ask that
| question or why something exists rather than nothing.
| pharrington wrote:
| Which God? Vishnu? Ra? Amatarasu?
| ben_w wrote:
| Prince Philip?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Assume God exists.
|
| Various isolated cultures are going to come up with
| different names for God.
|
| This like saying which Sun? Surya, Ra or Helios?
|
| All are different names of sun. But there is only one sun.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| On the other hand, there are a lot of stars and different
| cultures might give them different names and yet there
| really are many of them.
|
| Furthermore, assume God doesn't exist. Lots of cultures
| might invent god for various reasons and they'd naturally
| have different names and attributes for them, which in
| fact seems to be the current state of affairs.
|
| In fact, if we assume God exists and is actively in
| communication with humans, its actually a bit _weird_
| that different human cultures would have different
| conceptions and names for that being. Why didn 't it just
| give everyone the same name and information?
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Why do you think God will have a name? Name is used by
| humans to identity a person among a lot of other persons.
| Why will God have a name if it is the only thing in
| existence?
|
| To answer the question of why humans give name to God.
| It's to make god more relatable so that they can workshop
| it. And use devotion to come closer with it. Look up
| Bhakti Yoga.
| yibg wrote:
| How about just having one God vs many? If there is a
| single omnipotent being, why do various cultures have
| multiple gods? And why do different cultures' gods tell
| them different things?
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Fair question. So my understanding is God is
| consciousness. It's omnipotent, all knowing and eternal.
| It's the only thing which is constant in your life and it
| sees everything you do.
|
| Now, you cannot worship consciousness as humans because
| it's invisible and you can never imagine it. You need a
| version of consciousness that you can see as well as you
| can relate to. So cultures invent localized version of
| God which people can relate to. And of course it will
| have attributes similar to that of the culture. But the
| properties kind of still hold. Like all knowing, powerful
| etc.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I didn't say he'd have a name, I said he'd give humans a
| uniform one since, according to, for instance, the
| Christian worldview he is purported to be interested in
| human affairs.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| But that sun has never been a pharoah of Egypt.
|
| If the only common factor is a belief that 'something'
| created 'something', you're really not saying anything
| worth evaluating.
| steve_taylor wrote:
| > Various isolated cultures are going to come up with
| different names for God.
|
| People hate not knowing the answer to the big questions
| so much that they'll readily accept whatever answers are
| served up to them.
|
| > This like saying which Sun? Surya, Ra or Helios?
|
| The difference is that the sun is readily observed. A
| conveniently invisible god isn't.
|
| > All are different names of sun. But there is only one
| sun.
|
| And there's only one human nature, which is why it's not
| surprising that common artefacts of human nature (e.g.
| religion) emerged universally throughout ancient human
| cultures.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Try to find who you are and you will find god.
| kobalsky wrote:
| You're confusing belief with accepting the current scientific
| consensus.
| duped wrote:
| There's quite a big philosophical difference between "there
| exists a point beyond which it is possible to make
| observations" and "the universe was created by an omnipotent
| being"
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Am omnipotent being is a necessity for making observations.
| A lot of religions considers consciousness as God.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I don't see how this is. It seems eminently reasonable
| that observation can simply be performed by sub-
| omnipotent beings.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Life is one omnipotent being. It's just ego, thoughts and
| social identity that creates the illusion of multiple
| beings.
|
| But ego and names are made up. Separation just thoughts.
| The more life believes in thoughts it becomes divided.
|
| But the waves and ocean are one.
| 47282847 wrote:
| An illusion is something that disappears when you see
| behind it, no? How goes it for the illusion of the both
| of us being connected but separate beings? I think at the
| very least it would require consent of both parties to
| merge, so as long as I don't believe it, you have to live
| as a being separate from me, and as such it stays ,,an
| illusion" for you that we are one; merely an idea, a
| potential option maybe, no?
|
| You can declare Life to mean the complex interplay of
| every living organism, but I don't see how you can go as
| far as to claim our physical and mental separateness is
| not there at all? After all, we need boundaries between
| ,,us" to not be utterly alone. I like to think even of
| ,,my" body more as a federated system, like Life maybe
| but on a smaller scale. I have some influence on it but
| not full control. In fact, one could say the polarities
| in the physical realm are Nature (towards separation,
| entropy; Kaos) and Life (actively working towards one,
| requires energy to keep matter ordered; Order).
| 47282847 wrote:
| (Alone, all-one)
|
| If we merge, by definition the ,,I" and ,,you" have to
| die; both of us stop existing. The merger creates
| something new, a ,,we". A single entity. We can then use
| the definition of identity to call this new we ,,I".
| Rinse and repeat until back to being alone/all-one?
|
| Do you really want to be all-one? Omnipotent, full of all
| potentials/possibilities? I don't know. I am already
| overwhelmed with my limited human
| potential/possibilities/options. And I prefer to not be
| alone. I prefer to stay separate, and keep my identity.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I don't get it. Put all life together and its all pretty
| obviously NOT omnipotent as far as I can tell. Every
| living thing on earth could spontaneously have an desire
| about the state affairs on Pluto and I don't see any
| reason to believe anything on Pluto would change.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Verily, for all knowest that the gods live up in the sky,
| which is forever unreachable and unobservable by any man.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Yes. The man can never see consciousness. Only
| consciousness can see man.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I don't think so - god is substantially less parsimonious.
| But in the end, I think you're sort of using two different
| notions of belief as if they were the same.
|
| I believe (lowercase b) in all sorts of stuff, scientific and
| otherwise, but believing in God typically indicates some kind
| of act of faith, which is to say, ultimately, to believe in
| something despite the absence of evidence for it and for some
| deeper reason than can be furnished by a warrant of some
| kind. I can believe in the spontaneous generation of the
| universe in the lowercase b sense of the word without really
| having anything to do at all with the latter kind of belief,
| which I think is kind of dumb.
| mjh2539 wrote:
| Historically, in the West at least, the ability or
| inability to reason one's way to the existence of God
| determined whether you needed to rely on faith or not.
|
| https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-
| xii/en/encyclicals/docum...
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Nice, paragraph 5 and he's already into "evolution is
| fiction and commies love it."
| mjh2539 wrote:
| You didn't read closely enough. He is condemning the
| notion that evolution explains the origin of all things
| (as ridiculous as that sounds...it was a kind of
| ontological darwinism; no reasonable person holds this
| opinion today).
| skellington wrote:
| Sort of like believing that we have free will.
| zthrowaway wrote:
| The Big Bang theory was created by a Catholic priest. So yes.
| mcswell wrote:
| And the Big Bang was created by the priest's God.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| What is the currently accepted theory?
| bmacho wrote:
| We have no theories working at those conditions. Wiki says
|
| > General relativity also predicts that the initial state of
| the universe, at the beginning of the Big Bang, was a
| singularity of infinite density and temperature.[6][obsolete
| source] However, classical gravitational theories are not
| expected to be accurate under these conditions, and a quantum
| description is likely needed[7].
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity
| DrammBA wrote:
| > [6][obsolete source]
|
| I didn't know but apparently wikipedia treats old sources
| as obsolete, doesn't matter if there's new information or
| not that would make it obsolete.
|
| I wonder if any sources supporting the notion that the
| earth is round must be updated every couple of years with a
| new source or study.
| cwmoore wrote:
| That exemplifies a much deeper problem than good
| information, "Good Law":
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_law
|
| As an aside, the earth is almost flat, just not nearly as
| flat as the Universe.
| DrammBA wrote:
| > As an aside, the earth is almost flat, just not nearly
| as flat as the Universe.
|
| Source? And make sure to update your response every few
| years.
| cwmoore wrote:
| It's in the Library of Babylon. My standing citation.
| mkl wrote:
| Obsolete doesn't just mean old, it means superseded by
| newer information.
| DrammBA wrote:
| I agree with you, wikipedia seems to disagree with both
| of us
| arbll wrote:
| At t=0 or "before" none
| joquarky wrote:
| This is the best theory we have:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
| jerf wrote:
| A more accurate summation would be that _our theories_ do not
| permit us to go back beyond what appears to be the "Big Bang",
| and indeed, we can't quite get to it either, since the need for
| Quantum Gravity becomes too great as we get to what seems to be
| the "zero time". We have no principled, reasonable way to make
| any claims about what came before the point where our theories
| break down, and that includes the claim that there was no space
| or time at all before then.
|
| Thus, anything and everything you've heard about what is there
| "before the big bang" has always been speculation. I mention
| this because sometimes people read the science media, which is
| always reporting on this speculation, and think that the
| reporting on the speculation constitutes "science" constantly
| changing its mind, but that's not the case here. Science has
| consistently not had a justifiable position on this topic,
| ever. It has always been speculation. It is the press that
| often fails to make this clear and writes stories in terms of
| what "science" has "discovered", but any claims of certainty in
| this area are not the claims of "science".
| _alternator_ wrote:
| Interesting thing with this work is that it does create an
| observable, testable hypothesis: slightly positive curvature
| of the universe.
| smadsen wrote:
| What people seem to not be able to conceptualize, consciously
| or not, is that there really is no "before" the Big Bang in the
| standard model (Lambda-CDM), if time itself exists only after
| t=0.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| The Lambda CDM does not really say that. As other commenters
| have pointed out, Lambda-CDM is silent on the very earliest
| few moments of the universe where quantum gravity would be
| required.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Seems inevitable that we'll discover we aren't the only
| universe / only cycle.
|
| We went from thinking the Earth was the center of the universe,
| to the sun being the center of the universe, and the next
| obvious step is our universe isn't at the center of universes.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| O[?] = 0.0007 +- 0.0019 (68% confidence level)
|
| If the universe is curved dark energy is still a problem because
| the expansion is getting faster and overcomes the current
| curvature bounds.
| mclau157 wrote:
| Expansion definitely creates some issues here, at longer time
| scales how do we deal with this?
| bglusman wrote:
| Wow, wild this is being taken seriously now perhaps, I first
| encountered the idea in The Life of The Cosmos ~26 years ago[0]
| and my impression was the author, Lee Smolin, didn't REALLY
| beleive it, but he came up with it mostly to have some kind of
| preferable, falsifiable(er?) alternative to string theory, which
| he disliked even more, and perhaps more as an idea of the kind of
| theory we need to explore to start making progress... or that's
| my memory/impression form 26 years ago, I've been meaning to re-
| read it for a while since. Anyone read more recently/have other
| impressions?
|
| (the basic idea was fecund universes/cosmological natural
| selection[1], such that we should expect to find ourselves, if
| the theory were true, very near to a local maxima of values such
| that they approximately maximize the number of black holes
| produced... but most of the book is really taken up with a
| fascinating look at the history of physics and ideas...)
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_the_Cosmos
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
| rramon wrote:
| I speculate that the big bang is/was fueled by all the black
| holes that existed and will exist, like a huge cycle where all
| the energy sucked into black holes converges at the same point in
| time causing the big bang.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Fractal Universe - I discussed the idea with Benoit Mandelbrot
| back in '84 over beers, interning for him, before he'd
| published "Beauty of Fractals."
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Cool anecdote!
| jpeterson wrote:
| How do you deal with Hawking radiation?
| henry2023 wrote:
| Maybe with space expansion? With more space, particles
| interaction is weaker overall. So the whole system kind of
| loses total energy.
|
| * Not a physicist so this is a really uninformed take
| brian-bk wrote:
| flip the direction of time and hawking radiation ""creates""
| mass/energy inside a black hole (overall mass/energy is
| conserved)
| collinvandyck76 wrote:
| The bounce to me has always seemed more intuitive than the bang,
| but man, when it comes to the quantum universe I've learned to
| just check intuition at the door.
| edfletcher_t137 wrote:
| > The black hole universe also offers a new perspective on our
| place in the cosmos. In this framework, our entire observable
| universe lies inside the interior of a black hole formed in some
| larger "parent" universe.
|
| Does it also follow that black holes in _our_ universe contain
| universes internally, beyond their event horizons?! Seems like it
| should. Mind-blowing.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's not a new idea, although I don't think it would be
| accurate to describe the other universes as "contained" within
| the black hole.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hole#Big_Bang/Supermassi...
| bozhark wrote:
| Black hole to White hole to Black hole
|
| It's holes all the way down
| bigbuppo wrote:
| That's a wholly a whole lot of holes.
| lelag wrote:
| Damn, I would not have guessed that Men In Black was actually a
| documentary...
| EasyMark wrote:
| I thought the universe they were saving in that was in some
| kind of "fish bowl" type universe (galaxy?)
| goodcanadian wrote:
| _Does it also follow that black holes in our universe contain
| universes internally, beyond their event horizons?!_
|
| Not necessarily. It's not clear that any are massive enough to
| cross the threshold required for the "bounce."
| physix wrote:
| I think this is a great summary. It's quite intuitive and
| elegant. Does anyone have any information about what the author's
| peers think of this model?
|
| I'd love the idea that we are living inside a black hole, which
| is inside a black hole, which is inside a ...
| m3kw9 wrote:
| So what if one of the numerous black holes in the universe starts
| to bounce?
| RS-232 wrote:
| Not many people these days like to hear this (I myself was one of
| them), but the answer to this is in Genesis.
|
| There's a reason some of the most famous mathematicians,
| scientists, engineers, and philosophers of all time believe(d) in
| God.
|
| The Hebrew name of God, YHWH, literally means "He Who Is." In
| other words, the Self-Existent One. The father and originator of
| all things that were, are, and will be, who exists outside of
| spacetime.
| jaapbadlands wrote:
| That explains nothing.
| RS-232 wrote:
| Neither does the precursor to the Big Bang. It's the same
| exact thing.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| They are not the same thing. Religion and science may try
| to answer the same questions, but they are entirely
| different endeavors.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| The idea that they're mutually exclusive is entirely
| stupid.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| The trouble is we can strive to understand the physical
| circumstances we find ourselves in. Once we decide that the
| circumstances simply 'just are' because He Who Is, we no
| longer have an objective basis for discovering why things
| are as they are. There's no need, no purpose.
| SigmundA wrote:
| This is not an answer that satisfies just begs more questions.
|
| Who Created God? No one? Why does the universe need a creator
| if God does not?
|
| Where does free will and evil come from if God is "originator
| of all things that were, are, and will be". For true free will
| to exist it must have a source of entropy which denotes
| something outside of Gods control and design otherwise
| everything is deterministic as set forth by God.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I understand that many people yearn for a religious explanation
| to answer the question of what caused the universe to exist. I
| myself am content with the "it just happened" explanation, as
| any information prior to the big bang, if it even exists, is
| unknowable.
|
| There are countless other religions that believe in a deity who
| created the universe. These deities either created themselves,
| or had always existed outside of space and time. To that end,
| any one of those deities would be on equal footing with YHWH. I
| don't think that it is appropriate to axiomatically claim that
| a certain deity exists because only that deity could have
| caused the universe to exist.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Yet you call yourself a fool in your own username. Why be so
| sure you're not wrong about any or all of those statements?
