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“ It argues that large numbers of extremely early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets actively shaped the universe's structure in its first few hundred mil

“ It argues that large numbers of extremely early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets actively shaped the universe's structure in its first few hundred million years” Isn’t the entire problem that there is no known mechanism by which these supermassive black holes would form so early with so much mass?

CGMthrowaway 1y ago
Well, Webb has observed SMBHs earlier than current theory would suggest. But I don't think that's the problem here, it's the opportunity: ΛCDM was the best model for the cosmic web when we thought that SMBHs could not exist so early. But now that we have observed that they do, it opens the possibility of other theories for the cosmic web, including this one (blow torch) in which the early SMBHs take a role in its creation.
- justlikereddit 1y ago
  ΛCDM was the best model for a long while because it gave a free mystery variable to generously use as plaster to fill in an innumerable amount of yawing cracks. The convenience provided by the Dark Plaster theory have meant that despite innumerable failures in actually detecting it have been handwaved off by an equally convenient "it's just a bit darker than expected".
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    A single variable to fill innumerable cracks? How would that work? All the cracks just happen to line up so the same value of the variable fills each one? Wouldn't that mean there's just one crack?
    - jesse__ 1y ago
      According to the article, the plaster changes properties based on the crack it's currently filling, which is the whole problem.
      - JulianPGough 1y ago
        Yes. (See longer version of this "yes" above!)
    - JulianPGough 1y ago
      Currently, Cold Dark Matter, as used in simulations etc, usually has six free parameters. Most simulations of structure formation at the level of the universe as a whole ONLY model Cold Dark Matter (i.e., they treat baryonic matter as a rounding error, and leave it out: that's partly understandable, as baryonic matter is much harder to model than Cold Dark Matter, and trying to model it eats compute.) And when they DO add baryonic matter to simulations (usually of smaller-scale structure formation), that usually has four free parameters, which are also not based on observation, but can be tuned to fit. So you can end up with 10 free parameters in the simulations. As von Neumann once said, "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." At this point, with ten, it's basically CGI. And the model gets tweaked afresh to suit each new observational anomaly. So you can tweak it to fit, say, large galaxies, but then it doesn't fit small galaxies. (The cusp/core problem.) But that's OK, because you can tweak it to fit small galaxies! (But then it won't fit large galaxies.) And on it goes. A key problem is that, after 50 years of tweaking, it still didn't predict the rapid, efficient structure formation of the early universe as revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Three-stage cosmological natural selection (the parent to Blowtorch Theory) did. https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the-james-webb-space https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
      - thicktarget 1y ago
        >Cold Dark Matter, as used in simulations etc, usually has six free parameters. That is not correct. LCDM as a cosmology is described by 6 parameters mostly for CMB analyses, but this is much more than just CDM. These parameters include the amount of normal matter, the cosmological constant, the amount of dark matter, reionization, the Hubble constant and two parameters which describe the initial fluctuations. CDM only has one parameter in the model, its density. As you can see there aren't many nobs to turn. These parameters are also fixed to observational values. And if you think you can fit all modern cosmological data with a physically-meaningful model and fewer parameters then go ahead.
    - justlikereddit 1y ago
      How about dark dollars that can be freely adjusted up and down in density to balance the books, that any and all auditors will have to accept as real because it's written down to satisfy calculations but can not directly be observed? Charles Ponzi or Bernie Madoff could've had the Nobel Prize in economics had they merely used the same explanation as the lambda-cdm cosmologist do.
      - FredPret 1y ago
        Only if you can observe the dark dollars bending the trajectories of the bright dollars
vlovich123 1y ago
> (And even as this Blowtorch Theory post was being researched and written, a paper was published detailing an extraordinary blazar – a jet, a blowtorch, pointed straight at the earth from over 13 billion years ago, just 750 million years after the Big Bang – far earlier than Lambda Cold Dark Matter predicted, but slap-bang where the theory outlined here said we would find them. See: A blazar in the epoch of reionization, by Eduardo Bañados et al, Nature, December 17, 2024.) We don’t know how they form but we do now know they exist through Webb.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  My take on it is that it's been known for a long time (1970s) that supermassive black holes couldn't possibly have been formed between the big bang and the present, never mind the early times that JWST can see into. Astronomers will make excuses for that and say that they didn't really prove that galaxies had black holes in them and that they were really massive recently but the tension has existed for a long time because people suspected that galaxies had huge black holes but there was no path to form black holes that big. I worked for arXiv in the 00's and had a coworker who'd gotten a PhD in astrophysics about accretion disks who was really bitter about how the poor job prospects in astronomy let senior astronomers bully junior astronomers creating a false consensus about how accretion disks and other phenomena worked. When I first heard about ΛCDM my first instinct was that some bullying was going on. [1] Observations that the "first billion years" might have taken 10 billion years or so have been coming for a while but with JWST there is an absolute flood of them. [1] The cold dark matter doesn't bug me half as much as the dark energy. I mean, once you look at anything bigger than a star cluster it's obvious that dark matter is there or otherwise gravity works differently in a way that is huge for objects bigger than a star cluster but doesn't show up in precision measurements at all in the solar system.
  - daedrdev 1y ago
    Yes, basically black holes growing speed is limited since when they eat they push away the surrounding matter so there isn't enough time. There are also no black holes in between normal size and super massive, both nearby or far away (in the past because of the speed of light)
itishappy 1y ago
This post is suggesting just such a mechanism: > The second half of this post will outline the parent theory – three stage cosmological natural selection – which successfully predicted these extremely early supermassive black holes, and their jets, plus the associated rapid early galaxy formation, in advance of the first James Webb Space Telescope data.
- itishappy 1y ago
  I want to correct a misunderstanding I had when reading the article the first time: The mechanism suggested is Direct Collapse Black Hole formation, not the "three stage cosmological natural selection" model I quoted.
magicalhippo 1y ago
> 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? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_collapse_black_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_collapse_black_hole
- pixl97 1y ago
  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!
  - JSchneider321 1y ago
    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.
    - throwaway5752 1y ago
      "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.
      - JulianPGough 1y ago
        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-james-webb-space 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.

