JulianPGough

6 ms·

1.
by JulianPGough 1mo ago
In a crude way, you could say so. Certainly, looked at through a purely evolutionary lens, the meaning of life for universes is (in one respect) to make as many black holes as possible. That maximises reproductive success for the unit of se
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
Well, that's a purely physics argument. You need to think instead about the information about an evolutionary history that can be extracted from an evolved organism (and the implications thereof), even if you only have one example. The
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
(Whoops, I was replying to "Why does there need to be an original?"; not sure why the reply ended up elsewhere.)
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
Yes! Fascinating, that you can only get stable planetary systems in universes with three spatial dimensions. More, and it all goes to hell.
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
Yes, this is a very common, and understandable, question; I get asked it a lot. But in fact new (child) universes aren't constrained in size by the initial energy/mass entering the parent black hole. Actually, that's one of t
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
Indeed! You're right, there doesn't. See my reply above.
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
I think this cuts through that Gordian knot. "Nothingness" is just an idea in our heads: we have never encountered "nothing". There's no such thing, it's an idea. There is always something; there was always som
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
Again, I've written about the reproduction of universes at length here... The key implication of cosmological natural selection: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-key-implication-of-cosmol... And here... A histor
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
The universe is the replicator. This comes directly from John Wheeler's old idea, which he came up with back in the 1970s to solve the two mysteries in our universe that involve singularities: black holes, and the Big Bang. I've w
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
Definitely worth toying with. Lee Smolin's original idea of cosmological natural selection, of the Darwinian evolution of universes, is about the same age as string theory, and it's just as powerful and interesting a speculative i
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
That's a fair point. I suspect that any journalist trying to write about this subject for a respectable mainstream publication (like the Smithsonian Magazine) has to negotiate pretty hard with his or her editor to get the piece to run
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
Yes, they slip into resonances. This is even more pronounced in the case of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The resonances give them stability. As I've written before, elsewhere; Ganymede, Europa, and Io, for example, are in 1:2:4 res
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
Yes, I'm familiar with the idea of a Big Bang/Big Crunch cycle. It's intriguing. But, though it too gives you a sequence of universes, its automatic 1-to-1-to-1-to-1 sequential structure doesn't really give you an evolut
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
Hey, thanks. Fun to be here! I love these ideas, I'm delighted people are interested in debating them.
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by JulianPGough 1mo ago
Sagan is terrific. And it's true that the planets and moons that survive have made it through a pretty brutal era of orbit-clearance. But the evolutionary cosmology model I and others have been exploring is at the level of universes, a
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Earth's organisms developed via evolution. What if the cosmos did, too?(smithsonianmag.com)
105 points by JulianPGough 1mo ago|69 comments
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by 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://theeggandth
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by JulianPGough 1y ago
Glad you like the theory! As for the age of the blazar... Pretty confident. "Bañados and his team..." searched systematically "...for objects that were redshifted so far that they did not even show up in the usual visible lig
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by JulianPGough 1y ago
Thanks! Glad you were enjoying it. Also, if you keep going, epicycles do in fact get a shout out!
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by JulianPGough 1y ago
Mmmm, I thought I had carefully avoided doing exactly that. I think I say at various points that there were good reasons at the time for the choices they made, and I try to show, as sympathetically as I can, the logic of their thinking. I c
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by JulianPGough 1y ago
I do understand why you are critical of my decision to attack ΛCDM and the work that led to it. I can see your point of view, and indeed I wrestled with that decision. I do realise that a lot of people will be alienated by the "dissing
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by JulianPGough 1y ago
I watched the search for the Higgs Boson and the search for Cold Dark Matter carry on in parallel for decades. The former was clearly actual science: they had a theoretical particle, they knew what it did, it had a place that made sense in
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by JulianPGough 1y ago
I like you, wyager. Marry me. Yeah, I think cosmology has very slowly walked into a swamp with ΛCDM. And it's having enormous trouble backing out of the swamp, even though the James Webb Space Telescope is screaming at them that they n
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by JulianPGough 1y ago
Yes. (See longer version of this "yes" above!)
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by 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 rou
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"Life Without Stars? Request for feedback on a chapter of a non-fiction book(theeggandtherock.com)
12 points by JulianPGough 2y ago|6 comments
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by JulianPGough 2y ago
Hi, I’m Julian Gough. I write novels (most recently science fiction), children’s books, and hard-to-classify stuff like the End Poem for Minecraft. I’m currently writing a book about the universe, The Egg and the Rock, in public, online, to
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by JulianPGough 2y ago
It’s an absolute pleasure! I love seeing what people do with my words.
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by JulianPGough 2y ago
Thanks for putting up the context. Thoughtful of you.
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by JulianPGough 2y ago
Oh, I wondered why some people were visiting theeggandtherock.com from Hacker News. (I popped over to check.) I see, it’s downstream of this… Yes, a very nice Brazilian guy set up theendpoem.com the day after I put the End Poem in the publi

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