Now that those of us with a lively but an amateur interest in cosmology have sort-of gotten our heads around the idea of a black hole, we have to wrestle with an odd variant, the "naked black hole" -- i.e the black hole that can be observed from outside. We amateurs understand or think we understand that the inner workings of a black hole cannot be observed from outside its boundary, formally known as its "event horizon". Hence the adjective "black". Yet the James Webb telescope seems now to be saying -- yes, maybe we can. Perhaps sometimes we can observe the singularity, the point at the Senate where gravity becomes infinite and all laws seem to break down. Here is one take on this. https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/09/this-naked-black-hole-shouldnt-exist.html One thing that us amateurs think we know about black holes is that they form from the collapse of a star in upon itself. Hossenfelder says that the naked black holes did not form that way, ...
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Are black holes philosophically interesting? And, if so, why? I submit that they are. They seem to be central to the development of cosmology, the branch of physics that asks the Big Questions: where did the universe come from? why does it have the laws that it has? (for example, why does gravity have the force that it has)? Do the laws of nature themselves have a history? However much impressive and, for many of us, impenetrable the mathematics that may be thrown at such problems, they retain their philosophy-adjacent pull. Why are black holes central to cosmology? In part because the natural way to understand black holes involves the notion of a singularity -- a place (perhaps a mathematical point) where laws cease to apply. Take a simple point from some of the math I just mentioned. Whenever there is a value defied as 1/x= V, then the value goes to infinity as X goes to zero. You can think x as the distance between an objec...
I today finish my laborious piece-by-piece road through PROCESS AND REALITY with you, dear reader, by my side. Near the end of PROCESS AND REALITY, our author gets systematic about presenting his conception of God. The underlying idea here is of the physical cosmos and God as partners, not Master and Slave, not Creator and Created, but partners on the dance floor of existence together. That is my way of putting it. Not his, This is his way of putting it. It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent. It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God is many. It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as it is to say that in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently. It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. It is as true to say that God transcends the world, ...
I am told that physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists dream about is the placement of a radio telescope on the far side of the moon. Putting it on the dark side would of course ensure that the planet earth would not be in its way. What is more important, the moon has no atmosphere, so the clarity of radio 'view' the human race would get of distant parts of the cosmos would be ... well, to use a technical phrase, an ass-kicking thrill. And though a radio telescope would be all that, ambitious scientists have additional related ideas. For example, there is a proposal to put a gravitational wave interferometer in the moon. Obvious question ... a whaaaaat? Interferometry is a set of techniques by which waves are made to interfere with one another, creating patterns that convey information. Usually this sort of measurement involves electromagnetic waves. But the study of gravitational waves is a new thing. The first direct observation of gravity waves was recorded in...
The dialogue Philebus is not one of the best known or oft interpreted in the Platonic canon. Maybe that's for the best. It would surely cause some confusion for undergraduates, not least because the titular character, "Philebus," has very little to say in it. The discussion is chiefy between Socrates and a student of the sophists named Protarchus. So why isn't it called the Protarchus ? I accept my ignorance. The central issue, at least in terms of narrative structure, is the value of a hedonistic life versus that of a life spent in pursuit of wisdom. Spoiler alert: the conclusion is that the ideal life includes components of both, but that the life spent in pursuit of wisdom at the expense of pleasure gets "second prize." In the course of this, there are lengthy digressions, as it seems, about cosmology and such. As is often the case with Plato's dialogues, the digressions contain the real philosophical meat. What is perhaps best remembered a...
"This cosmos was not made by immortal or mortal beings, but always was, is and will be an eternal fire, arising and subsiding in measure." The presumption that the cosmos was not made by immortal or mortal beings draws out attention to the verb. The cosmos was not "made" at all, so there is no answer to the question who made it. The cosmos was not made precisely in the sense that it has always been. So far so good, we might attribute to Heraclitus something akin to the steady-state theory of the cosmos and knock off our exegetical work for the day. But then what are we to do with the final clause? The cosmos continues to exist by "arising and subsiding in measure." To continue with the categories of contemporary cosmologists, this seems like a "Big Crunch" theory. The universe is a closed one, in that it will not expand forever (that would be an expansion without "measure"!). It will at some point start to fall in upon itself,...
Just thinking aloud here. There are several theories extant about how what we think of as the universe, the totality of spaces you could in principle get to from here, and of moments in time that came before or will come after this one, is only one of many. A multiplicity of multiverse theories, so to speak. I'll still to three (I'm sure there are more). 1) A multiverse exists because every black hole is also a big bang . I'm told that mathematical modeling of a black hole leads to the inference that a mass of any size may somehowishly be reduced to a single infinitesimal point (meaning: infinite density). Also, that this makes the formation of a black hole look like the big bang postulated as the start of our universe in reverse. From such premises, the italicized inference above seems possible. If every black hole you can get to from here is a big bang, though, then it is the big bang of another universe, one you can't get to from here, one with its own space an...
Fred Hoyle, the creator of steady-state cosmology, wrote something for Harper's about his agnosticism, back in 1951. The magazine has reprinted part of it in the January 2016 issue as one of their continuing "From the Archives" series. "[I]t seems to me that religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly fantastic Universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this security is illusory."