| StefanBatory wrote:
| It would be a nice argument for deism - but to jump from that
| into anything more, seems way too extreme of a leap.
|
| Why Christianity then, over Hinduism? Why _any_ human religion
| at all?
| downboots wrote:
| The Christian answer may be "God showed the 12, martyred,
| codified by church fathers [Wu ]" but I haven't asked any
| Hindus, or anything nonhuman.
|
| [Wu ] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitarianism_in_the_Chu
| rch_F...
| kgwxd wrote:
| Yes, not many people these days like to hear senseless drivel,
| hence the failing churches.
| wolfhumble wrote:
| Have you visited a church lately? You might like it. I for
| sure, do!
| kgwxd wrote:
| I too like to read fiction, and play role playing games,
| occasionally. I just don't make real-world decisions based
| on the DM's chosen lore.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I think they mostly "believed" because they would be ostracized
| and maybe even killed for not believing in God and saying as
| much. Many who were famous in their lifetimes would have had
| enemies who would have loved to destroy them via that avenue.
| downboots wrote:
| "An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought
| of God." -- Ramanujan
|
| I like to think he was referring to computation. There's a
| reality to the constant pi, its computation, and ourselves and
| the representation being part of that same universe.
| krapp wrote:
| >There's a reason some of the most famous mathematicians,
| scientists, engineers, and philosophers of all time believe(d)
| in God.
|
| That reason being that for much of Western history if you
| didn't believe in God the Church would burn your research in a
| big fire and probably you on top of it.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| You're in Athens, son.
| jl6 wrote:
| I didn't understand whether the author is implying that this
| happens to _all_ black holes or whether the model only applies in
| some circumstances.
|
| I definitely didn't understand whether this is suggesting that
| expanding universes can be contained within black holes that look
| like fixed-size finite objects from the outside.
|
| And what happens to the inner universe when the parent black hole
| evaporates through Hawking radiation?
| WD-42 wrote:
| The heat death of the inner universe.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| Oh I have so many questions on this topic.
|
| I've often wondered about this. I don't have any direct physics
| training, but it's something that felt really plausible after I
| learned that the mass of a black hole is linearly proportional to
| its swarzschild radius.
|
| As the size of the black hole goes up, its overall density must
| decrease. Combined with the other observation that our universe
| has uniform density at large scales, it seemed really obvious to
| me that there existed some threshold at which the decreasing
| density of a very large black hole, and the fixed density of our
| observed universe.. would cross.
|
| I used to muse about this question with some other tech
| colleagues that liked talking about physics stuff but never
| really got a clear answer to this.
|
| On a side note - I'm absolutely fascinated by the implications
| relating to this. I'll post a follow-up thought I'm hoping
| somebody else has also thought about:
|
| I've seen discussion of dark energy mostly presented as a
| surrogate for real energy. That there is some underlying energy
| "accelerating things away from each other".
|
| I always felt uncomfortable with that characterization. It seems
| more reasonable to me to think of dark energy as _negative
| energy_ - i.e. a loss of overall energy.
|
| In a classical system, two things moving away from each other
| stores potential energy that can be recouped at some later time.
| Dark energy doesn't work this way - things accelerate away from
| each other the further apart they are. From a global perspective,
| it's an energy loss.
|
| The energy loss pervades to the quantum world as well - photons
| that start off high frequency arrive low-frequency.
|
| It somehow feels more appropriate to me to think of dark energy
| as energy being extracted out of the universe, in some form never
| to return. Maybe like a black hole evaporating as observed from
| the inside?
|
| When I asked this of some people in real life, I was pointed to
| answers that indicated that the "energy" component in dark energy
| is normalized into the "tension" of space somehow. As I mentioned
| before I'm not really studied in physics, but that explanation
| felt unsatisfactory to me.
| dvh wrote:
| Plug estimated mass of universe to your schwarzschild formula
| and be amazed how close it is to observable size of the
| universe.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| I tried once, but I'm not sure what terms to throw in there.
| Visible matter, estimated dark matter.. anything else?
|
| I think my estimate came out to less dense than the required
| threshold but it was a while back now and cobbled together
| with some queries to wolfram.
| eapriv wrote:
| This is true almost by definition, and doesn't tell us
| anything interesting about black holes.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That is a very interesting idea... the equation and its
| assumptions doesn't seem to have any exceptions so it does
| strongly suggest our universe is a black hole, inside a black
| hole?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| > It somehow feels more appropriate to me to think of dark
| energy as energy being extracted out of the universe, in some
| form never to return. Maybe like a black hole evaporating as
| observed from the inside?
|
| But in this story the black hole increases in size as matter
| falls into the horizon and shrinks as it evaporates, so cosmic
| expansion would be associated with more energy falling into the
| black hole than leaving it.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| I thought about this part. I'm not sure we can link apparent
| size from outside the event horizon to apparent size from
| inside.
|
| Apparent distance is something that's affected by relative
| frames of reference and the frames of reference are as
| different as as can be in this case.
| account-5 wrote:
| There was a thread a while ago on here where the hypothesis for
| why things are moving apart at faster rates is down to time
| moving at different speeds due to mass.
|
| So time in the void between galaxies is moving quicker than
| time in the galaxies, but on the grand scale of the universe
| the differences as up a lot.
|
| I quite liked this theory, think is make sense, at least from
| my very limited understanding of this stuff.
| codethief wrote:
| Aka Timescape Cosmology,
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhomogeneous_cosmology
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Would make sense if our universe is a simulation. It takes
| more compute power to simulate areas of high density so time
| naturally flows slower there.
| account-5 wrote:
| Yeah, but also that's how time actually works too, time
| runs slower for us on earth than say GPS satellites so
| adjustments need calculated to sync the two. Again caveat
| is I'm more than likely either just wrong or
| misunderstanding it or massively oversimplifying it.
| afarah1 wrote:
| >follow-up thought I'm hoping somebody else has also thought
| about [...] dark energy as _negative energy_ [...] Maybe like a
| black hole evaporating
|
| Another layman's thoughts: Isn't the energy theoretically lost
| by black holes so faint it's currently undetectable? And isn't
| the amount of dark energy theorized to be the major component
| of the observable universe? It seems like the numbers wouldn't
| add up?
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| I don't have enough of the background to speculate about the
| numbers. Dark energy feels "big" if we think of it in terms
| of the actual energy it would take to accelerate the universe
| away from itself at the rate that we see.. but the rate that
| we see is affected by our frame of reference, along with
| distances and everything else.
|
| I'm gonna pull out my lay understanding again. An evaporating
| black hole, as it gets smaller, should get more dense and be
| associated with a higher local spacetime curvature, no? The
| effect of which would be to slow down apparent time for
| observers within the system. Maybe that affects observed
| distance and rates of speed at which things seem to be
| happening when we look out into the sky?
|
| Sometimes I regret not caring enough about calculus in
| university.
| codethief wrote:
| > Combined with the other observation that our universe has
| uniform density at large scales
|
| s/has/had at the time of recombination
|
| It is largely an assumption of LCDM that we can treat the
| universe as practically homogeneous throughout its entire
| evolution but potentially not a very well-founded at that [0,
| 1].
|
| > I always felt uncomfortable with that characterization. It
| seems more reasonable to me to think of dark energy as
| _negative energy_ - i.e. a loss of overall energy.
|
| Your intuition is correct. If the Lambda term in the Einstein
| field equations is moved over to the side of the energy
| momentum tensor, it takes on the role of a negative
| contribution (provided Lambda > 0, as observations seem to
| indicate).
|
| > In a classical system, two things moving away from each other
| stores potential energy that can be recouped at some later
| time. Dark energy doesn't work this way - things accelerate
| away from each other the further apart they are. From a global
| perspective, it's an energy loss.
|
| Note that there is no global energy conservation in General
| Relativity[2], only at a local scale[3]. Heck, you'll already
| struggle to define what the energy _is_ of a given piece of
| spacetime in a meaningful and generic manner[4, 5]. In other
| words, violations of energy conservation due to spacetime
| expanding or contracting (a strictly non-local phenomenon),
| like in the case of the cosmic redshift, are expected and our
| intuition from classical mechanics only takes you so far.
|
| > It somehow feels more appropriate to me to think of dark
| energy as energy being extracted out of the universe, in some
| form never to return.
|
| Dark energy aka the cosmological constant term in the Einstein
| field equations is a constant term, as the name suggests. Yes,
| there can be energy loss due to spacetime expanding (see above)
| but that doesn't change the gravitational _constant_.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_web
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhomogeneous_cosmology
|
| [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy
|
| [3]:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress%E2%80%93energy_tensor
|
| [4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.02931
|
| [5]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_general_relativity
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| Interesting reading - this is the first thorough response
| I've gotten to some of these question. Will check out the
| reading material.
| timewizard wrote:
| > As the size of the black hole goes up, its overall density
| must decrease.
|
| The center of a black hole is infinitely dense. That's why it
| even exists. The event horizon is not the black hole.
|
| > and the fixed density of our observed universe
|
| Our universe is expanding. It's density is not fixed.
|
| You really want to be thinking about this in terms of entropy
| and not matter.
| DrammBA wrote:
| > The center of a black hole is infinitely dense. That's why
| it even exists. The event horizon is not the black hole.
|
| Arguing semantics is rather boring when it's obvious you
| understood the point he was trying to make.
|
| > Our universe is expanding. It's density is not fixed.
|
| None of that precludes uniform density at large scales.
| daedrdev wrote:
| I think a point they are trying to make is that the border
| of a black hole is only to us outside observers, if you
| yourself fell into one you wouldn't notice anything
| specific when you crossed the boundary. The popular example
| of hawking radiation references a border and pairs of
| particles, however its actually only to help people
| understand the idea of what is going on
| viraptor wrote:
| > if you yourself fell into one you wouldn't notice
| anything specific when you crossed the boundary.
|
| Wouldn't you notice that fairly suddenly everything's
| getting brighter because all the light/radiation is
| sucked back in?
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| I learned recently on [a
| video](https://youtu.be/a4vHwY0wMjs?t=246) that for very
| large black holes , we suspect there is no difference.
|
| For smaller BH, the gravity gradient is higher and it
| would be detectable.
| lutusp wrote:
| >> Our universe is expanding. It's density is not fixed.
|
| > None of that precludes uniform density at large scales.
|
| According to observation, the universe is expanding. An
| argument that it's really static at a large scale would
| require contradicting observational evidence, but none
| exists. A theory that requires abandoning observational
| evidence bears a special burden, which this theory lacks.
| Jensson wrote:
| Black holes are capable of expanding, they do it by
| eating material from outside.
| lutusp wrote:
| The universe's expansion, and a black hole's increase in
| mass over time, are unrelated phenomena. We could have
| one without the other. In fact, because of Hawking
| radiation, in the far future we might see a larger
| universe accompanied by smaller black holes.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| Yeah I was referencing the event horizon as the most
| meaningful measure of size.
|
| And whether the density is fixed over time or not doesn't
| affect the question. Let's take the universe at its current
| average mass/energy density - whatever the "true" measure of
| that is.
|
| To the best of our understanding, at large scales the density
| is uniform. So if we consider a suitably large spherical
| volume of space within our (presumably infinite) universe..
| that volume will have an average mass/energy content greater
| than the threshold amount for a black hole of that apparent
| volume (again, using the external event horizon frame).
|
| So that suggested to me that either we live in a finite
| universe, or we must be on the inside of an event horizon. It
| seems like an unavoidable conclusion.
| postalrat wrote:
| It's a mathematical model, not reality. I don't believe
| scientists believe an actual infinitely dense object exists
| at the center of black holes.
| lutusp wrote:
| >> As the size of the black hole goes up, its overall density
| must decrease.
|
| > The center of a black hole is infinitely dense. That's why
| it even exists. The event horizon is not the black hole.
|
| >> and the fixed density of our observed universe
|
| > Our universe is expanding. It's density is not fixed.
|
| These are both correct and germane points. So why was this
| post downvoted? Physics isn't a popularity contest, it relies
| on evidence.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| A black hole is really just a singularity with infinite density
| by definition, but finite mass.
|
| The size and density of the Schwarzschild volume is determined
| only by mass (stationary, non-rotating). It's proportional to
| the inverse square of mass. Density = 3c6/32pG3M2.
|
| SMBHs have densities ~0.5 kg/m3 between thin air and water.
|
| Stellar BHs are ~1e19 kg/m3 several orders of magnitude more
| than a neutron star.
| raattgift wrote:
| I think given time at a blackboard we could walk through
| Newton's cannon in the context of Poisson gravity, and for
| extra credit with the cannonball inducing a perturbation of the
| Poisson vector field. Even without the cannonball's
| backreaction, the Poisson picture offers a nice image of the
| gravitational potential energy at the top of the cannonball's
| inertial (ballistic) curve. We would then consider a cosmology
| like our own but with a recollapse: at maximum extent there is
| some (quasi-)Newtonian notion of gravitational potential energy
| for all the galaxies, since they are at the point where they
| begin free-falling back into a denser configuration. It's then
| the usual story of relating kinetic and potential energy, and
| recognizing that the standard cosmological frame is close to
| Newtonian by design. (We also have to stop this approach when
| the galaxies are merging enough that radiation pressure and gas
| ram pressure become relevant, because the errors become
| astronomical).
|
| Since we don't have a blackboard in front of us to interact
| with, I can suggest Alan Guth's lecture notes on Newtonian
| cosmology. (Guth is credited with discovering cosmic
| inflation.) https://web.mit.edu/8.286/www/lecn18/ln03-euf18.pdf
| See around eqn (3.3). You could also borrow a copy of Baumann's
| textbook <https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/cosmo
| logy/53...> which studies the Poisson equation for various
| spacetimes, however a static spacetime gets most of the focus.
|
| A universe which expands forever, or which expands faster in
| the later universe, makes a mess of this sort of approach to
| calculating a gravitational potential energy. So does any
| apparent recession velocity that's a large fraction of c
| (inducing significant redshift, whatever the recession
| (pseudo-)"force" might be).
|
| However, the general idea is that there is a relationship
| between the kinetic energy a receding galaxy (in a system of
| coordinates -- a "frame" -- in which these kinematics appear)
| and a gravitational potential energy still occurs in a non-
| recollapsing universe. It's just that the potential energy
| climbs forever, and you get an equivalent to gravitational time
| dilation between galaxies at different gravitational potentials
| (i.e., between early-universe galaxies and higher-potential
| modern-times galaxies).
|
| Accelerometers in galaxies will not show a cosmic acceleration
| for any galaxy; they're all really close to freely-falling
| (local galaxy-galaxy interactions are real -- collisions and
| mergers and close-calls happen -- but wash out over
| cosmological distances; look up "peculiar velocity" for
| details). Therefore we can conclude that there's no real force
| imposing acceleration on the galaxies. However that's also true
| of a cannonball in a ballistic trajectory, including one on an
| escape trajectory or one that enters into a stable orbit.
