[ExI] Cosmological Natural Selection

Thu Jun 22 18:48:26 UTC 2017

I've just read Lee Smolin's book

"Time Reborn"

and it reminded m
e
of his previous book

"The Life Of The Cosmos"

that was about

Cosmological Natural Selection. Smolin's idea is that when a star collapses
into a Black Hole a Singularity does not form in it's center, instead
everything bounces back before infinite density is reached. You would not
see this from the outside of the Black Hole but from the inside such a
thing would look like a big bang, and a new universe would be formed.

In that new universe the constants of physics, the 20 or so number
s
that can't be derived and must be put in by hand by physicists to make
there theories conform with observation, are similar to their parent
universe but not identical, there would be some
small 
random variation.

Universes that have laws encouraging the formation of black holes will
thus 
have more descendants than those that don't
.

And
 all this sounds very much like Darwin's idea written on a cosmic scale

because it has the 2 things that are needed, natural selection and
inheritance (although some have questioned the inheritance part wondering
if information can really cross the event horizon, even mutated
information).

Smolin

does not

predict

that

as a result of this Evolution

the physical

constants

in our universe

are

perfect for the formation of Black Holes,

but he does predict no small change

in them

will make more Black Holes.  And Black Holes need stars that go supernova,
and

hose stars

produce carbon and oxygen that also causes dust clouds to cool more and
collapse into
 yet
more

large stars that go supernova

and form more Black Holes
.
Those heavy elements also cause life to form but as far as

Cosmological Natural Selection

is concerned that's just a unimportant byproduct.

But what about Primordial Black Holes, you don't need stars to make then.
According to inflation theory expansion of
our
 universe started slow but then in just

10^-36 seconds space expanded by a factor of 10^78, during that time the
universe grew by a larger personage than it has form then to now

13.8 billion years

later. There is a number called the Size Density Constant, if it were much
larger all the matter in the universe would form Black Holes almost
immediately, but it turn out then the universe would inflate for even less
than 10^-36 seconds so there would be much less matter in it, so although
all its matter would be in the form on Black Holes it would have fewer
Black Holes than out universe does.

Smolin makes another prediction this one is about Neutron Stars.
Cosmological Natural Selection

predicts that the maximum mass a Neutron Star can be is lower than
previously thought and thus more Black Holes can be produced due to a
particle called the Kaon. The conventional idea is that in a Neutron Star
the pressure is so high electrons are forced into protons forming neutrons
and that's the end of the story, and if that's true then the maximum mass
of a Neutron star is

somewhere between

2.5

and

2.9 solar masses
.
But that's without considering Kaons, Smolin found that theory says some
interesting things happens to them when the pressure gets very high.

Normally Kaons are much more massive than electrons and thus unstable, but
under ultra high pressure suddenly the individual wave function of the
particles will merge, much like what happens to electrons in
superconductors, and their effective mass should be reduced

by

a lot, perhaps even to less than that of a electron.  If that actually
happens then things would be reversed and electrons would become unstable
and decay into Kaons (and Neutrinos  which fly out of the star and play no
further part in the story). In this scenario the upper mass limit for a
neutron star is

between

1.6

and

2 solar masses. More than that and a Black Hole forms because the
Kaon-Proton-Neutron soup at the center would be even more dense than
degenerate neutron matter
,
so the Neutron Star would be smaller
 and
its surface gravity greater, and thus a Black Hole can be formed with less
mass.

But would the effective mass of the Kaon really become less than that of
the electron? Nobody knows for sure but we do know that the mass of the
Kaon depends on the mass of the Strange Quark, and the Strange Quark has
little involvement with everyday matter in our everyday world, so in a
universe that had a Strange Quark with a mass very different from our own
things would be pretty much the same as they are here except the maximum
size of a Neutron Star and thus the minimum size of a Black Hole would be
different.

The two most massive neutron stars
where the

mass

ha
s

been

been accurately measured
are

PSR J0348+0432

with

2.01±0.04 solar masses

and

PSR J1614–2230

with

1.97 ± 0.04

solar masses. So far the Kaon idea survives by the skin of its teeth. There
is another Neutron Star whose mass might be as high as 2.5 solar masses but
that measurement is much less precise
 than the others
, however Smolin says if
it
 holds up then the Cosmological Natural Selection

idea

will have been disproved. By the way the smallest Black Hole found so far
is GRO J1655-40

with 5.31±.07 solar masses
. The reason for the large observational gap between the most massive
Neutron Star and the least massive Black Hole is probably because small
Black Holes are generally harder to detect than Neutron Stars. 

 John K Clark
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