In a philosophy group to which I belong, a fellow calling himself Barleycorn posted the following thought: People like to think of the universe as some magical godly force of creation but really it's just the earth that houses life. The universe for the most part is death. Put anything living up in space and the universe instantly kills it. The universe is not your loving friend. This little bubble on earth called an atmosphere is the only thing stopping the universe from instantly murdering you. So why all the memes about the magical mystical universe and all this spirit science crap? And why do so many people feel like the universe will absorb or save your soul at death. No it won't. That's a very romantic idealistic view of the universe. Life struggles AGAINST the universe. My reply was, and is, as follows: First, the "little bubble" of life on earth is only possible because of a continuous stream of energy from the nearest star, and because we are held...
I tried to describe the 'big picture' of Smolin's book in yesterday's post. Today I'll write about a detail -- a point hidden in the end note, the lengthy note 10 for the chapter 16. Smolin discusses the different "arrows of time" and the question whether they can all be reduced to one. Is time's directionality one fact, or several? He seems to think it is several distinct facts. There is a cosmological arrow, a thermodynamic arrow, a biological arrow, an experiential arrow, and an electromagnetic arrow. In principle, we could perhaps reduce the biological and experiential flow of time to thermodynamics, though Smolin sounds dubious even about this. "We remember the past and not the future because memory is a form of organization, and organization decreases in the future -- or so it is claimed." Similarly, as to biology, "we age, it is claimed, because disorder accumulates in our cells." But where he steps in with something ...
Free-flowing meditation. I believe that we acquire knowledge pragmatically, through living in the world and experiencing successes and failures. But I also believe that there is something not-this-worldly about us, and this Otherness, this transcendental character in ourselves, is none the less real despite the inability of anything akin to our pragmatic intellect to understand it. In ethics, I believe again that we form ideas of right and wrong based upon the long experience of the human race, butting heads on a small planet and working toward co-existence, and more than that, coincident prosperity. These ideas have at their root unquestionable intuitions, which are very simple: that it is good to enjoy beautiful things, for example, or that it is good to create beauty that others can enjoy. I also believe that nothing comes from nothing, so that in some manner or other the world has always existed, and will always exist, and that as science continues in its own progression i...
Last week I wrote an entry about the "argument from design," and William James' negative view of it. This week, prompted by a commenter there, I'll add some thoughts. I quoted James writing thus: " When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement ... so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively." Henry objected. He saw two arguments here, one on the assumption that order is an objective fact, the other on the denial of that assumption. 1) Assuming order is an objective fact, it is equally so that there is a lot of disorder too, which vitiates the proposed inference that there is an order-loving Creator. 2) But order isn't an objective fact, it is subject...
As regular readers of this blog and its precursor know, I'm always happy to find support for myown prejudice against Big Bang cosmology. Sometimes my search for such support has led me into blind alleys, and I back out of those as quickly as I can . Recall this discussion from September. Here are a couple of pieces I've written that mention alleys that might not prove to be so blind. Maxwell's demon and panspermia might both bear upon the big cosmological questions. Today, I can report something else worth further investigation. Something from Robert Matthews' website: Cosmology and other questions Matthews, a Brit, is a professor who teaches at the Dept of Information Engineering at Ashton University, is a working scientist (a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, author of dozens of articles for refereed publications about statistics, encryption, neural networks, and related matters) as well as a science journalist. Here is the full CV...
According to a new calculation by Alexei Sharov and Richard Gordon, life must have pre-existed the planet Earth. You can find the study here . You can find some of my own earlier uncredentialed speculations about related matters here. Sharov and Gordon are both properly credentialed. Each is a Ph.D. with a research role with prestigious (though non-academic) institutions. Nonetheless, there is a good deal of speculation in their work, as one might imagine given the subject. The gist is that they infer that genetic complexity increased at an exponential pace: it doubles every 376 million years. If that is right, then life originated roughly 9.7 billion years ago (give or take 2.5 billion). And if that is right then it could not have originated on earth. Radiometric dating puts the age of the earth at roughly 4.5 billion years. So on their guesstimations, life must have been already 5 billion years old before the earth was formed. Their calculations als...
As I indicated in yesterday's post, I was disappointed by Ratcliffe's book, The Static Universe: exploding the myth of cosmic expansion (2010). He fails to make his case, even to a will-to-believer like me, and he mixes up his case with a polemic against all of modern geometry, going back as far as Carl Friedrich Gauss . [Gauss is the rightwardmost figure in the photo above, a still of the afterlife of great mathematicians as represented in the stage show Fermat's Last Tango.] The wrongness of the paths followed by modern cosmology, then, has its origin prior to the mid-point of the 19th century, when Gauss started working on non-Euclidean space. As some of my readers may have learned at school, Euclid's geometry rests in large part upon the following axiom: "If a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet...." This...
I recently purchased The Static Universe: exploding the myth of cosmic expansion , through amazon. I've long been suspicious about the Big Bang Theory (not the TV show, which is very funny, but the actual BBT), and I have suspected that some re-worked version of the Steady State Theory will have its innings again. So I thought this work might have valuable nuggets of fact and argument that could shore up that ignorant prejudice. The author is Hilton Ratcliffe, a distinguished astrophysicist who was one of the co-discoverers of the CNO nuclear fusion cycle on the surface of the sun. (This is a cycle involving carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.) He is a member of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, as well as a fellow of the Institute of Physics, a British institution. So I guess he travels a lot! So: heretical science from someone who could easily have sat on his laurels as a member of the establishment but chose to defy it...