| Consequently one can draw some practical comparisons between a
| ballistic launch from Earth into deep space and galaxies
| spreading out from an initially denser early part of an
| expanding cosmos.
|
| > Dark energy as energy being extracted out of the universe
|
| No, it's just a way of thinking about whatever is driving the
| expansion, and that doesn't dilute away with the expansion as
| ordinary matter and radiation does. It's not even a "real"
| energy in the sense that it is only an energy in the
| cosmological frame, and is a frame-dependent scalar quantity,
| whereas in the fuller theory it's just a multiplier of the
| metric tensor. So it's the full relativistic metric doing the
| work but we absorb some of that into cosmological coordinates
| in the cosmological frame of reference, carving up the metric
| tensor into a set of vectors including an expansion vector
| identical at every point in spacetime.
|
| The expansion vector can also be thought of in terms of
| pressure: in a collapsing cosmological frame, a pressure drives
| galaxies together into a denser configuration. The inverse of
| pressure is tension, so in an expanding cosmological frame,
| it's a tension that pulls galaxies apart into a sparser
| configuration. (The reason one uses pressure or its inverse is
| that the matter fields are idealized as a set of perfect fluids
| at rest in the cosmological frame; each such fluid has an
| associated density and internal pressure which evolve with the
| expansion or contraction of the cosmos, generally becoming less
| positive in the time-direction of expansion (i.e., in the
| future direction in a universe like ours). Another way of
| thinking about pressure is as a measure of isotropic inflow of
| energy-momentum into a point; increasing pressure at a point
| therefore increases the curvature at that point. Tension is an
| isotropic outflow, and so positive tension is repulsive as
| opposed to the attraction from positive pressure.)
|
| > that explanation felt unsatisfactory to me
|
| Hopefully the above helps a bit. Unfortunately there's only so
| much teaching one might do in a series of HN comments, and
| ultimately one probably is better served in developing some
| grounding in the full Einstein Field Equations / Friedmann-
| Lemaitre equations before thinking in quasi-Newtonian ways.
| Going the other direction tends to lead to misunderstandings
| and developing false intuitions when running into situations
| where the quasi-Newtonian picture needs post-Newtonian
| correction terms.
|
| It's cool that you have all sorts of questions. You could
| consider signing up for part time / non-business-hours courses
| in relativity at a nearby community college or the equivalent,
| depending on where you are, or maybe just bringing a hot lunch
| to a lecturer there in exchange for a quick informal tutorial.
| Anything like that is bound to get you to better answers than
| raising comments on HN threads about astrophysics in the
| broadest sense, as answers here are often somewhere between
| non-standard and unreliable.
| danieldrehmer wrote:
| I sympathize with Lee Smoolin's cosmological natural selection
| hypothesis, which would require that black holes give birth to
| new universes within
| bglusman wrote:
| I can't beleive you and I are the only ones familiar with, and
| that no one else referenced or responded to this connection!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44251438
| meta-level wrote:
| I too read the book and was just searching for anyone
| mentioning it. Why can such an idea be called new, when
| someone else already described it decades ago?
| tehjoker wrote:
| This was an interesting read, but I didn't understand exactly
| what leads to the big crunch. I get the exclusion principle leads
| to pressure, and this causes the bounce, but why would it
| continue to accelerate and then decelerate resulting in a big
| crunch?
|
| https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.111.1...
| chasil wrote:
| I don't understand where the rest of the parent universe is if
| all of the matter has emerged from the event horizon. Twisted
| into a new dimension, perhaps?
| tehjoker wrote:
| My take away was that it's still somehow causally
| disconnected from our universe. They make an assumption that
| the space outside is empty and that makes the numbers
| correspond closely with observations. Maybe there is stuff
| there but very very far away?
| meindnoch wrote:
| I've read somewhere an article which posited that our 3D universe
| might be inside a 4D black hole. When you cross a black hole's
| event horizon, the radial coordinate becomes timelike, so you
| lose one degree of spatial freedom. Movement is still possible in
| the tangential directions however, so what you get is basically
| an N-1 dimensional universe. So maybe our 3D universe is actually
| matter that fell into a 4D black hole, and our 3D black holes
| contain 2D flatland universes. And of course, the outer 4D
| universe might be in a 5D black hole, etc.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Yes, and then there's the parlor game of guessing what familiar
| property of our known universe is actually a spaghetified
| fourth dimension.
|
| I guessed c once. It _would_ be a constant. Maybe all the
| constants are spaghettified remains of a superior universe.
| jfengel wrote:
| I don't think c is a good candidate, because it's not really
| a parameter. It's just a correction factor for our mis-
| judgment in picking different units for time and space.
|
| In "natural units", we define the units so that the important
| conversion factors (c, G, h-bar, etc) work out to exactly 1.
| You can say that c is one light-year per year and then forget
| about it.
|
| The true parameters of the universe are the dimensionless
| constants: the fine structure constant, proton-electron mass
| ratio, 3+1 dimensions, etc.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| > I don't think c is a good candidate, because it's not
| really a parameter.
|
| dont be so sure! there is no way to experimentally know if
| c is a parameter or not. there are consistent physics
| formulations which have variable, even anisotropic c.
| physicists dont usually explore them (e.g. tangherlini
| relativity) though because the math is considerably harder.
| raattgift wrote:
| _Physicists_ (and in particular the subset doing physical
| cosmology) don 't usually explore parametrizations of c
| because they're not clearly physical (and sometimes even
| clearly unphysical), or alternatively don't help solve
| astrophysical or cosmological problems.
|
| _Relativists_ sometimes like to explore things that make
| using the Tangherlini transformations rather than the
| Lorentz transformations look positively benign. (To be
| clear, the Tangherlini synchronization system is clearly
| unphysical, requiring infinite speeds. His thesis also
| proposed using a distinguished global frame, which is not
| really philosophically different from how the standard
| cosmological frame is used, and seems OK because the
| distribution of stress-energy can pick out useful systems
| of coordinates in standard relativity. Unfortunately his
| method frustrates and probably outright breaks
| comparisons between inertial reference frames related by
| a boost, which the standard cosmology does not, and it 's
| hard to see an alternative method that preserves his
| central ideas.)
|
| But why even be stuck with 3+1d spacetime like
| Tangherlini? He was trying to do physics. But an
| unphysical metric signature with 47 plusses and no
| minuses is really cool!
|
| In our observed universe, FAPP, c is the same everywhere
| after recombination, and we get that from spectral lines.
| You have to play really weird games to preserve the
| Lyman-alpha forest's apparent isotropy while introducing
| spacetime (or redshift-space, here) anisotropy. Things
| like BAOs make the problem even harder.
|
| If we strip away all that pesky radiation and the
| information its structure encodes, analysing variations
| of c gets a lot easier. A relatively recent paper (Lewis
| & Barnes 2021) I enjoyed considered anisotropy in the
| one-way speed of light in an FLRW cosmology with zero
| energy density (well, really the convenient Milne model,
| which is also far from spatially flat). "So far, we have
| considered two cases, where either the speed of light is
| isotropic, or the extreme case where the anisotropic
| speed is 1/2 in one direction, and infinite in the other.
| The question remains whether this holds true in general
| case, for an arbitrary k":
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/publications-of-
| the-... (arxiv: <https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.12037>). "For
| more general cosmological models, where the presence of
| mass and energy results in curved space-time, the picture
| is more complicated as there is no simple mapping of the
| modified Lorentz transformations into the general
| relativistic picture. We leave this discussion for a
| future contribution."
|
| Sadly there doesn't seem to be a future contribution yet,
| at least going by published citations (<https://scholar.g
| oogle.com/scholar?cites=2012575105829699847...>). (Of
| those, I've put the Chamberlain paper on my to-read pile;
| you'd appreciate how it relates to Tangherlini, "credence
| is given to one-way infinite light-speed inward to each
| particle in direct comparison against Einstein's
| isotropic (c=constant) light-speed").
|
| Of course there's also the excellent Magueigo 2003 VSL
| overview <https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0034
| -4885/66/11/R...> copy
| <https://cds.cern.ch/record/618057/files/0305457.pdf>
| preprint <https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0305457>.
|
| And even if you can make sense of an f(c) cosmology in
| the early visible universe, you will get to epochs before
| recombination and try to make sense of the later
| universe's chemistry, which of course relates to big bang
| light nucleosynthesis, baryogenesis and electroweak ssb.
| How do you abolish Lorentz symmetry in those epochs? Good
| luck!
|
| (I mean, I think if you are doing physical cosmology you
| ought not to ignore gauge theory...)
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I thought that's what the high dimension counts of string
| theories were: taking constants and turning them into
| dimensions.
|
| Or is that too simplified?
| jldl805 wrote:
| Gravity, obvs.
| account-5 wrote:
| What's in a 1D black hole?
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| /dev/null I presume
| modderation wrote:
| I'm guessing it'd look something like this on a 1-dimensional
| number line: --- > | > >> . << < | <
| ---
|
| The dot in the middle would be the singularity, the pipes the
| event horizon, and the contents would be increasingly warped
| spacetime that may or may not exist, depending on your
| interpretation of things.
| codethief wrote:
| > When you cross a black hole's event horizon, the radial
| coordinate becomes timelike, so you lose one degree of spatial
| freedom.
|
| The second half is incorrect. Since the time coordinate becomes
| spacelike in turn you'll still have 3 spatial degrees of
| freedom. Dimensions can't just vanish if you believe that
| spacetime is a 4D Lorentzian manifold (as physicists do).
|
| Moreover, the singularity is not a place you can poke with a
| stick, once you've entered the black hole. It lies in your
| future, in the same way as your death.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > The second half is incorrect. Since the time coordinate
| becomes spacelike in turn you'll still have 3 spatial degrees
| of freedom. Dimensions can't just vanish if you believe that
| spacetime is a 4D Lorentzian manifold (as physicists do).
|
| Can we say that one of the spatial dimensions (the radial
| dimension) and the time dimension combine into a single
| dimension? After crossing the event horizon aren't they 1:1
| correlated?
| raattgift wrote:
| No, there's no change in dimensionality.
|
| The swapping of timelike and radial dimensions are a "game"
| frequently played with families of coordinates, including
| Schwarzschild coordinates. One can apply any system of
| coordinates on a physical system without changing the
| behaviour of the physical system: coordinates are
| unphysical. Think of navigating around in a neighbourhood:
| you can talk about going forward a few blocks then turning
| left, after which you go forward two more blocks; or for
| the same journey, going "city north" a few blocks then
| going "city west" two blocks. Here assuming that
| (initially) "forward" is in the "city north" direction (and
| "city north" is not necessarily exactly magnetic north nor
| a section of a meridian of longitude). After the left turn,
| "forward" is "city west". There's an analogue to the
| discussion's (ab)use of Schwarzschild coordinates.
|
| In Schwarzschild spacetime, without applying _any_ system
| of coordinates, just floating in free-fall far from a black
| hole extremizes your travel in the timelike dimension. (You
| can do this at home: you stay put at some point on Earth
| (whether you use GPS latitude /longitude/altitude or some
| other system of coordinates) but your wristwatch keeps
| ticking). Inside the black hole horizon, just floating in
| free-fall extremizes your travel in the direction of the
| singularity. Far from the black hole, accelerating as
| strongly as you can in any direction takes travel from the
| timelike dimension and puts it into one or more spatial
| dimensions. In particular, you have the freedom to increase
| the spacetime interval between you and the singularity.
| Within the horizon, however strongly you accelerate the
| spacetime interval between you and the singularity shrinks.
| This behaviour seems to invite the use a different set of
| coordinates applied to a patch of space around an observer
| far from the black hole and a patch of space around an
| observer inside the horizon. It's some human cognition
| thing, and in the early 20th century it took decades to
| discover systems of coordinates that work for observers far
| from the black hole, at the horizon, and inside the
| horizon. And even today, most people don't seem to try to
| enhance physical intuitions by swapping among arbitrary
| systems of coordinates (including _no_ coordinates) on a
| single physical system like a black hole and a pair of
| observers (one inside the horizon and one far outside the
| black hole).
|
| The Schwarzschild black hole interior is still locally
| Lorentz-invariant everywhere (because the whole
| Schwarzschild spacetime is a Lorentzian manifold).
|
| The various _local_ interactions of the Standard Model will
| keep working inside a black hole. In a _really tiny_ patch
| around every point, everything behaves as if its in
| Minkowski space (flat 4-d (3 spatial + 1 time) spacetime).
|
| (That's one of the problems of quantum field theory on
| curved spacetime: the "focusing-pressure" [for experts:
| this is encoded in the Weyl curvature tensor; my "scare
| quotes" take a view of this in a Raychaudhuri equation way]
| gets so high that the unknown ultraviolet behaviour of the
| Standard Model (a quantum field theory) becomes relevant.
| The Weyl behaviour in Schwarzschild is that quasispherical
| objects are strongly prolated with the long axis aligned
| radially: a soccer ball or basketball starts looking like
| an American or Canadian or Rugby football ball. The radial
| stretching "spaghettifies" by ripping apart weaker bonds
| (like intermolecular ones, and molecular ones, and ionizing
| atoms), but the tangential squashing ("focusing") must
| eventually generate more nuclear interactions, probably up
| to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) energies possibly before
| the radial stretching starts generating hadronization.
|
| How this works in the Standard Model is just unknown.
| However simpler "test" quantum field theories (fewer, or
| even no, interactions; and often no colour-confinement-like
| processes) raise really difficult questions.
|
| Finally, back to the Standard Model as _local_ theory: how
| does any allegedly quantum nonlocality behaviour work?
| Local here in the sence that states can be distinguished by
| local measurements alone. Related questions: can you
| entangle particles deep inside a black hole? If an
| entangled pair fall in together, how does the entanglement
| evolve? Or obsessing black hole information people, what if
| you throw in only one half of an entangled pair and locally
| measure the outside half? Nobody has great answers for
| these sorts of questions at present, and there 's no near-
| term hope of testing any proposals in laboratories or via
| astrophysical observation.
| XorNot wrote:
| I don't think the spacetime swap idea is particularly well
| explained though? Like although it's sort of mathematically
| true, my impression was that it's not like time suddenly
| becomes a dimension you're moving in once inside the event
| horizon, just that spacetime is acting so weird because
| there's now a deliberate direction where one did not exist
| before.
| codethief wrote:
| > I don't think the spacetime swap idea is particularly
| well explained though?
|
| What exactly do you mean by "spacetime swap idea"? If
| you're saying the behavior of Schwarzschild coordinates at
| the event horizon is not well-understood, then I disagree.
| There is nothing particularly weird or surprising going on,
| there's just a trapped surface[0].