CGMthrowaway 1y ago

Well, Webb has observed SMBHs earlier than current theory would suggest. But I don't think that's the problem here, it's the opportunity: ΛCDM was the best model for the cosmic web when we thought that SMBHs could not exist so early. But now that we have observed that they do, it opens the possibility of other theories for the cosmic web, including this one (blow torch) in which the early SMBHs take a role in its creation.

justlikereddit 1y ago
ΛCDM was the best model for a long while because it gave a free mystery variable to generously use as plaster to fill in an innumerable amount of yawing cracks. The convenience provided by the Dark Plaster theory have meant that despite innumerable failures in actually detecting it have been handwaved off by an equally convenient "it's just a bit darker than expected".
- pfdietz 1y ago
  A single variable to fill innumerable cracks? How would that work? All the cracks just happen to line up so the same value of the variable fills each one? Wouldn't that mean there's just one crack?
  - jesse__ 1y ago
    According to the article, the plaster changes properties based on the crack it's currently filling, which is the whole problem.
    - JulianPGough 1y ago
      Yes. (See longer version of this "yes" above!)
  - JulianPGough 1y ago
    Currently, Cold Dark Matter, as used in simulations etc, usually has six free parameters. Most simulations of structure formation at the level of the universe as a whole ONLY model Cold Dark Matter (i.e., they treat baryonic matter as a rounding error, and leave it out: that's partly understandable, as baryonic matter is much harder to model than Cold Dark Matter, and trying to model it eats compute.) And when they DO add baryonic matter to simulations (usually of smaller-scale structure formation), that usually has four free parameters, which are also not based on observation, but can be tuned to fit. So you can end up with 10 free parameters in the simulations. As von Neumann once said, "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." At this point, with ten, it's basically CGI. And the model gets tweaked afresh to suit each new observational anomaly. So you can tweak it to fit, say, large galaxies, but then it doesn't fit small galaxies. (The cusp/core problem.) But that's OK, because you can tweak it to fit small galaxies! (But then it won't fit large galaxies.) And on it goes. A key problem is that, after 50 years of tweaking, it still didn't predict the rapid, efficient structure formation of the early universe as revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Three-stage cosmological natural selection (the parent to Blowtorch Theory) did. https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the-james-webb-space https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
    - thicktarget 1y ago
      >Cold Dark Matter, as used in simulations etc, usually has six free parameters. That is not correct. LCDM as a cosmology is described by 6 parameters mostly for CMB analyses, but this is much more than just CDM. These parameters include the amount of normal matter, the cosmological constant, the amount of dark matter, reionization, the Hubble constant and two parameters which describe the initial fluctuations. CDM only has one parameter in the model, its density. As you can see there aren't many nobs to turn. These parameters are also fixed to observational values. And if you think you can fit all modern cosmological data with a physically-meaningful model and fewer parameters then go ahead.
  - justlikereddit 1y ago
    How about dark dollars that can be freely adjusted up and down in density to balance the books, that any and all auditors will have to accept as real because it's written down to satisfy calculations but can not directly be observed? Charles Ponzi or Bernie Madoff could've had the Nobel Prize in economics had they merely used the same explanation as the lambda-cdm cosmologist do.
    - FredPret 1y ago
      Only if you can observe the dark dollars bending the trajectories of the bright dollars

