We’ve talked before about something in physics called the “Hubble Tension.” Named for Edwin Hubble, who first observed the universe’s expansion in 1929, in simple terms it refers to the disagreement between two different methods of measuring the rate at which the universe is expanding. One method uses nearby supernovae and Cepheid variables, yielding a value of about

while another method based on cosmic microwave background radiation gives around

That difference of 6km/s/Mpc might not sound like much, but it is very significant and constitutes a conundrum that has puzzled astronomers for years. One reason is that knowing the exact rate of expansion plays a major role in deciding how old the universe is.

To make matters worse, along comes Dr. Indranil Banik from the University of Portsmouth in the UK, speaking to an astronomy conference in Dublin and proposing the idea that our Earth, our entire Solar System and even our entire Milky Way may sit inside a mysterious giant hole. ‘A potential solution to the Hubble tension is that our Galaxy is close to the center of a large, local void,’ explained Banik.

Banik presented data examining baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) – which roughly translate as the ‘sound’ of the Big Bang. The findings showed that a “void model” for the universe is about 100 million times more likely than a “void-free model.”

The Standard Model of Cosmology requires that matter should be uniformly spread throughout the Universe, and the idea of voids is controversial within the cosmology community. But for this theory to hold, Earth and our local galactic neighborhood would need to lie near the center of a void around a billion lightyears in radius, with a density about 20% lower than the Universe’s average.

If that’s true, they believe, it may cause the cosmos to expand more quickly in our local environment than in other parts of the universe. And if the cosmos is expanding more quickly in our neighborhood void, it could change the equations that determine the age of the universe, which is currently based on an expansion rate where matter is more uniformly spread out.

And if that’s not enough to shake up the cosmology community, another new theory of the origin of universe could explain cosmic structure and origin without inflation. An article written by Sayan Sen and published on neowin.net on August 15, 2026, presents the idea that the early Universe may have developed the first seeds of galaxies and other large-scale structures without needing the hypothetical scalar field (or early rapid expansion) commonly used in explanations of inflation.

Here are some excerpts from that article….

“Cosmology is the study of the origin, evolution and large-scale structure of the universe. For decades, cosmologists have worked with the inflationary paradigm, proposed by physicist Alan Guth in 1981, and this idea helped explain how small differences in density in the young universe could eventually grow into galaxies, galaxy clusters and other structures seen today.”

In simple terms, inflation is a crucial component of the Standard Model of cosmology, describing a rapid exponential expansion of the universe that occurred between

seconds and

seconds after the Big Bang. But this Standard Model of Cosmology has problems.

“There are many versions, and they can contain adjustable values known as free parameters. These parameters can be changed within a model to match observations. This creates a scientific problem because it can make it harder to tell whether a model is genuinely predicting what scientists will observe or simply being adjusted to fit existing data.

“The new model does not require inflation. Instead, it starts with quantum fluctuations in space-time. Quantum mechanics, the theory used to describe nature at very small scales, allows fluctuations even when a system is in its lowest-energy state. In the early universe, these small fluctuations could have had effects that became important over much larger distances as the universe expanded.

“The researchers focused on fluctuations in space-time itself. These appear as gravitational waves, which are ripples in the geometry of space-time. The model proposes that these fluctuations can interact with one another and generate another type of fluctuation.

“These are called scalar perturbations. Put simply, they are small variations in the density of the early Universe. They are important because regions that were slightly different in density could later develop, under gravity, into the galaxies and larger structures that make up the universe today.

“The model also offers a possible explanation for how the period of rapid expansion could end. The researchers propose a natural transition to a radiation-dominated phase, a period when radiation played the main role in controlling the expansion of the Universe. This means the model does not need a separate, model-dependent mechanism to bring inflation to an end.

“One of the researchers, Raúl Jiménez said: ‘For decades, we have tried to understand the early moments of the Universe using models based on elements we have never observed. What makes this proposal exciting is its simplicity and verifiability. We are not adding speculative elements, but rather demonstrating that gravity and quantum mechanics may be sufficient to explain how the structure of the cosmos came into being.’

“The main idea is therefore relatively straightforward, even though the physics behind it is complex. Instead of introducing an inflaton and choosing the properties of that field, the researchers ask whether the early Universe could have generated its own structure through quantum fluctuations in gravity.

“This also changes the way the origin of cosmic structure is described. In the proposed model, gravitational-wave fluctuations appear first. Through their interactions, they produce scalar perturbations. Those density differences can then grow over time as gravity brings more matter into denser regions. Eventually, this process can lead to the formation of galaxies, stars and planets.”