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapped_surface
| raattgift wrote:
| The problem is probably connecting an image of a tilted
| causal cone at p near but outside a regularized r_s in
| Schwarzschild spacetime with the idea that from p there
| is a limited number of null geodesics escaping to the
| asymptotically flat region, that the fraction decreases
| with decreasing regularized r coordinate, and that from
| p' at the trapping surface there are no such null
| geodesics, as all non-spacelike curves (accelerated or
| not) at any point on or interior to the trapping surface
| terminate at the singularity. The idea that the
| singularity inevitably lies in the future of _any_
| observer at p ' is behind the "spacetime swap" notion.
|
| Some of the problem is that Schwarzschild coordinates
| have surprises buried in them, and what \Delta r and
| \Delta t mean are not what most people tend to think.
|
| Someone should do an ELI12 of Unruh's (ca. 2014)
| excellent (give or take varying the spelling of Martin
| Kruskal's surname) Schwarzschild BH global coordinates
| pedagogic review <http://theory.physics.ubc.ca/530-21/bh-
| coords2.pdf> and add in a bit on Fermi normal coordinates
| as a maybe-obvious not-a-chart follow-on to the commenary
| just above eqn (55). But on "maybe-obvious", Unruh has
| the choice line: "Since in a large number of cases, the
| single horizon coordinates were discovered long before
| Schild's coordinates, this is an exercise in alternate
| reality - what could have so easily happened if only the
| generators of those coordinate systems had recognized
| what they had."
| twothreeone wrote:
| What? Wouldn't that mean an object's speed in some direction
| determines how time passes once it crossed over, and
| conversely, it would experience its old time dimension as
| spatial and be able to "move through (old) time" freely after
| crossing the event horizon?? My head hurts.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| You can't have the curl operator in 4D.
| paulnovacovici wrote:
| I've always like to explore the idea of our universe being in a
| static 5th dimension where the 5th dimension represents
| randomness/entropy. The same way to think about exploring a 2d
| plane in a 3 dimensional space where the 3rd dimension is
| constant. We just happen to be in a random big bang in this 5th
| dimensional space
| molticrystal wrote:
| If the crux of the article is the fermion bounce, and you compare
| that to how much matter and energy we are aware of, that is quite
| the black hole, which leads one to start wondering what
| environment it existed in to become that size. Even if it is now
| stuck due to a positive curvature of just bouncing back and
| forth.
|
| I would like the article to acknowledge a bit more though that
| blackhole universe theories and speculation are quite old now,
| not radical and a striking alternative, as it is natural to think
| about it once you learn of the concept of event horizons. What
| differentiates this though is the analytical solution.
| pontifier wrote:
| There was a youtube lecture I saw years ago that showed exactly
| what you'd see as you fell into a black hole and passed through
| the event horizon.
|
| You'd see EVERYTHING that EVER crossed the event horizon. But
| critically, you'd see it EXACTLY as it was at the monent it
| crossed.
|
| Sounds a bit crowded to me. Sounds a bit like I'd expect the big
| bang to look.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I thought you were supposed to get spaghettified and die
| instantly ?
| pontifier wrote:
| At the event horizon of a large enough black hole, the tidal
| difference in gravity between your toes and head shouldn't be
| noticeable. There shouldn't actually be anything special
| about falling through the event horizon when looking at
| yourself.
|
| Outside though, you'd see everything start to blue-shift.
| Things below you would blue shift back to normal, and the
| universe above you would blue-shift and speed up until you'd
| see the heat death of the universe. Anything falling in after
| you would red-shift again as it approached to match your
| "normal" rate of time. Critically this would include any
| light or other particles, so it might be very hard to
| survive.
|
| No matter how fast you go or how weird the space time you are
| in, your local clock should still tick steadily to you, and
| you wouldn't notice anything weird.
| pontifier wrote:
| -Just watched the lecture again, and you wouldn't actually
| see the outside universe speed up.
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| > There shouldn't actually be anything special about
| falling through the event horizon when looking at yourself.
|
| If you went in feet-first, you'd perhaps find it quite odd
| that your feet never seemed to cross the horizon, as they
| would have red-shifted so dramatically.
|
| > you wouldn't notice anything weird.
|
| Maybe you wouldn't notice that you never saw your feet
| cross, since you wouldn't have much time to ponder it
| before your head crossed as well, but at that point, you
| surely you would notice that everything below you is black,
| since all light (and everything else) is now destined for
| the singularity. That's the very definition of the event
| horizon. There wouldn't be any reflected light.
| pontifier wrote:
| Found the lecture. Here is a link to the appropriate part:
| https://youtu.be/BdYtfYkdGDk?si=iNHi7N68DHxT-52-&t=3182
| ogou wrote:
| The word "research" in this title is a handy placeholder for
| indeterminate conjecture. No research happened, it's a theory he
| made up.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I would argue that theory is a critical part of the research
| process and is therefore research.
|
| There's of course a line between simply coming up with ideas
| that are quickly provably wrong or inconsistent vs generating
| ideas that are consistent and not quickly falsified. It's
| especially valuable the ideas are falsifiable and it seems like
| this is the case here.
|
| As such, theory finds patterns in existing knowns, makes some
| leaps and tries to connect them. Then empirical evidence can
| help solidify or falsify those ideas. But we tend not to just
| connect dots of empirical data without attempting to know the
| casual relationship, otherwise the connections can be rather
| nonsensical or may have weak predictive power.
|
| With all that said I didn't read the paper in detail nor am I
| qualified in this domain to say if it's quackery or a
| reasonable shot a developing some new theory. It is peer
| reviewed and published in APS so I suspect it's not complete
| quackery:
| https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.111.1...
| ogou wrote:
| A research paper makes use of multiple sources of known
| provenance and various degrees of authority and relevance. It
| tries to establish a consensus of knowledge, as close to fact
| as possible. The phrase "research suggests" is an appeal to
| authority that implies some kind of academic rigor. A theory
| paper, which is still useful and important, can be published
| without any kind of authority. You can just make things up.
| namenotrequired wrote:
| Would you say Einstein was not a researcher?
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| That is what is called research in theoretical fields. Making
| hypotheses up and then proving implications of those
| hypotheses. In this case, it yields a falsifiable test: the
| theory claims the universe should have small positive
| curvature.
| codingclaws wrote:
| Could a computer simulation also contain another universe, with
| virtual black holes that have universes?
| downboots wrote:
| Can a computer simulate itself?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WHN-pAFCs
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| Sean Carroll says this is absolute nonsense:
| https://youtu.be/U3uIiv48q98?feature=shared&t=6046
| lkmill wrote:
| If this is true it almost literally means black holes are a way
| for universes to make children. If we apply Darwin's principles
| of the strongest survive this must mean that universes that
| produce the most black holes are the "best". If correct, what
| does this actually mean?
| henry2023 wrote:
| Darwinian logic requires a feedback loop. And because those
| universes are isolated then there's no "incentive" of a
| universe to have more "offspring"?
| ben_w wrote:
| It requires imperfect reproduction where the imperfections
| alter the probability of further reproduction.
|
| If each black hole in our universe contained a pocket
| universe with very slightly different laws of physics (to
| each other and to us), but the same amount of mass-energy on
| the inside as our universe had when it started, then (1)
| those pocket universes able to create stars and black holes
| would also go on to create black holes with pocket universes,
| but also (2) those pocket universes not able to create black
| holes, would not create more pocket universes.
|
| I have never seen a reason to think that this could happen,
| nor why such pocket universes might have more mass on the
| inside than they appear to have on the outside, but that's
| the argument.
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| There is a theory of cosmological evolution. The child
| universes have slightly different physical constants and
| universes that produce more black holes will leave behind
| more offspring universes so over many generations, the
| universes evolve toward parameters that favour black hole
| production.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| That's what Blowtorch theory predicts, it notes three
| stages of black hole formation:
|
| - direct collapse after the big bang. Those supermassive
| black holes now from the center of galaxies and are the
| earliest and simplest form of how universes reproduced
|
| - stellar collapse, requires the formation of stars, but
| those can be much more plentyfull than previous
| supermassive direct collapse black holes, so many more
| universes will have those
|
| - black holes created by technology. Since black holes are
| incredibly efficient at converting mass to energy, in a
| universe that has the capability to form intelligent life,
| this life will eventually find a way to harness black holes
| as an energy source. In doing so they would create even
| more tiny black holes (maybe to power spaceships?), so such
| universes would form the most offspring.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
|
| https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-mo...
| hybrid_study wrote:
| I thought this was already an old general idea; that each black
| hole ignites the birth of a new universe?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| This theory actually makes sense. Vs big bang where half of the
| theory is "let's assume that there is this thing that explodes"
| lagrange77 wrote:
| If universes can exist in black holes and obviously black holes
| exist in universes, doesn't that smell like infinite recursion?
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| What reason do we have to believe that every universe can
| support black holes? We only have a sample size of 1 here.
| EasyMark wrote:
| What reason do we have to believe that there is more than one
| universe?
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| Black holes all the way down
| Toby1VC wrote:
| "In my room, redefinin' the meanin' of black holes"
|
| - Earl Sweatshirt
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| I went to school in a very bad neighborhood. Once I was sent to
| the office because my math teacher asked me what I was reading
| about that was soo much more interesting than our textbook. I
| happened to be reading "A Brief History of Time", so I answered
| "black holes."
|
| At the time I couldn't understand why my dad laughed about that
| particular phone call from the principal.
| Toby1VC wrote:
| Hahahahahahahaha
| afroboy wrote:
| I'm not a scientist or astrophysicist but i do believe in
| science, is it ok to believe that we as humans and all our
| scientific development still very very far from proving anything
| remotely close to how the universe got created? I feel this
| subject is for humanity in year 2600 to start discussing it.
|
| Scientist still can show their theories and search papers and i
| can't understand a shit but i don't believe in any theory that
| proves how the universe got created.
| philipov wrote:
| Before we can prove, we must first wonder. We proceed by small
| steps, and if we don't start discussing it now, 2600 will still
| be too early.
| belter wrote:
| If we can't even predict inflation rates maybe we should hold
| off on explaining the birth of the entire universe, yeah?
| daedrdev wrote:
| Predicting inflation rates may be harder than discovering the
| birth of the universe actually, because it would require
| perfect knowledge of the present and by the time you compute
| it it's out of date.
| belter wrote:
| We can claim to simulate the first femtoseconds of the
| universe...model nuclear detonations in software down to
| quantum effects....but 340 million citizens buying gas and
| groceries? That's somehow beyond our grasp... :-)
|
| Maybe the problem isn't complexity, but that science gets
| arrogant when it drifts into realms where its claims can't
| be falsified ;-)
| daedrdev wrote:
| The beginning of the universe is a start state we have
| theories about, that we can apply our system of physic to
| calculate once. A computer that calculates an economy
| might violate the halting problem because it would need
| to know when it itself is finished to calculate its own
| electricity costs, as well as every other algorithm in an
| economy.
| laborcontract wrote:
| You're fundamentally misunderstanding the difference
| between biology and physics.
| belter wrote:
| The difference is clear: https://xkcd.com/435/
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >Maybe the problem isn't complexity
|
| It most certainly is. Each of those 340 million citizens
| is a unique person, with unique circumstances. You can't
| fit an equation to that.
|
| >science gets arrogant where its claims can't be
| falsified
|
| This article proposes testable predictions?
| ptmcc wrote:
| It's not about belief, it's about observing, collecting data &
| evidence, and proposing possible explanations. As new
| observations and evidence are found the possible explanations
| are refined. No one credible is claiming hard proof of anything
| at this point.
| didibus wrote:
| Agreed, people often mix that up, but you have to adopt a
| probabilistic mindset, you can believe the coin with land on
| its head, but you also know that based on the weight and
| curvature of the coin it will land on its tail 68% of the
| time you flip it, etc. Then choosing tail is no longer a
| belief, it is simply going with the choice that is backed by
| prior observation, experiments, models, etc.
|
| You might still lose, and so you might choose to also believe
| it will land on tail this time, but the rationale for
| choosing tail was not based on a belief system, but the going
| information and where it points too.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| "Proving anything" is kind of fuzzy. We've got very solid
| evidence that some sort of big bang happened. We can see the
| galaxies flying away from a common point, and since we can
| count backwards, we can know roughly when they probably
| would've been in the same spot. The how and why, and the what
| happened before, those are very unknown, although we've got a
| surprising amount of knowledge of what the first few seconds
| were probably like.
| echelon wrote:
| I have immense respect for astrophysicists, but the data we're
| dealing with is extremely far away and relies on a lot of
| interlocking assumptions.
|
| I stumbled upon this paper [1, 2] last night that challenges
| the CMB, and thus the underpinning of much of our understanding
| about the age and evolution of the universe. As a layperson, I
| don't know the impact factor of the "Nuclear Physics B" journal
| - if this is just junk or if this is a claim that will pan out.
|
| My point is that it feels like we're building on a lot of
| observations that are all super indirect. I know I'm just a
| layperson, but that feels weird when reading assertions about
| these things.
|
| Our understanding of the universe is relatively new. We don't
| have a lot of energy or resolution in our observations. The
| fact that we can sniff the molecular spectra of exoplanets is
| so amazing and that part feels totally concrete and rock-solid.
| But I get skeptical when I see claims that we know how the
| universe began or how it will end. Is our evidence that good?
| Are our models? Are we basing everything on assumptions?
