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What if our sense of scale is off and the universe isn't curved we're just orbiting a black hole 10x the mass of the visible universe. It's not expanding that's

What if our sense of scale is off and the universe isn't curved we're just orbiting a black hole 10x the mass of the visible universe. It's not expanding that's us travelling through the gravity well at 99% the speed of light relative to it.

meowface 7y ago
Have things along these lines ever been seriously investigated as a possible explanation for dark energy and the phenomenon observed here? It doesn't necessarily need to be your exact hypothesis, but if you generalize it and look at our universe (just our observable universe, or perhaps "the whole thing" in some sense) as possibly being a small object in a much vaster medium, perhaps a medium we could never directly access or observe, what implications could that have, and what could it potentially explain? Perhaps even a medium abiding by a completely different kind of physics.
- MiroF 7y ago
  Yes, most of the random "what if" ideas put forth by laypeople have been investigated and either ruled out by theorists/experiments lists or are non-falsifiable. Not to offend anyone here, but unless you have a solid grasp of the theory, nobody here is going to be "solving" the mystery of dark matter
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - RHSeeger 7y ago
    You never know. Doug Forcett made an almost perfectly accurate guess as to the inner workings of the afterlife while stoned. For those unaware, it's from the show The Good Place. Good fun for me, highly recommend it. Edit: Apparently a joke with the meaning of "you never know who might get lucky and have an interesting insight" was... disliked. My thoughts on being able to have insight from anywhere come at least partially from the (somewhat recent) story of physicists that noted a connection between eigenvalues and eigenvectors (iirc) that mathematicians did not (after many years). Sometimes, insight comes from the outside.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Think of it like this: how many degree-level lectures can you give in physics as compared to whatever your profession is? Now imagine what someone who knows as much about your profession as you do about physics sounds like to you. Half my questions on Physics stackexchange are so naïve they’re not even wrong, they are so bad they get closed as nonsensical. Looking at past exam papers, I could probably get a grade B in A-level physics (A-level is UK qualification taken at age 18 between secondary school and university currently used to decide which university you go to). The other half of my ideas are right, but actual physicists tell me they’re “obvious” and “not worth writing about”.
      - RHSeeger 7y ago
        The fact that pretty much all thoughts from people outside the field are either obvious, false, or nonsensical... doesn't invalidate the idea that flashes of insight can come from anywhere. I get what you're saying and agree the odds of it happening are pretty much zero. But sometimes even things with a probability of pretty much 0 can happen. The eigenvalue thing is an example of that, in my opinion.
        specialist 7y ago
        A layperson could unwittingly trigger a cognitive leap by asking naive questions. A la Feynman saying he can't explain magnetism in a way that I could understand it, the effort could spark an insight or novel angle.
        MiroF 7y ago
        Name a single instance of a lay person without a background in physics discovering the basis behind a phenomenon since 1900. For some reason, physics seems to be disproportionately popular among armchair theorists compared to other fields like math or chemistry.
        ben_w 7y ago
        > disproportionately popular among armchair theorists compared to other fields like math or chemistry. I’ve heard this before, but I wonder how true it is? I know my experiences are just anecdotes, but I knew a guy who was convinced the Hotel Room/Bellboy/Missing Dollar problem “broke maths”, and I’ve had countless frustrations with family members promoting homeopathy and acquaintances talking about chemical X being “one atom away from being bleach” like that doesn’t apply to water. I’d be interested if anyone has done a real analysis of rates of armchair nonsense by sector.
  - techdreamer 7y ago
    and - the nilometers have just been fired up.
  - meowface 7y ago
    I understand that, and understand this likely falls into the unfalsifiable category, but when everyone, even physicists, are grasping at straws, laypeople don't have many options other than to throw around random "what if" ideas. It's fun. I doubt that hypothesis is actually true, and it may never be testable, but it's also true that a lot of things believed to be untestable eventually do become testable.
    - MiroF 7y ago
      It can be a bit exhausting when online physics forums get crowded by people who clearly have no understanding of physics asking for an explanation of whether their "pet theory" makes sense. I don't know why, but physics seems to be a much more popular target for these type of people than any other field.
      - meowface 7y ago
