korben dallas said:
...only posses a Jethro Clampet education, which means I only have half of my grade twelve, which, when calculated, translates to a real world grade 6,lol,lol...
Well you seem to me sensible, well-spoken, and of independent mind. I don't know how you strike others but that's my impression. Maybe we can come up with more stuff for you to look at that suits your requirements.
I wouldn't advise
buying "The Life of the Cosmos" because it is a 1999 book that sold widely some years back. It should be in the library. And being over 10 years old it would be a bit out of date.
My personal view is that it is very important for someone like yourself to have alternative sources of information---something to look at and think about besides what you already get from television.
I wish some other people would come up with some ideas. I can't think what to suggest.
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Maybe for the time being we can simply talk about Smolin's black hole bounce idea, that he develops in that 1999 book. It's rather interesting (although like any other new idea it might be wrong).
The starting point for all cosmology discussions is the 1915 theory of "GR" which describes how the shape of space (surveyed from within, not viewed from outside) interacts with matter and changes. A bunch of equations describing how geometry interacts with matter.
GR is known to be very close to right. But it can't be absolutely right because it suffers from singularities. (A technical word for failures in a manmade mathematical description.) In extreme situations its equations fail and don't give meaningful numbers.
So there is work in progress to
modernize the GR equations so they will not fail.
(The "einstein-online" link in my signature might help you understand this.)
One of the approaches to modernizing GR is called "Loop quantum gravity" or "Loop gravity" for short, but specifics don't matter. there are actually a half dozen of various different approaches to modernizing GR.
When you modernize GR and, say, use the modernized theory to make a computer model of a collapse, it doesn't necessarily develop a failure and end there. It may bounce!
We don't know what Nature would actually do, but at least in some new theories (hoping to replace the old 1915 version of how geometry interacts with matter) collapse is not necessarily a dead end.
So Smolin took this idea and ran with it. He imagined that a universe could have "children" by its black holes. New universes which we do not see, budding off from black holes in our universe and expanding at breakneck speed. And he imagined that the children could by accident be slightly different from the parent.
the constants in physical laws might be jolted slightly during the bounce, so that physics (and therefore chemistry based on atomic physics) might be slightly different in the daughter from what it was in the mother.
And he reasons on from there. How a kind of evolution might occur based on selection for "reproductive success". How many black holes a universe makes depends in interesting ways on how well adjusted the physical constants are. You need some key physical mechanisms to produce, for starters, clouds of gas which then are able to condense to form stars. And certain chemical elements and molecules help radiate heat away allowing more condensation. And constants of particle physics can be either conducive or not conducive to eventually the star collapsing to a black hole (or getting stuck halfway and just making a neutron star).
So he reasons on and on, about a kind of "natural selection" favoring universes which are able to have a lot of children and live a long time over universes with less fortunate physics. As I recall it gets to be a rather interesting story.
It is primarily just
conjecture except that one can ask whether the constants of physics (and chemistry) in our universe are actually adjusted so as to promote making a lot of black holes. So there is actually a testable hypothesis here. So it is, in a sense, science, not merely fantasy.
But it could well be wrong. Some people think that it has already been shown that the physics constants in our universe are NOT ideal for making a lot of black holes, which would suggest that this kind of natural selection evolution has NOT been at work amongst our ancestor universes. I think this is still undecided, and it remains an interesting idea.
The fact remains that the bulk of research on bounce cosmologies does not involve black holes. At the present time they are mostly studying models where a whole universe collapses to produce a bounce and an expansion (like what we see.) That is actually simpler to study, and simpler to simulate in the computer.
Maybe when they have studied whole universe bounce ("big bounce") for a while they will again return to the idea of black hole bounce. Smolin's idea might be revived. But it's hard to foresee where research will go.
Brilliant politically adroit people are just like the rest of us (in a good many ways.)