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04687
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb69yPNgX-Q
| didibus wrote:
| > But I get skeptical when I see claims that we know how the
| universe began or how it will end
|
| Absolutely, but you are interpreting it in the rewritten
| headline money making attention grabbing version.
|
| The original version of the claims always say that from some
| observation, experiments, and projection from known models it
| derives that the universe likely began this way, or will end
| that way, etc.
|
| That means, of all the going hypothesis, this might be the
| one with the best chances of being true, or close to the
| truth. It's not an absolute, but its the one that has the
| most chances due to the evidence behind it.
| didibus wrote:
| Science is a process, not a source of truth. It has a very
| practical lens, which is very utilitarian, does the knowledge
| and models allow for invention or prediction that works in our
| reality for some current need.
|
| The assumption is, you never really know, but if the model in
| which the theory says X, is able to predict something in the
| future or some experiment for Y, than that model appears to
| better approximate reality. Or is that knowledge and model
| allowing us to now do something we could not before, etc.
|
| Over time, it course corrects to improve its knowledge and
| models in ways that show better results for prediction or
| invention.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Belief is acting as if something, for which no evidence has
| been given, is true. Imagination, taken too far. No one is
| telling you to believe anything here, they're suggesting we
| search for clues to support or disprove a theory. Or don't,
| it's up to you.
| LordNerevar76 wrote:
| That's not the definition of belief. Belief can have various
| levels of different kinds of evidence behind it. Scientific,
| historical, philosophical, experiential, etc. A belief could
| have more or less scientific evidence than other beliefs, but
| rarely is belief predicated on no evidence whatsoever.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Do I really have to include the exact definition of every
| word I ever use? You know damn well I'm talking about blind
| faith and scientific evidence. And you know damn well OP is
| completely dismissing a theory because they're confusing it
| with a demand for blind faith. I don't care what people
| want to believe, but if they start labeling things
| incorrectly, I'm going to point it out.
| EasyMark wrote:
| But that's why science is so cool, it doesn't matter what we
| believe, it only matters if your theory fits the facts and
| makes good predictions. If it doesn't, you can chuck it in the
| bin without guilt. Unlike beliefs, which often can cause
| psychic trauma if reality doesn't match the belief of the
| individual.
| serf wrote:
| I think the phrase 'believe in science' is weird; it's nearly
| as problematic as "I have faith in science".
|
| It can be, but generally the concept of 'belief' isn't
| attributed to ground truths; it's just 'the truth', you rarely
| hear the phrase "I believe 2 and 2 is 4." , it's just '2 and 2
| is 4.' -- I think that's important.
|
| In fact, a lot of people insert the word 'believe' to insert a
| concept of self-doubt. "What was our last test results passing
| rate?" "I believe it was around 95 percent.."
|
| But semantics aside here's the real question : Why do you have
| some kind of notion that you should 'believe' anything without
| being able to understand it? Just trust in the world and those
| around you?
|
| We haven't figured origin yet, so let's get off that, but when
| a scientist of some sort makes a discovery, they release
| evidence and methods , and you decide to believe the
| conclusions without an understanding of the work -- well that's
| just a display of faith. Faith in the scientist themselves, the
| system they work within, and the society you're in.
|
| Which leads me to say this : If you make an effort to begin to
| understand the frameworks and systems which lead to scientific
| conclusions you can largely remove the faith and belief
| elements up until you hit the very highest spectrums of each
| field where speculation comes back into play.
|
| tl;dr : if you 'cant understand a shit', you don't put any leg-
| work in and make an effort to speak the language, you'll
| probably end back up in beliefs rather than an ever increasing
| codex of knowledge -- regardless of the field. That's okay --
| but it doesn't offer the same benefits as knowledge -- it just
| lets one say things like "I don't believe in any theory..."
| mkoubaa wrote:
| You don't believe in science, you believe in a metaphysical
| claim about science that you haven't articulated.
| HocusLocus wrote:
| Suggested hard sci-fi light reading: "Cosm" by Gregory Benford,
| 1999. A universe the size of a bowling ball created in a
| laboratory. The scientist responsible for it, keeping it safe and
| on the run from gvt spooks. They want to protect it for as long
| as it lasts, and since its time is as relative as its size, they
| won't have long to wait.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| Added.
|
| Opinions:
|
| A) I love all the scifi book recommendations that cone up on HN
|
| B) i wish you'd all stop recommending great and amazing books.
| My queue is so backlogged and jammed I'm never going to catch
| up.
| arto wrote:
| So many books, so little time...
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| If only we had an even bigger universe, we would have more
| time... is that how it works?
| figassis wrote:
| Like this? https://hacker-recommended-
| books.vercel.app/category/5/past-...
| dwaltrip wrote:
| That's a very cool app, but I think it is missing many,
| many references to books in HN comments? It only has like
| 15 total sci-fi books. I don't see any of my comments
| mentioning some sci-fi books.
| figassis wrote:
| It's a bit old. I bookmarked it a while ago, I don't
| think it has an update mechanism. A daily frontpage pull
| + AI parsing should be enough to keep it up to date.
| baw-bag wrote:
| There needs to be some kind of hackernews library or
| goodread. I have enjoyed many books (and some no so much)
| but always on the look out for books.
| lttlrck wrote:
| That would be fantastic.
| RGamma wrote:
| What's a couple dozen books (and video games) in my backlog
| when I have a thousand websites there?
| fibonachos wrote:
| Same here. My interest in the Sci-Fi genre started with an HN
| comment recommending Blindsight, by Peter Watts.
|
| Several comments and sci-fi series later, and I'm currently
| reading about spacefaring sentient spiders.
| donohoe wrote:
| Please share the queue!
| landtuna wrote:
| This sounds similar to Horton Hears a Who.
| jldl805 wrote:
| They exist in the same cinematic universe.
| Xophmeister wrote:
| I seem to remember a similar Star Trek episode; DS9, IIRC.
| ars wrote:
| I remember that, and the enormous plot hole that they could
| move the thing in a transporter!
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| "playing god", s2e17
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Rick and Morty episode (season 2 episode 6, 'The Ricks Must be
| Crazy') where it turns out rick has created a whole universe
| inside his spaceship battery who's whole purpose is to produce
| energy to run his spaceship. A scientist within this microverse
| creates a miniverse ....
| veqq wrote:
| Microcosmic God - Theodore Sturgeon (1941)
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Reminds me very much of Blowtorch Theory that was discussed here
| recently
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973
| profsummergig wrote:
| The big bang sounds like how a computer would interpret being
| turned on.
|
| Anyone else think this is what happened?
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Nope, it's just you applying the thing you think you know to
| something you don't know.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Computers refer to this as 'the Big Boot'.
| pontifier wrote:
| Imagine a being inside a turing machine wondering what came
| before it was turned on... implying the turing machine is
| even on and we're not just looking at the set of all possible
| rule sets on a similarly abstracted mathematical chart.
| profsummergig wrote:
| One day someone's going to reboot that computer and I'm going
| to lose all my carefully curated trauma.
| larodi wrote:
| it is funny the fact that author decided to explain who Galileo
| was
| johnwheeler wrote:
| So that's what that big blob in the Mandelbrot set is. It's a
| diagram of our fractal universe.
| ck2 wrote:
| There's a PBS Space Time for that (from three years ago)
|
| https://www.pbs.org/video/could-the-universe-be-inside-a-bla...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeRgFqbBM5E
| AppleBananaPie wrote:
| Will hacker news side with ChatGPT or real physicists? :D
|
| Love PBS space time !
| tug2024 wrote:
| Why does it always have to by "hyperbolic" instead of parabolic?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Very high "Time started when someone clicked start" - "cool, how
| did events happen before they clicked start?" factor title.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Big bang theory no longer excites me. As long as we can't explain
| consciousness all these theories are pointless. All theories mere
| appearances in consciousness including the universe and
| everything we experience.
|
| Consciousness has the property to render infinite universes and
| theories.
|
| But we have no clue how universe creates consciousness.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| First define consciousness such that the definition
| differentiates you from a computer with a webcam.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| You cannot define consciousness. You can only experience it.
| In fact consciousness is the only thing you will ever
| experience.
| saulpw wrote:
| Perhaps you should use 'sentience' or something more
| precise to mean 'qualia-experiencing'. The word
| 'consciousness' is quite overloaded and thus trips people
| up who haven't thought about this as extensively as you
| have. In particular many people take it to mean "self-
| awareness" (whether correctly or not), but it seems obvious
| to me that there are many sentient beings which lack self-
| awareness but still have an internal experience.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Yes. Self awareness is just another content inside
| consciousness.
| legohead wrote:
| You can measure various aspects of a computer. You can't
| measure consciousness.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| That's not a definition. Depending on the definition, it
| may be possible to measure it.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| You cannot measure consciousness. You are consciousness
| thinking of itself as the human. Measurement is an event
| appearing in consciousness done by humans.
|
| It's like persons inside GTA talking about measuring the
| Samsung monitor. It makes no sense cause they can never
| see the monitor or locate it. They appear in the monitor.
| consz wrote:
| You absolutely can measure "various aspects of
| consciousness" -- for example, "how much of the last 24h
| has this consciousness been awake" seems simple. So your
| definition seems kind of weak, could you be more precise?
|
| Conversely, in your definition, is consciousness the only
| "thing" that you would describe as not being able to
| measure various aspects about it? Are there any other
| objects or concepts which you also cannot measure various
| aspects about? If yes, what differentiates _those_ things
| from consciousness?
| everdrive wrote:
| Consciousness is a specific biological adaptation which is
| primarily focused in the management of social relationships,
| status, and the prolonged adolescence of children. (and their
| required care)
|
| There's no reason to think that consciousness is an important
| question in the objective sense; it just matters to people.
| (and rightfully so) People wondering about consciousness in the
| universe might be akin to dogs wondering what the big bang
| smelled like.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Are we both talking about the same thing?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
| woopsn wrote:
| What is an important question in the objective sense? Is
| life, or no because that just matter to life? It seems
| oxymoronic, "objective question", "objectively important".
|
| I don't follow GP's sort of solipsist (?) take, but would say
| question of whether big bang took place in a black hole is
| pointless compared to life/experience and how they arise.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Solipsism is the question whether it's all made up by my
| mind and only my mind exists.
|
| I am not interested in that.
|
| I am interested in the thing in which all the made up stuff
| appears. And the thoughts and mind appears. Even I appear
| in that.
| afarah1 wrote:
| Interesting read, but even if we assume the author is correct,
| and the cosmos formed as a black hole in a larger universe, the
| question remains, how did this larger universe formed, then?
| Might just be impossible to know.
| paleotrope wrote:
| A larger black hole
| alkonaut wrote:
| It's turtles all the way down
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Black holes all the way up.
| kgwxd wrote:
| if we assume the author is correct, it would cease to be a
| scientific endeavor.
| analog31 wrote:
| I'd put it a bit differently, that it remains a scientific
| endeavor, but leaves us in the same predicament as we're in
| now, which is the difficult work of forming a scientific
| theory that can only be tested indirectly.
| timewizard wrote:
| It may just be that the physical conditions of our universe
| just prior to the big bang are indistinguishable from that of
| the interior of black holes.
|
| In that sense black holes are areas where our universe has
| reverted from it's low entropy state all the way back to the
| initial nearly infinite entropy state.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| But who would be as cruel to put us here without giving us
| those answers? Who? And where did that entity come from?
| mrbungie wrote:
| Maybe there was no cruelty, and we were just plain matter
| that fell into our encapsulating black hole. Like what
| happenswith our own universes black holes.
| amelius wrote:
| There is no other entity. We're nothing. An algebra of
| nothing. Combine nothing with nothing in various ways (like
| S-terms) and it gives you physics, among many other things.
| From the inside we see a universe, from the outside you would
| see nothing.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| As an agnostic I agree, but none the less it is a whole,
| absurd joke to be here without any answers and I demand
| someone to answer me.
| largbae wrote:
| We apologize for the inconvenience.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| This needs to be escalated. Who is your manager?
| mindcrime wrote:
| You are Number 6.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Be seeing you
| foobar1962 wrote:
| That's _almost_ a HHGG reference.
| satiric wrote:
| If you agree with the above comment, doesn't that make
| you an atheist, not agnostic?
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I used to think that I was an atheist, but I realized
| nothing can be proven presently in any way even if I have
| opinions, so I decided I have to be agnostic.
|
| So e.g. I have hunches that there's no way there is a God
| that's in any way as religions might think it is, and I
| do have a hunch that we somehow happened from probably
| deterministic chain reactions, but it's a hunch, it's
| hard to call it a belief, or it's hard to think that I
| believe there is no God. It's more like a hunch or a
| thought. Because for all I know we could be some Alien's
| schoolwork project, but I don't think we are.
|
| In any case as a human I feel like I have evolutionary
| drive to hold someone responsible, so again I demand
| whoever is behind all of that to give us those answers.
| But that is my evolutionary drive, not that I think
| there's actually someone like that. It's the conflict of
| evolutionary brain vs the logical thoughts brain.
|
| These different parts in the brain can also agree to many
| different things, which can ultimately make me much more
| agreeable person, if I decide to pick one of those
| opinions.
|
| But I can be very disagreeable too, because I think Big
| Five said it can lead to success?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > I used to think that I was an atheist, but I realized
| nothing can be proven presently in any way even if I have
| opinions, so I decided I have to be agnostic.
|
| As an atheist myself, I find your type of agnosticism to
| be overly generous to the religious theories. Do you also
| think that Russell's Teapot might exist or do you have a
| limit of unlikeliness that you draw the line at?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
| amelius wrote:
| Why didn't anyone tell Musk to put a teapot in space
| instead of a Tesla?
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >So e.g. I have hunches that there's no way there is a
| God that's in any way as religions might think it is, and
| I do have a hunch that we somehow happened from probably
| deterministic chain reactions, but it's a hunch, it's
| hard to call it a belief, or it's hard to think that I
| believe there is no God.
|
| Saying that you know for certain that there is no god(s)
| is exactly the same as saying you know for sure that
| there is a god(s). Being agnostic is the realization that
| you can't be sure one way or the other. We are not
| omniscient and our reasoning abilities are not flawless.
| You might have your strong suspicions one way or the
| other about whether there is a god, but if you aren't
| certain (as many people are) I consider that as agnostic.
| foobar1962 wrote:
| Atheists are people that don't _bleieve_ there is a God.
| Agnostics are people who don 't _know_ they are atheists.
| -- Aron Ra
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I can't 100% prove that I'm an atheist, so I'm definitely
| agnostic. The brain structure is constantly evolving and
| it's unclear how that exactly works. What is a "belief"
| any way, and what does it matter for?
