Dark Beginnings

(Illustration from EarthSky)

One question I have zero expertise in answering:

Black holes and dark matter — are they one and the same? [bold added]

If most of the primordial black holes were “born” [after the Big Bang] at a size roughly 1.4 times the mass of Earth’s sun, they could potentially account for all dark matter, said Yale professor of astronomy and physics Priyamvada Natarajan, the paper’s theorist.

Natarajan and her colleagues say their new model shows that the first stars and galaxies would have formed around black holes in the early universe. Also, she said, primordial black holes would have had the ability to grow into supermassive black holes by feasting on gas and stars in their vicinity, or by merging with other black holes...

“Our study shows that without introducing new particles or new physics, we can solve mysteries of modern cosmology from the nature of dark matter itself to the origin of super-massive black holes,” [Miami physics professor Nico] Cappelluti said.

Primordial black holes also may resolve another cosmological puzzle: the excess of infra-red radiation, synced with X-ray radiation, that has been detected from distant, dim sources scattered around the universe. Natarajan and her colleagues said growing, primordial black holes would present “exactly” the same radiation signature.

Best of all, the existence of primordial black holes can be proven — or disproven — in the near future, courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope and ESA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission announced for the 2030s.

Major discoveries are occurring in every field of science at a rapid rate, thanks to the development of tools like the Webb Space Telescope. That's a good reason for us Boomers to stay sentient as long as possible, just to see what happens.

In the Book of Genesis readers rush past the beginning where everything is formless, void, and dark in order to get to the light and the creation of the world. It appears that the study of darkness would be very much worth our while.

Before You Can Simulate the Universe, You Have to Map It

Perlmutter is named after Berkeley Lab’s Nobel
Prize-winning astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter.(WSJ)

A powerful supercomputer will use artificial intelligence to map the universe in 3-D:

The real power of Perlmutter, Dr. Bailey said, will come into play as the data starts to build up and researchers begin creating maps to judge their progress. Processing a year’s worth of the data, for example, would take weeks with an existing supercomputer, Dr. Bailey said.

However, Perlmutter—which will be shared with other research teams working on other scientific projects—should be able to accomplish the task in a matter of days...

HPE says the NERSC computer has a peak AI performance, or speed, of almost four “AI exaflops,” which the company said would make the machine the fastest AI supercomputer to date. An AI exaflop is roughly mathematically equivalent to performing 250 petaflops per second, it said. A petaflop is 1,000 trillion, or one quadrillion, operations per second.

Today's smartphone is more powerful than all of NASA's computers used for the moon landing. Perlmutter will seem as primitive to data scientists 50 years from now as NASA's computers appear to us today.

Given the speed that computing power is progressing, we may soon have the power to populate this 3-D map of the universe with beings who think they are "conscious." Of course, that doesn't have to mean anything about our world.

It's All Connected

James Peebles, 2019 Physics Nobel laureate, discusses his work in cosmology: [bold added]

Michel Mayor, Didier Queloz, and James Peebles (WSJ)

“We have very clear evidence that our universe did expand from a hot, dense state, but although the theory is thoroughly tested, we still must admit that dark matter and dark energy are mysterious,” Dr. Peebles said. “Although we have made great advances in understanding the nature and evolution of our universe, there are still many open questions.”

Lyrics from the first verse of the theme song of the hit series The Big Bang Theory:

Our whole universe was in a hot dense state
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait...
The Earth began to cool
The autotrophs began to drool
Neanderthals developed tools
We built a wall (we built the pyramids)
Math, science, history, unraveling the mystery
That all started with the big bang!

In the series finale of the Big Bang Theory Sheldon and Amy win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the real-life presentation of the Physics award to Dr. Peebles, Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor, and Swiss astrophysicist Didier Queloz, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences member Ulf Danielsson quoted,

"Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state, then nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started.'

Historians of the distant future may well be perplexed by this melding together of music, television entertainment, and theoretical physics in a hot dense state. And note the coincidence of the fictional culmination of the 12-year TV show in Stockholm with the actual Physics award going to someone who studied the Big Bang as his life's work.

The (inter) action is spooky.