Hey, thanks Brent.

If Mr. Anderson was interested in exploring the ideas I’m playing with (which descend from the ideas of John Wheeler and Lee Smolin), and which certainly have something to say about these forces, I guess this might be a fun place to start…

theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowto...

Oh, they now have adaptive optics for a solar telescope! I had no idea they'd been working on this. GLORIOUS images, thanks...

Thank you, Justin. That's very nice of you to say.

Mmmm, very sweet shot. Well done.

There’s no pattern to the masses of the particles, or the strength of the forces, that you can derive just from those things themselves. Their meaning lies downstream, in their consequences for the reproductive success of the universe. Which is why their values are all over the place. They evolved.

There’s no pattern to the masses of the particles, or the strength of the forces, that you can derive just from those things themselves. Their meaning lies downstream, in their consequences for the reproductive success of the universe. Which is why their values are all over the place. They evolved.

Yes, that would be pretty much my take on this. If our universe evolved, then the laws of physics will be fine-tuned for an outcome. They won’t be symmetrical or beautiful in themselves, just as a tiger’s genes aren’t beautiful in themselves. The beauty is in the outcome: the tiger, the universe.

I’m sorry! The Blowtorch Theory post kicked off so much reaction, and so many interesting people got in touch, that I’ve been taken up with dealing with that.

Plus, it’s a hard one to follow up! Nothing seems sufficiently important.

The extremely small blue dots are… intriguing. Not red, yet at that extreme a redshift…. Do we have a consensus view of what they are, how large, and how far back? (Look like, potentially, extremely early point-source quasars or AGNs to me. Which would be interesting!)

And here’s the James Webb vindicating those predictions:

theeggandtherock.com/p/killer-new...

Hope you find all this as interesting as I do!

Here are some predictions it made about the early universe, before the James Webb Space Telescope had sent back any data:

theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/prediction...

Because the extended version of the theory is now making successful predictions, it’s starting to get some mainstream coverage for the first time in, gosh, I suppose, decades.

www.irishtimes.com/science/spac...

Here’s perhaps the most ambitious part of the book…

theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowto...

Yeah, it’s a terrific theory. Has fascinating implications that even Lee Smolin himself didn’t see at the time. In fact, I’m currently writing a book that explains, explores, and expands on cosmological natural selection. You might find it interesting. I’ll find a couple of links, hang on…

I’m delighted…

I did!

Thank you. I’m so pleased it connected with you.