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| That just seems to me a terribly flawed statement. I'm
| agnostic. Maybe there is a god, maybe there isn't, who am
| I to know? It always seems like incredible hubris to me
| when someone claims not only to know for certain one way
| or the other, but project their baseless beliefs onto
| others.
| haswell wrote:
| In practice, atheists are people who think they _know_
| there is no god. Agnostics are people who realize they
| don't know much at all about anything related to the
| origins of things and realize they don't want to hold
| unprovable dogmatic beliefs like the religious people do.
|
| I considered myself an atheist for most of my life. As I
| got older and learned more, this shifted. These days I
| consider myself agnostic.
|
| If atheism was defined as believing _a specific kind of
| god_ (e.g. the "father god in the sky that created all
| things in 6 days") does not exist, I'd still consider
| myself an atheist.
|
| But my agnosticism comes from an acknowledgment of our
| fundamentally limited understanding of certain aspects of
| existence, and the implications of that specific lack of
| understanding.
|
| It's not as if I believe "well maybe the god of Abraham
| could be real after all but I don't know" (it seems far
| more likely that if there's a god, he/she/it/they are
| closer to being the stuff of existence than some
| standalone entity). It's more that I withhold belief
| entirely and don't make absolute claims that are
| philosophically untenable.
|
| If we figure out how consciousness works or achieve
| breakthroughs in physics, I could imagine calling myself
| an atheist again. Until then, agnosticism seems like the
| most intellectually honest position.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Oh that was me - I figured if I let you guys work it out for
| yourselves, it'd be more meaningful or whatever.
|
| As for where I came from, I gotta admit I feel curious about
| that too, but mostly I'm just happy to be here. Real excited
| to see what you do next.
| noworriesnate wrote:
| I believe you, could you please give me 1000 upvotes? If
| you do I promise to spread the good news everywhere.
| tstrimple wrote:
| This is why the "but the universe couldn't spawn out of
| nothing!" style arguments are so annoying. They completely
| accept that an all powerful all knowing entity could exist
| for all of time and not need a creator without any supporting
| evidence. But the origin of the universe specifically needs
| to be explained in detail or science is a sham.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| My theory: There's no such thing as before and after "it". It
| is it.
| ckdot wrote:
| Block Universe. The more you think about it, the more
| probable it seems. Why should a universe pass time like a
| movie, if all moments could exist simultaneously? If there is
| no time, and it's just a simulation formed in our brain,
| there doesn't have to be a beginning nor end.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| However, a complete lack of time doesn't fit with our
| observations and we can measure relativistic effects where
| time gets distorted (e.g. fast moving particles that last
| much longer than you'd expect due to relativity)
| jiggawatts wrote:
| GR is compatible with a block universe. If anything, the
| relativity of simultaneity strongly suggests that we live
| in a block universe!
| ttctciyf wrote:
| What about "bit"? Doesn't that come before "it", Mr Wheeler?
| :)
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I feel like quantum physics is gently pointing us towards the
| idea "everything you can imagine is real at once". As in, all
| possible universes and physics systems and whatnot do exist in
| some sense of this word, and we happen to inhabit one. Just
| like Earth is a totally unremarkable planet in a totally
| unremarkable solar system in a totally unremarkable galaxy,
| except we popped up here so for a long time we thought there's
| something deeply special about Earth.
| layer8 wrote:
| Quantum mechanics doesn't imply at all that everything
| possible is actual. That is a misconception.
|
| I do agree that it makes sense, but not because of what
| quantum mechanics says.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Yes, it doesn't imply, but parallel universes is one of
| possible interpretations.
| layer8 wrote:
| If you are referring to the many-worlds interpretation,
| that's exactly what I'm talking about. There is no
| implication in many-worlds that every conceivable world
| exists as a branch of the actual wave function.
|
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44253344.
| notfed wrote:
| I fail to see how this doesn't lead to "every possible
| world". Maybe some edge cases are ruled out, but it seems
| to imply every possible world as far as what that means
| to the imagination.
| layer8 wrote:
| It is constrained by whatever you take as the initial
| conditions. The quantum state of the universe is a
| specific and precise thing, as well as how it evolves
| over time. It can be taken as a vector in Hilbert space
| that evolves according to the Schrodinger equation. There
| is no implication that the resulting path will have it
| visit every point in Hilbert space, or that the slices of
| the wave function that represent individual "worlds"
| somehow cover all worlds present in the unvisited points.
| grumple wrote:
| The math does imply infinite universes. There are many
| physicists who believe that all these worlds do exist.
|
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-
| worlds_interpretation
|
| And a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzKWfw68M5U&
| list=PLsPUh22kYm...
| layer8 wrote:
| Infinite universes doesn't imply every possible universe.
| I don't disagree about them existing.
| decae wrote:
| Not only does the sun not rotate around us, the rest of the
| galaxy doesn't even care to think that we exist. An
| interesting evolution in thought nonetheless.
| Rattled wrote:
| I find it more useful to anchor the concept of "real" in what
| one has direct access to. Beyond that there are many ways to
| describe our shared reality and the space of possible
| realities, including the past and future, some of which are
| more real than others, and go far beyond what we can imagine.
| Quantum physics gives us a language to expand what we can
| describe and imagine.
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe the larger universe is identical to the contained
| universe, like a fractal. That would solve the question. ;)
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Would be fun if we find a function f(state, time) such that
| for f(singularity, 14 billion years) we get our current
| universe. i.e.: every singularity turns into our exact
| universe.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Implying there's no such thing as randomness, at any level?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| No randomness when taking everything into account. I'm
| not an expert but I still hold out hope that if you know
| more about the universe than humanity does everything
| will be known to be deterministic.
|
| Also implies that all singularities of the same mass are
| identical. I think this should be less bold of a
| statement. Let's speculate that the more mass in the
| singularity would correspond to higher iterations in
| something like the Mandelbrot set. More of a resolution
| enhancement.
|
| More if a scifi prompt than anything else to be fair.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| That would mean that beings getting to know everything
| about the universe at some point and realizing it's
| deterministic was always pre-determined
| tiltowait wrote:
| While I doubt you're unique in this, I think this is the
| first time I've seen someone say they _hope_ there's no
| such thing as free will.
|
| Can you explain why you hope everything is deterministic?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Might just be a reflection of my enjoyment of life. I've
| been very lucky on most aspects. Perhaps if things were
| worse I'd wish for the knowledge that it could have gone
| differently.
|
| But also it would be super trippy and interesting.
| Knowing just the mass of the universe you'd be able to
| peer into any time, past or present, and see exactly what
| happened. But then what happens around areas where people
| look into the local time? This happens in the show Devs.
| So not at all a new idea in scifi.
| nwienert wrote:
| Not much concern for all the people less lucky than you?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Just explaining where my ideas on determinism might come
| from. It's not as though I can change the laws of physics
| to be one way or the other.
| downboots wrote:
| Might I suggest Brouwer's theorem while we figure it out
| joshdavham wrote:
| Could you elaborate? It's been a while since I've done any
| real analysis/etc.
| downboots wrote:
| A 2D version: If you have a map of the place you're in,
| there must be a point on the map that's in the exact
| place it represents.
| mikrl wrote:
| Then we gotta find the black hole in our universe that
| contains that universe, and nuke it before they come to take
| our fluids!
| revskill wrote:
| Why selfish ???
| bregma wrote:
| It's imperative we maintain Purity Of Essence. It will
| bring Peace On Earth.
| skeaker wrote:
| Might not be the best idea, unless we just so happen to be
| all the way at the top of the sequence[1]...
|
| 1 - https://qntm.org/responsibility
| postalrat wrote:
| That's a very 3D way to think of a universe.
| dboreham wrote:
| It's just recursion in the simulator.
| conradev wrote:
| This theory is in the same space:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
|
| I don't think it has a hypothesis for the origin, though
| phatskat wrote:
| See also the recent HN discussion about Blowtorch Theory,
| which has roots in (but doesn't necessitate) CNS
| conradev wrote:
| building on ten years of earlier research for a book on
| cosmological natural selection
|
| This is awesome, thank you! I'm interested in the general
| space
|
| I loved this overview on our current approaches to measure
| the expansion: https://youtu.be/WNyY1ZYSzoU
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| Just casually adding the biggest question its possible to ask
| randomtoast wrote:
| Questions like what was before the big bang or what is outside
| of our universe seem to be quite natural. However, we still
| don't know if these questions are well defined and have a
| proper meaning. For instance, a few hundred years ago, one
| might have asked, what happens if I go to the edge of the
| (flat) earth? Or one might ask: What is north of the north
| pole?
| timonofathens wrote:
| > What is north of the north pole?
|
| I really like this analogy for "what is outside of our
| universe", thank you
| helsinki wrote:
| Thanks, GPT 4.1. It told me the same thing twelve hours ago
| when I asked it what was at the top. "what's north of the
| North Pole"?
| randomtoast wrote:
| It is well possible that GPT-4.1 references Sean Carroll,
| either directly or by regurgitation.
|
| > One sometimes hears the claim that the Big Bang was the
| beginning of both time and space; that to ask about
| spacetime "before the Big Bang" is like asking about land
| "north of the North Pole."
|
| Source:
| https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/writings/dtung/
|
| I'm a regular listener of his Mindscape podcast, and that's
| where I got this phrase. I can highly recommend his
| podcast: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
| sullivantrevor wrote:
| my feeling is that the beginning of the universe is so
| unbelievably unexplainable and strange that we will never truly
| understand its origin
| GodelNumbering wrote:
| This brings to mind something I keep thinking about for years
| (mostly from watching too many physics videos).
|
| - Gravity "slows" the time down, gravitational singularity should
| bring the time to a halt
|
| - Suppose there is a quantum process that makes the true
| singularity impossible, so all black holes immediately expand
| right back
|
| - Looking at it from our time scales, even if the singularity
| existed for a moment, it would appear that "infinite" time has
| passed while from the black hole's perspective, the expansion was
| instantaneous.
|
| - From earth's perspective, if the singularity ever existed in a
| black hole, it stands to reason that when the time "resumes" from
| a black hole expansion, it won't fall into any of our known
| timelines since infinite time would have passed.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Along those lines, makes me wonder if the "bang" is in fact the
| fact that after the time compression, all matter/energy is
| effectively arriving at the same point all at once.
|
| Assuming our universe eventually collapses into a few black
| holes, perhaps the spawn of a new universe is simply all the
| matter and energy of our universe arriving at a new point in...
| time? an infinite amount of time in the future.
|
| Also, really mind bending to think the universe may just be an
| infinite series of black hole explosions with no beginning. It
| is because it always was.
| avmich wrote:
| > But how come Penrose's theorems forbid out such outcomes? It's
| all down to a rule called the quantum exclusion principle, which
| states that no two identical particles known as fermions can
| occupy the same quantum state (such as angular momentum, or
| "spin").
|
| > And we show that this rule prevents the particles in the
| collapsing matter from being squeezed indefinitely. As a result,
| the collapse halts and reverses. The bounce is not only possible
| - it's inevitable under the right conditions.
|
| Then how comes the neutron stars collapse into black holes
| despite obeying the exclusion principle?
| nick3443 wrote:
| Is it because the black hole is a macro distortion of spacetime
| and not a local quantum property?
| 1270018080 wrote:
| With enough mass, there is enough energy from gravity to put
| all fermions into different states, so the collapse continues
| truculent wrote:
| Are you suggesting that the authors' "bounce" would only
| happen if the energy was not enough to put them into
| different states?
| colechristensen wrote:
| >Then how comes the neutron stars collapse into black holes
| despite obeying the exclusion principle?
|
| One of the ways to overcome one of the levels of this
| degeneracy pressure is electron capture which is the opposite
| of a kind of beta decay. Squeeze hard enough and a proton
| combines with an electron to form a neutron and a neutrino.
|
| But there are several proposed levels of degenerate matter in
| neutron stars, the idea being that one (final?) level of this
| degenerate matter is dense enough to make an object smaller
| than its schwarzschild radius. Uncertainty is high because we
| have no current methods to observe any of this kind of matter.
|
| What goes on inside the schwarzschild radius is another mystery
| we don't have answers from, but there are lots of ideas with
| various levels of legitimacy.
|
| Quantum physics in and around singularities or things we think
| are singularities is not understood.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| _Then how comes the neutron stars collapse into black holes
| despite obeying the exclusion principle?_
|
| Different exclusion principle. For neutron stars, it is the
| Pauli exclusion principle (IIRC) which creates neutron
| degeneracy pressure. Enough mass and gravity can overcome it
| forming a black hole. The article is talking about quantum
| exclusion which happens at a much smaller scale. I don't know
| much about it because that exceeds the limits of my degree.
| holoduke wrote:
| I still don't understand from the article why the bounce effect
| results in an accelerated expansion of space time. Is the black
| hole (our universe) in the parent universe getting bigger? And
| why is that non linear?
| normalaccess wrote:
| I've always liked the Idea that black holes accelerate matter
| faster than light behind the event horizon propelling it back in
| time creating a singular white hole at the first moment.
|
| There are many many reasons why this is a dumb idea and it's just
| as much of a paradox as any other naturalistic creation theory.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| So the expansion comes from the bounce. And we are in a dormant
| supermassive black hole of sorts. How would it look like in our
| world if the mother blackhole is actively gobbling up matter from
| the parent universe?
| wrcwill wrote:
| while it doesn't take away from the article, i find it worrying
| that it seems mostly written with chatgpt
|
| "This is not just a technical glitch; it's a deep theoretical
| problem that suggests we don't really understand the beginning at
| all."
|
| "The bounce is not only possible - it's inevitable under the
| right conditions."
|
| ugh
| AppleBananaPie wrote:
| There was a physicist who made a video making fun of crackpot
| theories from engineers and reading the comments we're all
| happy to put forth our completely unsubstantiated opinions with
| zero understanding of the math and observations involved
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I thought the Pauli exclusion principle is why we have neutron
| stars, ie the degeneracy of a star results in the fusion of
| electrons and protons to form neutrons and emit neutrinos.
|
| What is preventing the collapse in this case and results in a
| bounce?
| ahuth wrote:
| Cool article!
|
| I can hear Sean Carrol saying, though, that:
|
| 1. We know general relativity isn't complete, because it doesn't
| take quantum mechanics into account.
|
| 2. We can't say whether this is right because we don't know the
| quantum theory of gravity.
|
| But I don't actually know what I'm talking about.
| truculent wrote:
| > The black hole universe also offers a new perspective on our
| place in the cosmos. In this framework, our entire observable
| universe lies inside the interior of a black hole formed in some
| larger "parent" universe.
|
| What specifically is meant by interior? Does this mean "within
| the event horizon" or something else?
| brtkwr wrote:
| Notebook LM version
| https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/bb55f273-a5e8-461a-b7...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Which suggests that:
|
| 1. You can have black holes inside black holes.
|
| 2. Potentially each black hole is a universe - although some are
| much smaller and less interesting than others.
| hateful wrote:
| I've always had this idea that perhaps the whole universe had
| already collapsed into many black holes and perhaps each galaxy
| was actually formed via hawking radiation. Then our galaxy came
| out of Sagittarius A*.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Does this model predict the CMB peaks?
| taeric wrote:
| I'm curious on what is "at stake" with this? The close lists a
| couple of predictions that this can lead to. I'm assuming they
| will be important in a far future time? Or do these help with
| some more near term problems?
|
| Edit: I hasten to add that I'm not asking to undermine the
| research. Seems the more the merrier, there. Genuinely curious on
| what some of this could lead to.
| gghoop wrote:
| I haven't read the paper, it's probably well beyond me, but I
| have always felt that the presumed existence of a singularity had
| to be the result of incomplete theory.
| blindriver wrote:
| Research? Sounds more like speculation.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Don't suppose you read the paper..?
| tengbretson wrote:
| It's probably best not to jump to conclusions until we see it
| replicated in another universe.
| jarend wrote:
| The article is based on a physics paper (arXiv:2505.23877), not
| management theory or institutional metaphors.
|
| What the paper actually proposes is that the Big Bang may have
| been a gravitational bounce inside a black hole formed in a
| higher-dimensional parent universe. Quantum degeneracy pressure
| stops the collapse before a singularity forms. From the outside,
| it looks like a black hole. From the inside, it evolves as a 13.8
| billion year expansion. That is general relativity applied across
| frames.
|
| Simply put this is a relativistic collapse model with quantum
| corrections that avoids singularities and produces testable
| predictions, including small negative curvature and a natural
| inflation-like phase.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| So, could the same interaction create planar universes inside
| our own black holes? Linear universes inside those as well?
|
| It's incredible how big a 4-D universe would have to be to
| contain our own, even crazier if there are more levels; but our
| own universe could contain easily uncountable planar universes.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Isn't it more a matter of how space is folded in higher
| dimensions rather than an increase in volume that accounts
| for containment? There is plenty of space in the corners:
|
| [0]: https://observablehq.com/@tophtucker/theres-plenty-of-
| room-i...
