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Comment by CGMthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Well, Webb has observed SMBHs earlier than current theory would suggest.

But I don't think that's the problem here, it's the opportunity:

ΛCDM was the best model for the cosmic web when we thought that SMBHs could not exist so early. But now that we have observed that they do, it opens the possibility of other theories for the cosmic web, including this one (blow torch) in which the early SMBHs take a role in its creation.

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ΛCDM was the best model for a long while because it gave a free mystery variable to generously use as plaster to fill in an innumerable amount of yawing cracks.

The convenience provided by the Dark Plaster theory have meant that despite innumerable failures in actually detecting it have been handwaved off by an equally convenient "it's just a bit darker than expected".

A single variable to fill innumerable cracks? How would that work? All the cracks just happen to line up so the same value of the variable fills each one? Wouldn't that mean there's just one crack?

According to the article, the plaster changes properties based on the crack it's currently filling, which is the whole problem.

Yes. (See longer version of this "yes" above!)

Currently, Cold Dark Matter, as used in simulations etc, usually has six free parameters. Most simulations of structure formation at the level of the universe as a whole ONLY model Cold Dark Matter (i.e., they treat baryonic matter as a rounding error, and leave it out: that's partly understandable, as baryonic matter is much harder to model than Cold Dark Matter, and trying to model it eats compute.) And when they DO add baryonic matter to simulations (usually of smaller-scale structure formation), that usually has four free parameters, which are also not based on observation, but can be tuned to fit. So you can end up with 10 free parameters in the simulations.

As von Neumann once said, "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

At this point, with ten, it's basically CGI.

And the model gets tweaked afresh to suit each new observational anomaly. So you can tweak it to fit, say, large galaxies, but then it doesn't fit small galaxies. (The cusp/core problem.) But that's OK, because you can tweak it to fit small galaxies! (But then it won't fit large galaxies.) And on it goes.

A key problem is that, after 50 years of tweaking, it still didn't predict the rapid, efficient structure formation of the early universe as revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Three-stage cosmological natural selection (the parent to Blowtorch Theory) did.

https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...

>Cold Dark Matter, as used in simulations etc, usually has six free parameters.

That is not correct. LCDM as a cosmology is described by 6 parameters mostly for CMB analyses, but this is much more than just CDM. These parameters include the amount of normal matter, the cosmological constant, the amount of dark matter, reionization, the Hubble constant and two parameters which describe the initial fluctuations. CDM only has one parameter in the model, its density. As you can see there aren't many nobs to turn. These parameters are also fixed to observational values. And if you think you can fit all modern cosmological data with a physically-meaningful model and fewer parameters then go ahead.

How about dark dollars that can be freely adjusted up and down in density to balance the books, that any and all auditors will have to accept as real because it's written down to satisfy calculations but can not directly be observed?

Charles Ponzi or Bernie Madoff could've had the Nobel Prize in economics had they merely used the same explanation as the lambda-cdm cosmologist do.

Only if you can observe the dark dollars bending the trajectories of the bright dollars

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