        I can definitely understand that. I wouldn't post such ignorant armchair speculation on a physics forum. But on HN? Why not? Meta-physics is inscrutable (unless something leaves the realm of meta-physics). What's the harm in speculating about it? Like the simulation hypothesis, for example. I understand it touches on real things here, like dark energy, but it's just dumb fun to try to conceive of if anything could lie beyond the universe and what it could possibly be if there is anything. It's likely forever unfalsifiable, but in some sense that's what makes it a fair subject for laymen. If it were testable, then you have to leave it to the professionals. I know I have zero understanding of physics. I don't have any attachment to this or any other speculation. I'm not a crank or something. But it's impossible to not wonder about the nature of reality and the formation of the universe, you know? The fact that it's unknowable within our lifetimes, and probably forever, is the driving factor. I like seeing how real physicists answer this question, too, in interviews and podcasts. They always hedge it with "of course this is wild speculation", like everyone should. I see I didn't really hedge my initial post, which was a mistake. This was a random thought triggered by that other post, not something I actually believe whatsoever.
airstrike 7y ago
This is giving me an unexplainable amount of anxiety right now, thanks... Strangely, I'd love to read more on this if anyone can point me in the right direction
- garmaine 7y ago
  Why? It wouldn't be able to cause you any harm, if true (according to our understanding of physics).
  - gooseus 7y ago
    Yeah, I'd be a lot more worried about that big ball of fire that scientists all agree will one day consume us.
    - garmaine 7y ago
      Yeah, this'll rightly induce some anxiety! https://twitter.com/universal_sci/status/1217314288085479426 https://twitter.com/universal_sci/status/1217314288085479426
      - m4rtink 7y ago
        Nothing a bit of stellar lifting can't fix. ;-)
    - hinkley 7y ago
      The one I'm terrified of is the switch where the laws of physics all change at the speed of light. We will simply cease to exist and not even see it coming.
      - fwip 7y ago
        Don't worry, we won't notice it either, if it does happen. :)
      - garmaine 7y ago
simcop2387 7y ago
Part of the problem with that is that we'd see an uneven amount of expansion. We'd see lots of it along the axis between us and the supermassive blackhole (towards and away from), but roughly perpendicular to it we'd see a ring/plane of matter going roughly the same speed as us towards it. Instead we see an equal expansion in all directions. Now I don't know what kind of scale that might change at though so maybe it's possible still with a seriously large one?
DeRock 7y ago
To expand upon this idea, take a look at http://www.flatuniversesociety.com/ http://www.flatuniversesociety.com/
zamalek 7y ago
My pet hypothesis is that the universe we experience is on the surface of the singularity of our black hole. This neatly explains some things: - The Great Attractor would simply be the volume deeper in singularity. The cone of influence for the entire universe tends towards the center of our singularity. - Dark energy, and the varying quantity of it, would simply be the amount of matter falling into our black hole. It would naturally start as a large amount (consisting of our parent star/mass) and later see variation as matter falls into it. - Dimensionless physical constants may have been fields in the parent universe. As an infinitely small point, our universe singularity would resolve a continuous gradient to a single value. Our child universes would have a single value of gravity, for example, which could change over time (but would be constant across the universe as they changed). I've got a huge list of interesting consequences, but as an armchair physicist it's probably all quack science :)
- gizmo686 7y ago
  You might be interested in the Holographic Principle [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
- hnuser123456 7y ago
  Maybe you already know all this, but to other curious readers: The great attractor is about 200 Mly away. Directly behind it, 600 Mly away from us, is the Shapley Supercluster, towards which the great attractor is itself moving. In the opposite direction is a underdensity, called the "Dipole repeller", and between the two, where we are, is a "dark flow". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley_Supercluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley_Supercluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_repeller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_repeller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow
  - HenryKissinger 7y ago
    If this thread continues any further, we're going to start talking about the dark side of the Force.
  - 7y ago
ithinkso 7y ago
You would see effects of tidal forces in the scenario you described, I think. The other thing is, if it's not curved then you still need to explain Mercury's orbit precession (43 arcseconds per century is it?). This is not an easy thing to do
hnews_account_1 7y ago
EM redshifts alone would invalidate that hypothesis. It doesn't matter how fast you travel, EM redshifts follow specific laws that we cannot see breaking at any point observed in the universe. It is more likely that physical laws have localised variations that we cannot tell from any discernible distance. Maybe pockets of vacuum do shit that we cannot fathom and if we observed it, we'd break the code for reality.