vlovich123 1y ago

> (And even as this Blowtorch Theory post was being researched and written, a paper was published detailing an extraordinary blazar – a jet, a blowtorch, pointed straight at the earth from over 13 billion years ago, just 750 million years after the Big Bang – far earlier than Lambda Cold Dark Matter predicted, but slap-bang where the theory outlined here said we would find them. See: A blazar in the epoch of reionization, by Eduardo Bañados et al, Nature, December 17, 2024.) We don’t know how they form but we do now know they exist through Webb.

PaulHoule 1y ago
My take on it is that it's been known for a long time (1970s) that supermassive black holes couldn't possibly have been formed between the big bang and the present, never mind the early times that JWST can see into. Astronomers will make excuses for that and say that they didn't really prove that galaxies had black holes in them and that they were really massive recently but the tension has existed for a long time because people suspected that galaxies had huge black holes but there was no path to form black holes that big. I worked for arXiv in the 00's and had a coworker who'd gotten a PhD in astrophysics about accretion disks who was really bitter about how the poor job prospects in astronomy let senior astronomers bully junior astronomers creating a false consensus about how accretion disks and other phenomena worked. When I first heard about ΛCDM my first instinct was that some bullying was going on. [1] Observations that the "first billion years" might have taken 10 billion years or so have been coming for a while but with JWST there is an absolute flood of them. [1] The cold dark matter doesn't bug me half as much as the dark energy. I mean, once you look at anything bigger than a star cluster it's obvious that dark matter is there or otherwise gravity works differently in a way that is huge for objects bigger than a star cluster but doesn't show up in precision measurements at all in the solar system.
- daedrdev 1y ago
  Yes, basically black holes growing speed is limited since when they eat they push away the surrounding matter so there isn't enough time. There are also no black holes in between normal size and super massive, both nearby or far away (in the past because of the speed of light)

itishappy 1y ago

This post is suggesting just such a mechanism: > The second half of this post will outline the parent theory – three stage cosmological natural selection – which successfully predicted these extremely early supermassive black holes, and their jets, plus the associated rapid early galaxy formation, in advance of the first James Webb Space Telescope data.

itishappy 1y ago
I want to correct a misunderstanding I had when reading the article the first time: The mechanism suggested is Direct Collapse Black Hole formation, not the "three stage cosmological natural selection" model I quoted.

magicalhippo 1y ago

> 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? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_collapse_black_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_collapse_black_hole

pixl97 1y ago
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!
- JSchneider321 1y ago
  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.
  - throwaway5752 1y ago
    "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.
    - JulianPGough 1y ago
      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-james-webb-space 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.