> Isn’t the entire problem that there is no known mechanism by which these supermassive black holes would form so early with so much mass?
Direct Collapse[1] models provide candidates for this, no?
> Isn’t the entire problem that there is no known mechanism by which these supermassive black holes would form so early with so much mass?
Direct Collapse[1] models provide candidates for this, no?
With the size of quasars we're seeing in the early universe, direct collapse seems likely.
Of course this begs the next question of how didn't the universe just collapse back in on itself!
Inflation seems to have been tuned to ensure this didn't happen, giving the cosmos time to grow while ensuring it didn't grow so quickly that galaxies couldn't form.
Cosmological natural selection provides an explanation for this, too.
"Cosmological natural selection provides an explanation"
This is the biggest reach in your entire essay, that black wholes create new universes. The event horizon is complete cut off from this universe and speculating that generations upon generations of universes are created from black holes is fanciful. Your just shoehorn what is basically a massive anthropic principle onto an interesting cosmology theory unnecessarily.
I understand your skepticism. But the awkward fact remains that three-stage cosmological natural selection made accurate predictions about the early universe, in advance of the James Webb Space Telescope data.
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
No other theory made such accurate predictions. So it might be worth at least exploring the theory and its implications further. Certainly, there is a funding and research mismatch between ΛCDM (which did not predict what we are now seeing) and three-stage cosmological natural selection (which did) that is... startling.
I have to ask. Did you and are you now, using a AI assistant to develop the theory or answer comments here?
The man is an accomplished novelist, lol. The kind of ego they typically have, he'd probably rather die than allow LLM-generated content be associated with his writing.
As I understand it, it's answering the question of why there's so much fine-tuning in the universe.
It's an explanation, it fits the observed data. It can't be tested, and the predictions it makes can't be verified. So until we can verify that new universes are created from black holes, with properties inherited from the parent universe, then it's just speculation. But interesting speculation.
And it's a real question that does need some kind of answer.
> It can't be tested, and the predictions it makes can't be verified.
To be clear, both Smolin's CNS and Gough's uptake of the theory make predictions and offer ways to be falsified, with Gough making accurate predictions of early galactic structure that Webb would see.
It's good to see people expecting predictions and falsifiability, but I'm curious why that requirement isn't being upheld against the standard model (which has been predicting more and more incorrectly) and string theory (which is unable to offer any predictions and also expects you to believe there are 9 or 11 dimensions or something). In my view, CNS requires the fewest logical leaps of faith.