meowface 7y ago

Have things along these lines ever been seriously investigated as a possible explanation for dark energy and the phenomenon observed here? It doesn't necessarily need to be your exact hypothesis, but if you generalize it and look at our universe (just our observable universe, or perhaps "the whole thing" in some sense) as possibly being a small object in a much vaster medium, perhaps a medium we could never directly access or observe, what implications could that have, and what could it potentially explain? Perhaps even a medium abiding by a completely different kind of physics.

MiroF 7y ago
Yes, most of the random "what if" ideas put forth by laypeople have been investigated and either ruled out by theorists/experiments lists or are non-falsifiable. Not to offend anyone here, but unless you have a solid grasp of the theory, nobody here is going to be "solving" the mystery of dark matter
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- RHSeeger 7y ago
  You never know. Doug Forcett made an almost perfectly accurate guess as to the inner workings of the afterlife while stoned. For those unaware, it's from the show The Good Place. Good fun for me, highly recommend it. Edit: Apparently a joke with the meaning of "you never know who might get lucky and have an interesting insight" was... disliked. My thoughts on being able to have insight from anywhere come at least partially from the (somewhat recent) story of physicists that noted a connection between eigenvalues and eigenvectors (iirc) that mathematicians did not (after many years). Sometimes, insight comes from the outside.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Think of it like this: how many degree-level lectures can you give in physics as compared to whatever your profession is? Now imagine what someone who knows as much about your profession as you do about physics sounds like to you. Half my questions on Physics stackexchange are so naïve they’re not even wrong, they are so bad they get closed as nonsensical. Looking at past exam papers, I could probably get a grade B in A-level physics (A-level is UK qualification taken at age 18 between secondary school and university currently used to decide which university you go to). The other half of my ideas are right, but actual physicists tell me they’re “obvious” and “not worth writing about”.
    - RHSeeger 7y ago
      The fact that pretty much all thoughts from people outside the field are either obvious, false, or nonsensical... doesn't invalidate the idea that flashes of insight can come from anywhere. I get what you're saying and agree the odds of it happening are pretty much zero. But sometimes even things with a probability of pretty much 0 can happen. The eigenvalue thing is an example of that, in my opinion.
      - specialist 7y ago
        A layperson could unwittingly trigger a cognitive leap by asking naive questions. A la Feynman saying he can't explain magnetism in a way that I could understand it, the effort could spark an insight or novel angle.
      - MiroF 7y ago
        Name a single instance of a lay person without a background in physics discovering the basis behind a phenomenon since 1900. For some reason, physics seems to be disproportionately popular among armchair theorists compared to other fields like math or chemistry.
        ben_w 7y ago
        > disproportionately popular among armchair theorists compared to other fields like math or chemistry. I’ve heard this before, but I wonder how true it is? I know my experiences are just anecdotes, but I knew a guy who was convinced the Hotel Room/Bellboy/Missing Dollar problem “broke maths”, and I’ve had countless frustrations with family members promoting homeopathy and acquaintances talking about chemical X being “one atom away from being bleach” like that doesn’t apply to water. I’d be interested if anyone has done a real analysis of rates of armchair nonsense by sector.
- techdreamer 7y ago
  and - the nilometers have just been fired up.
- meowface 7y ago
  I understand that, and understand this likely falls into the unfalsifiable category, but when everyone, even physicists, are grasping at straws, laypeople don't have many options other than to throw around random "what if" ideas. It's fun. I doubt that hypothesis is actually true, and it may never be testable, but it's also true that a lot of things believed to be untestable eventually do become testable.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    It can be a bit exhausting when online physics forums get crowded by people who clearly have no understanding of physics asking for an explanation of whether their "pet theory" makes sense. I don't know why, but physics seems to be a much more popular target for these type of people than any other field.
    - meowface 7y ago
      I can definitely understand that. I wouldn't post such ignorant armchair speculation on a physics forum. But on HN? Why not? Meta-physics is inscrutable (unless something leaves the realm of meta-physics). What's the harm in speculating about it? Like the simulation hypothesis, for example. I understand it touches on real things here, like dark energy, but it's just dumb fun to try to conceive of if anything could lie beyond the universe and what it could possibly be if there is anything. It's likely forever unfalsifiable, but in some sense that's what makes it a fair subject for laymen. If it were testable, then you have to leave it to the professionals. I know I have zero understanding of physics. I don't have any attachment to this or any other speculation. I'm not a crank or something. But it's impossible to not wonder about the nature of reality and the formation of the universe, you know? The fact that it's unknowable within our lifetimes, and probably forever, is the driving factor. I like seeing how real physicists answer this question, too, in interviews and podcasts. They always hedge it with "of course this is wild speculation", like everyone should. I see I didn't really hedge my initial post, which was a mistake. This was a random thought triggered by that other post, not something I actually believe whatsoever.