| thechao wrote:
| Sigh: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23877
| eggn00dles wrote:
| seems like this is just giving up on quantum gravity and saying
| the pauli exclusion principle will hold regardless of the
| gravitational force.
| Agentlien wrote:
| > What the paper _actually_ proposes [...]
|
| (Emphasis mine)
|
| I haven't read the paper yet, but this sounds like a (good)
| summary of exactly what the article is saying. It makes me
| wonder what, if anything, you feel is different from the way
| you put it and the way it is explained in the article? As a
| layman they seem the same to me.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| The article was written by the main author of the paper, so
| yes, it's a good summary :)
| Agentlien wrote:
| I meant that the parent comment to mine was a good summary
| of the article.
|
| However, the comment was worded as if it meant to highlight
| some difference between how the article summarized the
| paper and what the paper is actually saying. Since I
| couldn't see a difference between the above poster's
| summary and that in the article, I was curious what I was
| missing.
| empiricus wrote:
| Looking at the paper, I don't see any higher dimensions of the
| parent universe, it is still using the same 4D General
| relativity framework for the parent.
| potamic wrote:
| They have basically disproved Penrose-Hawking's theories of
| singularity? Isn't that like a pretty big deal? To people
| working in this field, what is the reaction to this paper?
| leiroigh wrote:
| >in a higher-dimensional parent universe
|
| That's incorrect: The parent universe is not higher-
| dimensional, it's the same good old 3+1 as our universe.
|
| What they propose is: Let's take our good old GR, and start
| with a (large, dilute) compactly supported spherically
| collapsing collapsing cloud of matter. During that, you get an
| event horizon; afterwards, this looks like a normal black hole
| outside, and you never see the internal evolution again
| ("frozen star", it's an event horizon). Inside, you have the
| matter cloud, then a large shell of vacuum, then the event
| horizon.
|
| Quantum mechanics suggests that degeneracy pressure gives you
| an equation of state that looks like "dilute = dust" first, and
| at some point "oh no, incompressible".
|
| They figure out that under various assumptions (and I think
| approximations), they get a solution where the inside bounces
| due to the degeneracy pressure. Viewed from inside, they
| identify that there should be an apparent cosmological
| constant, with the cosmological horizon somehow (?)
| corresponding to the BH horizon as viewed from the outside.
|
| All along the article, they plug in various rough numbers, and
| they claim that our observed universe (with its scale, mass,
| age, apparent cosmological constant, etc) is compatible with
| this mechanism, even hand-waving at pertubations and CMB an-
| isotropies.
|
| This would be super cool if it worked!
|
| But I'm not convinced that the model truly works (internally)
| yet, too much hand-waving. And the matching to our real
| observed universe is also not yet convincing (to me). That
| being said, I'm out of the cosmology game for some years, and
| I'm a mathematician, not a physicist, so take my view with a
| generous helping of salt.
|
| (I'm commenting from "reading" the arxiv preprint, but from not
| following all computations and references)
|
| PS. I think that they also don't comment on stability near the
| bounce. But I think that regime is known to have BKL-style
| anisotropic instability. Now it may be that with the right
| parameters, the bounce occurs before these can rear their
| heads, and it might even be that I missed that they or one of
| their references argue that this is the case if you plug in
| numbers matched to our observed universe.
|
| But the model would still be amazing if it all worked out, even
| if it was unstable.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > with the cosmological horizon somehow (?) corresponding to
| the BH horizon as viewed from the outside.
|
| That's not mentioned in the summary. After inflation the
| event horizon would not exist.
| cbolton wrote:
| You mean small positive curvature.
| Noelia- wrote:
| When I first heard the idea that our universe began inside a
| black hole from another one, it felt like something out of a sci-
| fi movie. But the more I sit with it, the more it starts to feel
| like the universe is quietly nudging us, saying it has a much
| bigger story to tell.
|
| If the Big Bang was just a moment in someone else's universe,
| then maybe everything we know is just one chapter in a book far
| larger than we can imagine.
| J253 wrote:
| So if our universe is inside a black hole from a parent universe,
| does that mean every black hole in our universe contains its own
| child universe? We could be living in cosmic Russian dolls all
| the way down?
| EMM_386 wrote:
| These type of 'theories' I dislike only because they don't get to
| the root of the problem.
|
| It is the same for 'multiverse' where that is used to explain
| literally anything 'it's like that in this universe but not the
| others'.
|
| Sure, we can get creative and explain the Anthropic Principle by
| mentioning the multiverse.
|
| But none of this answers how something comes from nothing.
|
| Not the vacuum of space and its 'quantum foam' where particles
| jump in from nowhere.
|
| Because that's not 'nothing'.
|
| One of these nothings ... such as level 9. No possibilities.
|
| https://closertotruth.com/news/levels-of-nothing-by-robert-l...
| jakeinspace wrote:
| I won't touch level 8/9 nothings, other than to say I don't
| think they're coherent. But I am of the metaphysical camp that
| thinks there will be at least some small ground truth which
| physical law or object which cannot be reduced, an axiom of
| nature. Physics unfortunately will probably always be limited
| in distinguishing between basic facts which are truly
| irreducible, and those which are simply limits of our
| observational abilities. That's the thing that bothers me; even
| if there were a single beautiful law of nature that just IS,
| one which we actually manage to postulate based on evidence, we
| will never know for sure. GR definitely has a beautiful
| mystique, it's a shame that it's most likely just a
| mathematical approximation.
| ajuc wrote:
| > But none of this answers how something comes from nothing
|
| Why do you assume there was nothing?
| beginnings wrote:
| give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest
| downboots wrote:
| Bertrand Russell is the pope
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Do we live inside a black hole?
| hulitu wrote:
| > Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black
| hole
|
| Is this OnlyFans ?
| lutusp wrote:
| > Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black
| hole
|
| The title's use of the word "research," and the paper's content,
| suggest the idea resembles science more than speculation. But in
| fact, the paper has no observational evidence, nor a proposal for
| acquiring evidence, to distinguish it from other similar
| speculations.
|
| To put it simply, at the center of a black hole is a singularity,
| a domain where existing theories can offer no guidance. So a new
| idea about singularities -- about black holes -- should suggest a
| testable property, to distinguish it from other similar ideas.
|
| I say "idea" here to avoid use of the term "theory," which in
| science requires observational evidence to move past the realm of
| speculation.
|
| Don't get me wrong -- speculations have an important role to play
| in science. But tendentious phrases like "research suggests"
| wrongly imply the presence of something more than speculation.
| whatever1 wrote:
| So, the whole thing is a recursion, and the only thing left to
| see is how deep is the stack.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Wouldn't it have to be a black hole anyway given how much matter
| was concentrated in a small point?
| Valgrim wrote:
| A few years ago a popular idea was that our universe existed as
| an hologram on the surface of a black hole.
|
| Recently I saw also a theory that black hole might not, in fact,
| exist as we thought, and may be instead something called
| 'gravastars', where large stars do not collapse in an infinite
| point but instead the mass reaches a maximum density and hardness
| and become sorts of empty bubbles.
|
| Now this. It's not exactly a new idea, I remember reading about
| black hole cosmology 10 years ago.
|
| Sooo... My uneducated, pop-sci fueled imagination now sees the
| universe as a mathematical function of a fractal looking like a
| shell with patterns on it, and those patterns interact or 'fold'
| in a way where the patterns themselves can be thought of as
| shells with patterns on them, and each shell creates something
| that, from the inside, looks like a new dimension of space or
| time, and what we think of as black holes are the next fold. Does
| that make sense?
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| It makes sense to me... I think. And I like this vision as
| well. It would explain the big bang (initial black hole
| formation), why the universe is expending (at probably non
| constant rates over time) which would be the black hole
| "ingesting" matter and growing and maybe also why time and
| space are one. Same as you, a take from complete uneducated
| pop-sci fueled imagination.
| purpleidea wrote:
| I always pondered about everything in our universe getting
| swallowed up continuously merging black holes until all of a
| sudden "everything" is "in" the black hole and then suddenly
| that's your big bang, and everything starts all over.
|
| I don't have the Ph.D physics/maths skills to work out the
| plausibility of any of that (or variations on that) but I've
| always felt I've been good at coming up with ideas.
|
| Any physicist wants to work with me, I'm
| https://purpleidea.com/contact/
| misja111 wrote:
| > But how come Penrose's theorems forbid out such outcomes? It's
| all down to a rule called the quantum exclusion principle, which
| states that no two identical particles known as fermions can
| occupy the same quantum state (such as angular momentum, or
| "spin").
|
| > And we show that this rule prevents the particles in the
| collapsing matter from being squeezed indefinitely. As a result,
| the collapse halts and reverses. The bounce is not only possible
| - it's inevitable under the right conditions.
|
| Do I understand right, that this would mean that every formation
| of a black hole would result in a bounce?
| scotty79 wrote:
| I've heard about interesting theory. Since we observe large early
| galaxies, to explain them scientists postulate that they must
| have grown very quickly. But recently some scientists calculated
| how much light would such quickly growing galaxies could have
| emitted. And it turned out that this light after being dispersed
| by the dust and redshifted by the expansion of the universe it
| should have contribute to CMB, up to 100% of it's observed
| intensity. What's interesting they didn't make any assumptions
| outside of established modern cosmology. Just So it's entirely
| possible that CMB is something completely different than what we
| believed.
| rednik06 wrote:
| More info available.
|
| TARS is a new theoretical framework that fundamentally reimagines
| the foundations of physics. Instead of assuming that reality is
| made of pre-existing entities (particles, fields, or spacetime
| itself), TARS posits that everything that exists is, at root, a
| relation. In this view, the universe is a dynamic network of
| coherence relations, and what we perceive as space, time, matter,
| and even physical laws, are emergent phenomena arising from this
| underlying relational web.
|
| 1. Motivation: The Crisis in Fundamental Physics
|
| Modern physics, despite its immense successes, faces deep
| unresolved problems:
|
| The incompatibility between General Relativity (GR) and Quantum
| Field Theory (QFT)--the so-called "quantum gravity problem."
|
| The mystery of singularities (in black holes and at the Big
| Bang), the nature of time, and the unexplained phenomena of dark
| matter and dark energy.
|
| The lack of a unifying principle that can reconcile the
| fragmented domains of current theories.
|
| TARS responds to these challenges by proposing a radical
| ontological shift: relations, not entities, are fundamental. This
| shift is not just a new model, but a new grammar for describing
| reality.
|
| 2. Ontological Foundations: Radical Relationalism
|
| Core Postulate:
|
| "All that exists is relation."
|
| There are no absolute, isolated objects. The very identity of any
| "entity" (particle, field, law) is defined by its pattern of
| relations with all others.
|
| The universe is fundamentally non-separable: no part can be fully
| understood in isolation.
|
| This principle generalizes quantum entanglement to a universal
| ontological status.
|
| Realism and Symbiosis
|
| Symbiotic Realism: Entities and their properties are co-
| constituted through mutual relations. There are no intrinsic
| properties, only extrinsic, dynamically co-created ones.
|
| The observer is not external, but an active node in the
| relational web. Knowledge itself is a process of coherent
| participation in this network.
|
| 3. Mathematical Formalism
|
| 3.1. From Discrete Relations to Emergent Fields
|
| At the most fundamental level, reality consists of discrete
| coherence relations, denoted x_{ij} (or quantum operators
| x_{ij}), between abstract nodes.
|
| At emergent scales, these relations manifest as a continuous
| coherence field ph_{mn}(x), a symmetric tensor field encoding the
| density and structure of relational coherence at each emergent
| spacetime point.
|
| The emergent metric is given by: g_{mn}(ph) = e^{2aph} e_{mn}
|
| The Symbiotic Action is:
|
| S[ph]=[?]d4x-g(ph)[12gmn(ph)([?]mph)([?]nph)-V(ph)]S[ph]=[?]d4x-g
| (ph)[21gmn(ph)([?]mph)([?]nph)-V(ph)]
|
| where V(ph) is the relational potential.
|
| 3.2. Dynamics: Coherence, Dissonance, and Self-Organization
|
| Local coherence (x_l) and global coherence (x_c) quantify the
| degree of relational compatibility.
|
| The difference Dx = |x_c - x_l| acts as a "relational tension,"
| driving the system toward higher global coherence.
|
| When Dx exceeds a threshold, critical reorganizations occur
| (mediated by an operator F0), leading to emergent order, the
| arrow of time, and the formation of physical laws.
|
| 3.3. Quantization and Emergence
|
| TARS aspires to a quantum theory of relational fields, where
| quantization applies to the relations themselves, not to fields
| on a pre-existing spacetime.
|
| The challenge is to mathematically derive how spacetime, matter,
| and interactions emerge from the dynamics of x_{ij}.
|
| 4. Phenomenological Implications
|
| TARS provides new perspectives and solutions to major physical
| puzzles:
|
| Singularity Resolution: The regularization of black hole and
| cosmological singularities emerges naturally from the relational
| dynamics.
|
| Dark Matter/Energy: Gravitational anomalies are interpreted as
| regions of relational coherence deficit, not as unseen particles.
|
| Inflation and Cosmology: The early universe's rapid expansion is
| modeled as a phase transition in the global coherence field.
|
| Black Hole Evaporation: Predicts a slower, non-singular
| evaporation process, leaving stable remnants.
|
| Consciousness and Life: Interpreted as high-order reflexivity in
| relational networks--consciousness is a self-referential
| coherence loop.
|
| 5. Scientific Achievements to Date
|
| Full mathematical formalism: Action, field equations, emergent
| metric, and relational potentials.
|
| Analytical derivations: For black hole interiors, dark matter
| effects, and cosmic inflation.
|
| Numerical simulations: Demonstrating the propagation of coherence
| fronts and self-organization.
|
| Distinct predictions: Such as black hole evaporation profiles and
| singularity avoidance, differentiating TARS from standard models.
|
| White paper and technical documentation: Comprehensive and
| available for peer review.
|
| 6. Meta-Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Reach
|
| TARS is not just a new physical theory; it is a meta-framework
| for understanding emergence, organization, and knowledge itself.
| Its principles can be applied to biology, neuroscience, social
| systems, and artificial intelligence, wherever complex relational
| networks give rise to emergent phenomena.
|
| 7. Conclusion
|
| TARS offers a radical, mathematically grounded, and
| phenomenologically rich alternative to current foundational
| physics. By shifting the focus from entities to relations, it
| provides a unified language for the emergence of space, time,
| matter, and law. Its predictions are testable, its formalism is
| rigorous, and its implications reach far beyond physics, offering
| a new way to organize scientific and philosophical knowledge.
| rednik06 wrote:
| TARS is a new theoretical framework that fundamentally reimagines
| the foundations of physics. Instead of assuming that reality is
| made of pre-existing entities (particles, fields, or spacetime
| itself), TARS posits that everything that exists is, at root, a
| relation. In this view, the universe is a dynamic network of
| coherence relations, and what we perceive as space, time, matter,
| and even physical laws, are emergent phenomena arising from this
| underlying relational web.
