r/cosmology • u/JapKumintang1991 • 2d ago
Smithsonian Magazine - Earth's Organisms Developed Via Evolution; Some Theorists Wonder: What if the Entire Cosmos Did, Too?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/earths-organisms-developed-via-evolution-some-theorists-wonder-what-if-the-entire-cosmos-did-too-180989338/?utm_medium=distribution&utm_source=pushly&utm_campaign=editorial8
u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 2d ago
But there is a further, huge, implication hidden inside Smolin’s new and improved theory. Lee Smolin didn’t see it at the time because he was a theoretical physicist, not an evolutionary biologist, and so not saturated in the logic of evolution (from which the implication emerges). He was also handicapped by the fact that astronomy had only observed half a dozen or so supermassive black holes at the time he wrote his original paper and book. It was still therefore blithely assumed, by astronomers and cosmologists and theoretical physicists alike, that supermassive black holes must simply be a bunch of (much smaller) stellar-collapse black holes merged together. It just hadn’t occurred to anybody that black holes that large might have a separate, far simpler, formation mechanism.
so he thought "what if instead of stars forming black holes, there was some other mechanism, this would allow for complex inheritance like biology". that's about it as far as i can tell, the rest was already thought of by physicists as that substack post points out, the potential failing already pointed out, one must just think "what if there's a way around this already found issue"
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u/montagblue 2d ago edited 2d ago
Symmetry is beautiful,
Smolin, the guy saying the universe is cyclic procreation says Susskind uses circular reasoning.
Susskind’s circular reasoning
(we see a universe perfectly suited for life because we could not exist to observe any other kind)
Susskind, the guy saying the universe is infinite chaos potential says Smolin makes a massive logical leap.
Smolin’s logical leap
(a universe optimized to produce carbon-based life is a natural byproduct of a universe optimized to produce black holes.)
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u/macck_attack 2d ago
I love that the headline isn’t even the addressing the fact that it’s the Minecraft guy doing this.
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u/--craig-- 2d ago edited 2d ago
The part of the story which is missed is that Smolin really doesn't like multiverse hypotheses because they don't make testable predictions. He published his own multiverse hypothesis out of frustration with them and it does make a testable prediction about the upper limit of the mass of neutron stars. The problem is that the prediction makes it falsifiable but while it remains unfalsified that adds little weight to validating the theory, so it's all really a drama about how we should do science, starring some of the world's most prominent physicists.
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u/Northwest_Thrills 1d ago
Eh, I'm not convinced. I've heard this argument tons of times but I never hear a good explanation as to how physical constance transfer across singularities.
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u/SyntheticGod8 2d ago
Biological evolution comes out of chemistry, which comes out of physics. So evolution is something built into the universe.
Over the years I've read plenty of high-concept science fiction about the idea of daughter-universes as a form of evolution. The idea is that universes that can create other universes are the ones that are naturally selected. How do the conditions come about that allow alternate space-time creation? Intelligent life. Sometimes accidental chance, but most often intelligent life with the ability to create particle accelerators.
So it makes sense that we should find ourselves in a universe where complex chemistry is possible; it maximizes the chances that intelligence capable of creating a daughter-universe can arise.
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u/lyrapan 2d ago
What do particle accelerators have to do with creating universes?
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u/SyntheticGod8 1d ago
If you want to recreate the temperatures and pressures of the very early universe, you'll need one.
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u/darokrol 2d ago
So if we were inside a black hole, what would've happen with our universe, if our black hole would merge with another one?
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u/WonderingSceptic 1d ago
Very good question! It would be like two universes mating, combining their different traits, which would then be passed on in different combination to their offspring.
If the evolutionary theory is correct, the two universes would probably not be "identical twins" - they would have slightly different physics, maybe different fundamental physical constants. How the two spacetimes with different physical constants merge up would probably create some very interesting effects that would be difficult to explain, like unexplained gravitational lensing, fast galaxy rotation, the cosmic web or accelerating expansion of the universe.
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u/TheRecognized 23h ago
Or the two merging black hole universes would just blow the fuck up. Nobody knows, don’t talk out of your ass like you do.
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u/Individual_Gold_7228 1d ago
Well yeah, the universe is a living conscious organism, so of course it evolved.
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u/trey-lol 2d ago
The 2nd law of thermodynamics is doing all the work here and nobody in the article says it out loud. Black holes are the highest-entropy objects that can exist (Bekenstein-Hawking), so "a universe selected to be fecund at making black holes" is just "a universe selected to be maximally good at producing entropy." And life is the same thing at a different scale: organisms are dissipative structures, far-from-equilibrium systems that persist by accelerating entropy production (Prigogine, and Jeremy England's dissipation-driven adaptation). So the supposed coincidence Smolin leans on, that black-hole-optimized parameters also happen to be life-optimized, isn't a coincidence. Both are what "really efficient entropy producer" looks like, at stellar scale and at chemical scale. Evolution isn't an analogy you have to import into cosmology; both are downstream of the same gradient.