airstrike 7y ago

This is giving me an unexplainable amount of anxiety right now, thanks... Strangely, I'd love to read more on this if anyone can point me in the right direction

garmaine 7y ago
Why? It wouldn't be able to cause you any harm, if true (according to our understanding of physics).
- gooseus 7y ago
  Yeah, I'd be a lot more worried about that big ball of fire that scientists all agree will one day consume us.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    Yeah, this'll rightly induce some anxiety! https://twitter.com/universal_sci/status/1217314288085479426 https://twitter.com/universal_sci/status/1217314288085479426
    - m4rtink 7y ago
      Nothing a bit of stellar lifting can't fix. ;-)
  - hinkley 7y ago
    The one I'm terrified of is the switch where the laws of physics all change at the speed of light. We will simply cease to exist and not even see it coming.
    - fwip 7y ago
      Don't worry, we won't notice it either, if it does happen. :)
    - garmaine 7y ago

simcop2387 7y ago

Part of the problem with that is that we'd see an uneven amount of expansion. We'd see lots of it along the axis between us and the supermassive blackhole (towards and away from), but roughly perpendicular to it we'd see a ring/plane of matter going roughly the same speed as us towards it. Instead we see an equal expansion in all directions. Now I don't know what kind of scale that might change at though so maybe it's possible still with a seriously large one?

DeRock 7y ago

To expand upon this idea, take a look at http://www.flatuniversesociety.com/ http://www.flatuniversesociety.com/

zamalek 7y ago

My pet hypothesis is that the universe we experience is on the surface of the singularity of our black hole. This neatly explains some things: - The Great Attractor would simply be the volume deeper in singularity. The cone of influence for the entire universe tends towards the center of our singularity. - Dark energy, and the varying quantity of it, would simply be the amount of matter falling into our black hole. It would naturally start as a large amount (consisting of our parent star/mass) and later see variation as matter falls into it. - Dimensionless physical constants may have been fields in the parent universe. As an infinitely small point, our universe singularity would resolve a continuous gradient to a single value. Our child universes would have a single value of gravity, for example, which could change over time (but would be constant across the universe as they changed). I've got a huge list of interesting consequences, but as an armchair physicist it's probably all quack science :)

gizmo686 7y ago
You might be interested in the Holographic Principle [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
hnuser123456 7y ago
Maybe you already know all this, but to other curious readers: The great attractor is about 200 Mly away. Directly behind it, 600 Mly away from us, is the Shapley Supercluster, towards which the great attractor is itself moving. In the opposite direction is a underdensity, called the "Dipole repeller", and between the two, where we are, is a "dark flow". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley_Supercluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley_Supercluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_repeller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_repeller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow
- HenryKissinger 7y ago
  If this thread continues any further, we're going to start talking about the dark side of the Force.
- 7y ago

ithinkso 7y ago

You would see effects of tidal forces in the scenario you described, I think. The other thing is, if it's not curved then you still need to explain Mercury's orbit precession (43 arcseconds per century is it?). This is not an easy thing to do

hnews_account_1 7y ago

EM redshifts alone would invalidate that hypothesis. It doesn't matter how fast you travel, EM redshifts follow specific laws that we cannot see breaking at any point observed in the universe. It is more likely that physical laws have localised variations that we cannot tell from any discernible distance. Maybe pockets of vacuum do shit that we cannot fathom and if we observed it, we'd break the code for reality.