|
| 1. Motivation: The Crisis in Fundamental Physics
|
| Modern physics, despite its immense successes, faces deep
| unresolved problems:
|
| The incompatibility between General Relativity (GR) and Quantum
| Field Theory (QFT)--the so-called "quantum gravity problem."
|
| The mystery of singularities (in black holes and at the Big
| Bang), the nature of time, and the unexplained phenomena of dark
| matter and dark energy.
|
| The lack of a unifying principle that can reconcile the
| fragmented domains of current theories.
|
| TARS responds to these challenges by proposing a radical
| ontological shift: relations, not entities, are fundamental. This
| shift is not just a new model, but a new grammar for describing
| reality.
|
| 2. Ontological Foundations: Radical Relationalism
|
| Core Postulate:
|
| "All that exists is relation."
|
| There are no absolute, isolated objects. The very identity of any
| "entity" (particle, field, law) is defined by its pattern of
| relations with all others.
|
| The universe is fundamentally non-separable: no part can be fully
| understood in isolation.
|
| This principle generalizes quantum entanglement to a universal
| ontological status.
|
| Realism and Symbiosis
|
| Symbiotic Realism: Entities and their properties are co-
| constituted through mutual relations. There are no intrinsic
| properties, only extrinsic, dynamically co-created ones.
|
| The observer is not external, but an active node in the
| relational web. Knowledge itself is a process of coherent
| participation in this network.
|
| 3. Mathematical Formalism
|
| 3.1. From Discrete Relations to Emergent Fields
|
| At the most fundamental level, reality consists of discrete
| coherence relations, denoted x_{ij} (or quantum operators
| x_{ij}), between abstract nodes.
|
| At emergent scales, these relations manifest as a continuous
| coherence field ph_{mn}(x), a symmetric tensor field encoding the
| density and structure of relational coherence at each emergent
| spacetime point.
|
| The emergent metric is given by: g_{mn}(ph) = e^{2aph} e_{mn}
|
| The Symbiotic Action is:
|
| S[ph]=[?]d4x-g(ph)[12gmn(ph)([?]mph)([?]nph)-V(ph)]S[ph]=[?]d4x-g
| (ph)[21gmn(ph)([?]mph)([?]nph)-V(ph)]
|
| where V(ph) is the relational potential.
|
| 3.2. Dynamics: Coherence, Dissonance, and Self-Organization
|
| Local coherence (x_l) and global coherence (x_c) quantify the
| degree of relational compatibility.
|
| The difference Dx = |x_c - x_l| acts as a "relational tension,"
| driving the system toward higher global coherence.
|
| When Dx exceeds a threshold, critical reorganizations occur
| (mediated by an operator F0), leading to emergent order, the
| arrow of time, and the formation of physical laws.
|
| 3.3. Quantization and Emergence
|
| TARS aspires to a quantum theory of relational fields, where
| quantization applies to the relations themselves, not to fields
| on a pre-existing spacetime.
|
| The challenge is to mathematically derive how spacetime, matter,
| and interactions emerge from the dynamics of x_{ij}.
|
| 4. Phenomenological Implications
|
| TARS provides new perspectives and solutions to major physical
| puzzles:
|
| Singularity Resolution: The regularization of black hole and
| cosmological singularities emerges naturally from the relational
| dynamics.
|
| Dark Matter/Energy: Gravitational anomalies are interpreted as
| regions of relational coherence deficit, not as unseen particles.
|
| Inflation and Cosmology: The early universe's rapid expansion is
| modeled as a phase transition in the global coherence field.
|
| Black Hole Evaporation: Predicts a slower, non-singular
| evaporation process, leaving stable remnants.
|
| Consciousness and Life: Interpreted as high-order reflexivity in
| relational networks--consciousness is a self-referential
| coherence loop.
|
| 5. Scientific Achievements to Date
|
| Full mathematical formalism: Action, field equations, emergent
| metric, and relational potentials.
|
| Analytical derivations: For black hole interiors, dark matter
| effects, and cosmic inflation.
|
| Numerical simulations: Demonstrating the propagation of coherence
| fronts and self-organization.
|
| Distinct predictions: Such as black hole evaporation profiles and
| singularity avoidance, differentiating TARS from standard models.
|
| White paper and technical documentation: Comprehensive and
| available for peer review.
|
| 6. Meta-Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Reach
|
| TARS is not just a new physical theory; it is a meta-framework
| for understanding emergence, organization, and knowledge itself.
| Its principles can be applied to biology, neuroscience, social
| systems, and artificial intelligence, wherever complex relational
| networks give rise to emergent phenomena.
|
| 7. Conclusion
|
| TARS offers a radical, mathematically grounded, and
| phenomenologically rich alternative to current foundational
| physics. By shifting the focus from entities to relations, it
| provides a unified language for the emergence of space, time,
| matter, and law. Its predictions are testable, its formalism is
| rigorous, and its implications reach far beyond physics, offering
| a new way to organize scientific and philosophical knowledge.
| tekkk wrote:
| Interesting sci-fi plot device but seems far-fetched, not gonna
| lie. To think that our highly stable universe is just compressed
| mass of another universe is a lot to take in. Does that black
| hole emit Hawking radiation as well and shouldnt our universe
| lose mass in result? And how exactly can our universe expand if
| the size of the black hole is fixed?
|
| Well, at least it does make for interesting conversations.
| Someone will surely milk it for Youtube content.
| ordu wrote:
| Hmm... What if some matter falls into our black hole? I know
| there are some weird time-space effects on the boundary, which I
| do not have any intuition about. To my knowledge it may be, that
| it will never fall in our time frame, or that it have fallen all
| already. The question is, will we able to see and welcome new
| matter entering our Universe?
| rokobobo wrote:
| I may be wrong, but I believe spending time in a deeper
| gravitational well means you observe everything outside of the
| well to be happening much faster; at the singularity, the
| entire future of the parent universe will appear to you as
| happening all at once. There is no notion of "matter that falls
| in later" -- once you reach the singularity, you travel to the
| end of time in the parent universe. And the passage of time in
| our universe isn't a continuation of time in the parent
| universe; it's not even the same dimension, the latter is
| collapsed.
| giorgioz wrote:
| Thank you! That answered my question whether there would be
| in our universe a "white fountain" spitting matter coming
| from the back hole in the top universe. In your hypothesis
| where we lose one dimensione over the top universe than all
| the events of the top universe, like the mass arriving,
| happen in our universe all at the once in the beginning (the
| big bang).
| dinkblam wrote:
| stupid question: if at the beginning of the universe (before the
| big bang) all the matter was in the very same spot, shouldn't
| this have been effectively been a black hole due to the extreme
| density? if so, how could it explode if nothing can escape a
| black hole?
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| That's not a stupid question. But I suggest reading the linked
| article which pretty much covers this.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Black holes may contain a second event horizon in the center,
| like a Poisson's spot. So it was the Big Rip, when this spot
| was born.
| kosh2 wrote:
| I have two problems / questions with this:
|
| 1. This theory requires a parent universe that can't have been
| formed inside a black hole. This means there must a be second
| "universe creation" mechanism that we can / may never know about
| from our child universe. For me, this doesn't really answer the
| true question: "How did our universe begin?" Yeah, it may the
| "unknown field with strange properties" but instead we get an
| unknown parent universe with strange properties.
|
| 2. The black hole in the parent universe must be much much bigger
| than anything we see in ours since it has to contain all the
| matter that we see. How is a black hole supposed to form that is
| 750 billion times bigger than the largest black hole we know
| about?
| bagacrap wrote:
| Wouldn't every theory/model of the universe leave room for
| follow up questions? Why is it problematic if it doesn't answer
| literally every conceivable quandary?
| godelski wrote:
| > requires a parent universe
|
| Not _exactly_. A universe can expand, slow down, then collapse.
| In this case, bouncing back out.
|
| Does that repeat forever? Does it lose energy in the bounce? If
| so, to where and how? > The black hole in the
| parent universe must be much much bigger than anything we see
| in ours
|
| Yes and no. You're not thinking about contraction. With
| relativity we can fit a 100ft ladder inside a 10ft barn.
|
| Most importantly, you don't need everything all figured out at
| once to publish. Then no one would always publish. There'd be
| nothing to improve on. Only one publication that says
| everything. Till then, everything does have criticisms and is
| incomplete. It's good to have criticisms! They lead you to the
| next work!
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Where does the information of the previous universe before
| the bounce go? Is it destroyed?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It's been suggested it is gone and that perhaps even new
| laws of physics are created with each iteration (but I
| don't know why that would be).
| mordae wrote:
| Maybe we live inside an universal hash function.
| mcswell wrote:
| >> The black hole in the parent universe must be much much
| bigger than >> anything we see in ours
|
| >> Yes and no. You're not thinking about contraction. With
| relativity >> we can fit a 100ft ladder inside a 10ft barn.
|
| I believe the OP was talking about mass, not linear
| dimension. (And if he wasn't, I am.) Unless somehow mass
| inside a black hole is not constant? (ignoring accretion)
| meowky wrote:
| 1. It is _possible_ that every universe is formed in a
| blackhole - an infinite universe-blackhole-universe chain. We
| don't know what "infinity" means in this scenario, so we can't
| simply rule it out. For comparison, Aristotle ruled out an
| infinite chain of _causes_ , which we now know (with the help
| of hindsight, of course) is a flawed conclusion.
|
| 2. We don't know whether our universe is big or small compared
| with other universes. We don't know whether, or how, it makes
| sense to compare sizes between universes.
|
| Big Bang is arguably the biggest speculation in modern science.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I don't see this idea as very new.
|
| There are many models of black holes, such as the Schwarzchild
| solution, that have an area of "asymptotically flat spacetime"
| which is, from the viewpoint of our universe, part of the black
| hole. That something happens around the singularity that
| creates this new universe doesn't sound that crazy.
|
| If our universe is a child of another universe and that is a
| child of another universe and so forth it fits into the kind of
| "multiverse" model that addresses issues such as "why does the
| universe have the parameters it does?" Either there are a huge
| amount of universes such that we're lucky to be in one we can
| live in, or there is some kind of natural selection such that
| universes that create more black holes have more children.
|
| As for the relative size of the parent black hole, conservation
| of energy doesn't have to hold for universes in the normal
| sense. One idea is that the gravitational binding energy of the
| universe is equal to the opposite of all the mass in the
| universe such that it all adds up to zero so we could have more
| or less of it without violating anything.
| nurettin wrote:
| > "why does the universe have the parameters it does?"
|
| To those who say "oh but if this parameter was slightly off,
| that thing I subjectively decided to pick wouldn't have
| happened!":
|
| How would you know that this universe could exist in any
| other way? Wouldn't things just stabilize into certain
| frequencies and lengths after some time?
|
| To me "fine tuning" isn't really a conundrum, it is just
| question begging and you don't need to wish it away with
| multiverses.
| D-Coder wrote:
| > we're lucky to be in one we can live in
|
| Nitpick: We _couldn 't_ be anywhere else, except nonexistent.
| thomasweiser wrote:
| The anthropic principle
| corry wrote:
| Do you find the idea of an infinite regress -- "our universe
| is a child of another universe and that is a child of another
| universe and so forth" -- holds much explanatory power for
| you?
|
| To me it's prima facie a hollow explanation. I get that some
| models, like eternal inflation or certain cyclic cosmologies,
| entertain the idea of an infinite past or blur the standard
| arrow of time... but how does pushing the origin question
| back indefinitely actually resolve anything?
| lugu wrote:
| I doubt you understand what science is about. The proposed
| theory, like any theory, should be judged on its power of
| prediction and simplicity. It doesn't matter if it doesn't
| satisfy your curiosity.
| bhk wrote:
| It's black holes all the way down!
| mr_toad wrote:
| The outer universe could have always existed, but unlike ours
| it eventually collapsed. By contrast ours did the reverse, and
| it looks like it will expand forever. There is a neat symmetry.
| I guess you could make the case that it's really just one
| universe, and the collapse and expansion mirror each other.
| nbulka wrote:
| We think the universe had to "begin" because we "began" and
| tend to anthropomorphize. Is that necessarily true? The
| universe is under no obligation to have a beginning. Sail
| around the Earth and you might just end up right where you
| started.
| mc32 wrote:
| The Sun had to begin. At one point it was just accreting
| gasses, then at some point gained enough mass to ignite.
| People also start at some point they begin as a daughter and
| grow eventually into a viable life. But also our galaxies had
| to form before our sun. So, yes there are beginnings to
| things. At one point they weren't, at another point they
| were.
| jungturk wrote:
| Yes, but earth still had a beginning.
|
| I agree with you, though - causal explanations are compelling
| and confer a sense of certainty and humans seem to like that,
| but it doesn't make them necessary.
| 0x0203 wrote:
| If the universe does have a positive curvature as this predicts,
| would that mean that if we look out into space, we could see the
| same galaxies multiple times? Or even our own galaxy in the past?
| Or is the predicted curvature slight enough that anything we
| might see multiple times is already beyond the limits of
| visibility due to universe expansion?
| mr_toad wrote:
| Only if the circumference of the universe is small enough for
| light to have made the round trip since the universe began. But
| we think that the universe is much larger than that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_horizon
| okokwhatever wrote:
| Science today:
|
| {..insert here a statement...} maybe yes but also maybe not
| {...clickbait things here...}
| ddingus wrote:
| Great! Maybe the idea of a cyclical universe will gain traction.
|
| In my view, there is one universe. We are in it. It cycles from
| maximum to minimum condition endlessly. This cycle is much longer
| than any entity lifespan and for any entity, the current state is
| THE state for them, and all they will know and become.
|
| What does it expand into?
|
| Nothing. Space itself just gets bigger and smaller over time.
|
| No beginning, no end. It all just is.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| We are inside of a Docker container.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Would it possibly make sense for a black hole in our universe to
| lead to a higher level "parent" universe? Or would any black hole
| universe contained within our own universe necessarily lead to a
| lower level "child" universe? Basically, I'm wondering if there's
| a way (within the constraints of this model) to access the parent
| universe.
| w10-1 wrote:
| As a lay reader, it sounds like they are assuming what they are
| trying to prove.
|
| Yes, it produces a testable prediction, but seemingly based on a
| mathematical assumption derived from our observed cosmic
| radiation background.
|
| > This lower bound follows from the requirement of
| khk>=kh*[?]15.9 Gpc to address the cosmic microwave background
| low quadrupole anomaly
|
| As a lay reader, can I assume that no scientist would publish a
| theory with mathematical circularity (at the heart of the
| prediction)? I sure can't verify it myself.
| grumple wrote:
| I've spent the past month or so immersed in Penrose diagrams.
| Some of the implications of the math and diagrams include white
| holes (opposite of black holes - spew matter outwards), infinite
| universes contained within one another other, anti-gravity
| universes, and things like this. You can also fall into a black
| hole and make it out into another universe instead of meeting the
| singularity (at least, an idealized, rotating black hole).
| Anyway, cool stuff.
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