The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe

I think you should rework the style of the article to remove the “dissing” of the work that established ΛCDM. It is doing the article a disservice, making it sound unprofessional and crackpot-y. If the Blowtorch Theory has merit, it will stand on its own.

Fascinating stuff! What seems a bit far fetched is that idea that black holes create new universes and in doing so somehow transfer some cosmological constants over.

Is there anything that supports this? That is what the whole 'evolutionary universe' theory hinges on in the end. It certainly is a convenient explanation for the anthropic principle, but if any black hole however small it may be creates a universe - where do these universes go?

The early direct collapse black holes responsible for the formation of galaxies and structure of the universe are certainly more easily digestible.

I really enjoyed this essay. I'm just a cosmology bystander/hobbyist, but your takedown of the dark matter hypotheses was very appealing to me. I was shocked when I got to the section where you talk about all these macro-scale simulations using only dark matter. It's like an ouroboros of cosmological theories eating themselves, totally disconnected from reality. And relates to one of my favorite quotes that "simulations are doomed to succeed". I don't understand physics well enough to really understand black hole jets, but it feels like an elegant theory and I hope you're able to take it somewhere.

This was my first time hearing about the idea of universes producing children inside of black holes that may have slightly different physical properties. This is also really cool and interesting, but clearly a different level of theoretical compared to your first half about the black hole jets. I haven't had time to delve into any of your links, but it seems like you skipped over explaining how a universe would form inside a black hole in the first place. I saw in the comments on substack that someone pointed out the concept of "black hole electrons" and it's like, yeah, if we don't know what's going on inside black holes, then why couldn't they be their own universes? And if that's the case for black holes, then why not also electrons, or protons, or any other sufficiently dense and mysterious object? But then again why would we suppose that another universe would necessarily form inside those things? I'm curious if you could expand on what you think the mechanism would be for universe formation, as well as what you think the mechanism would be for variation/heredity in the child universes.

This is interesting, but a few issues jump out at me.

There are fundamental issues mapping Biological Evolution to the formation of the universe. Evolution fundamentally works on 'introduce random variations into an environment with selective pressures and/or competition and if that variation produces a change that benefits the animal relative to those pressures and competition, it will more likely survive and reproduce' and that reproduction ultimately is what defines the fitness of that evolution. How does this apply to a uniform CMB, the sudden collapse to make supermassive black holes? The eventual formation of smaller black holes? The formation of planets? The expanding universe? Where is the competition? Where is the reproduction? Where are the selective pressures that define evolution? Where does this show branching and dead branches of evolution's failed attempts.

You repeatedly refer to evolution directing, favoring, having reproductive strategies etc. showing either a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution or a casual use of the terms that will confuse many readers. Evolution is a random and non-directed process. You describe a singular chain of events where those events are just as likely to be random and unconnected but try to imply strongly directed evolution because you approached it with the view that evolution would optimize this process and combined theories that could indicate a more optimized process (while not actually proving that optimization or any form of selection for it).

It fails to address observations backing the existence of dark matter while criticizing existing theories for failing to address observations that do not line up with their predictions.

Beyond that, are any of the predictions you make novel to just your story, or are they ultimately the combined predictions made by the various theories you are basing this on? I didn't see any that did not lead off the existing work that doesn't always require throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Ultimately this feels like a new interpretation combining a number of exciting and new discoveries that make predictions that JW is backing, approaching them with a philosophical view giving potential novel insights, but failing to disconnect the philosophy before engaging actual science and misunderstanding the difference between a good sounding science story and good science while on-boarding a fair amount of personal skepticism and frustration with the existing methods.

Its not to say that some of the theories its based on aren't correct, or that the existing theories aren't problematic, but it certainly feels like its leveraging the predictive power of other theories to do its heavy lifting.

It's a very enjoyable read.

Have you considered adding a little note or link near the beginning of the article, indicating how you know these jets and so forth will do the work you need them to do? (Or, if you're not sure they will, laying out that uncertainty clearly?)

Apologies if this list is on there and I missed it.

Here's hoping this is the 21st Century Copernican Revolution. Have you played the game Outer Wilds?

I didn't manage to get through all of the text, but it's the most interesting thing on science I've read in quite a while. Orders of magnitude more informative than any pop science news, and readable unlike journal papers.

I think the only thing missing is to mention epicycles of solar system models.

Amazing. What caused you to look for a solution without a particle?

> (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.

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.

> 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

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.

> empiricism is useless if you need a galaxy-scale particle accelerator.

I would say it's just not available more than that it's useless—albeit, only not available in theory.

The Xeelee would like a word.

I agree with most of what you've said here, particularly the following line which I'm copying for emphasis because I think it's incredibly important.

> These simulations have a lot of value, they demonstrate that standard cosmology and normal gravity has no problem forming voids and filaments.

That being said, I think the author intends for this article to be more of a call to action than an actual result. Simulations aren't cheap, somebody needs to actually do the work. The point that there aren't any simulations without dark matter is an important one too.

I've been calling out the similarity of works done by Barbour, Turok, Farnes & Petit for a long time, and the last developments by Turok's team vindicate this intuition. It is now very close to Jean-Pierre Petit's Janus model. Curt Jaimungal announced he'd interview him soon.

https://januscosmologicalmodel.com

Petit's models implies negative masses that would sit at the center of the cosmic voids, giving it structure.

Someone wrote simulation showcasing this emergent phenomenon a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtcbBpieR5U

Agreed, but my interpretation here is that Blowtorch Theory does just that. It just predicts that direct collapse supermassive blackholes determine the large scale structure of the universe using existing physics.

The parent theory leans on Cosmological Natural Selection to explain away the anthropic principle, but it's a separate theory not required by Blowtorch Theory.

> Blowtorch theory works, and can be explored, independently of its parent theory: however, three-stage cosmological natural selection gives an important and useful framework for more deeply understanding blowtorch theory and its implications.

I believe Gough has expressed properly that you're welcome to consider Blowtorch Theory and ignore CNS entirely and it still works as an astrophysical model. Honestly, the longer process of reading the series of articles on the substack where Gough explains how we got the model of the cosmos we currently have helps to explain some of the strange mismatches we've had to deal with throughout history, and CNS (developed originally by the brilliant physicist Lee Smolin) offers explanatory power using no new physics, no exotic matter, and applies the process of natural selection (which is the only observed way we've identified increasingly complixifying self-organizing systems) to the cosmos, and it works shockingly well.

I felt the same way when I first read the theory, and the idea of being inside a black hole sounded silly. But the more I read, the less crazy it sounded, and I'm at the point now where it feels crazier to ignore all this evidence.

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