It should be clear why I found this article particularly interesting. I have always objected to physicists adding in “speculative elements,” such as dark matter, dark energy, and inflation just to make the mathematical equations come out right. To me it’s like starting with the answer of “5” to the equation of 2+2=? To get to “5”, they add an unknown and unproven factor (These parameters can be changed within a model to match observations) …. 2+2+X=5, and go chasing after the X, trying to find it, when they should instead take a closer look at their assumption that “5” is the answer.

So, I have to stand up and cheer when these researchers say, “We don’t need an X—in this case, inflation—to understand the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets. All we need is gravitational-wave fluctuations and scalar perturbations, which we already know exist.”

An article published on SciTechDaily.com on July 9, 2026 is titled The Milky Way’s Black Hole Isn’t Tearing Everything Apart – New Observations Reveal a Surprise. Since it’s focusing on our own Milky Way galaxy and not some other galaxy millions of light years away, I thought it would be a good article to quote some excerpts….

Besides, finding a black hole that’s not eating everything that gets anywhere close to it is an interesting new twist.

“Near the heart of the Milky Way, where the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* bends nearby space with immense gravity, astronomers have been watching several strange dusty objects for signs of destruction. Earlier studies suggested that some of them might be stretched apart and swallowed. New observations now show a different outcome.

“An international research team led by PD Dr Florian Peißker at the University of Cologne used ERIS (Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph) at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) facility in Chile to track these objects in detail. The data show that several dusty objects are following stable paths around Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy. The results were published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“The study examined four unusual objects that have attracted debate in recent years. One of the best-known, G2, was long interpreted as a simple cloud of dust and gas. Under that idea, the gravity of Sagittarius A* should have pulled it into an elongated shape through a process known as ‘spaghettification’ before tearing it apart.

“ERIS, which observes near-infrared radiation, instead shows that G2 remains on a stable orbit. That behavior suggests the dusty cloud likely hides a star inside it. The finding points to a galactic center that is not only capable of destroying objects, but also of preserving them in unexpectedly stable motion.

“The same pattern appears in other objects. D9, a binary star system discovered by Peißker and his team in 2024, is still intact despite the extreme tidal forces near the black hole. It is the first known binary star system observed so close to a supermassive black hole. In theory, those two stars could merge into one larger star under such intense gravity, but the ERIS data so far show that D9 has survived. Objects X3 and X7 also continue to move on stable orbits, making them more durable than earlier models suggested.

“’The fact that these objects move in such a stable manner so close to a black hole is fascinating,’ says Florian Peißker. ‘Our results show that Sagittarius A* is less destructive than was previously thought. This makes the center of our galaxy an ideal laboratory for studying the interactions between black holes and stars.’

“The findings suggest that the Milky Way’s center is more complicated than a region where black holes simply tear matter apart. ‘The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way has not only the capability to destroy stars but it can also stimulate their formation or the formation of pretty exotic dusty objects, most likely via mergers of stellar binaries,’ says Michal Zajaček from Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic).

“Future observations with ERIS and the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which is currently under construction, should allow astronomers to keep following these objects as they evolve. Those observations could help explain how stars and dusty stellar systems survive in one of the most extreme environments in the universe.”

I was a little surprised to read that not all black holes consume everything that gets close to them. I found some other references that might be interesting as well…..

“Black holes are some of the most extreme objects in the universe, but they are not cosmic vacuum cleaners. The reason they do not swallow everything comes down to gravity, distance, motion, and how matter behaves near them. A black hole can dominate its immediate neighborhood, yet most stars, planets, gas clouds, and even light can remain far beyond its reach. Understanding that boundary reveals why black holes are dangerous locally but not universally destructive.”^[1]

“Black holes do not work like vacuum cleaners. A vacuum cleaner actively pulls air inward because it creates a pressure difference. A black hole creates no such suction. It simply has gravity—very strong gravity near its event horizon, but ordinary gravity at large distances. If the Sun were replaced by a black hole with the same mass, the planets would not suddenly spiral inward and disappear. Earth would continue orbiting exactly as it does now. The gravitational pull at Earth’s distance depends on the Sun’s mass, not its size. The Sun’s mass would remain the same, so Earth’s orbit would remain stable. The only difference would be that the solar system would go dark, because a black hole emits no visible light the way the Sun does.”^[2]

“When black holes feast, they don’t just swallow, they spill. That’s the unsettling picture painted by new results from the XRISM satellite, showing that even the smallest stellar-mass black holes fling matter back into space instead of calmly consuming it. A research team caught the black hole system known as 4U 1630-472 during one of its dramatic flare-ups. What they saw was chaos: gas still being expelled at three percent of the speed of light, even as the X-ray flare dimmed. Intuition suggests the opposite. If a black hole is gorging rapidly, spillover makes sense. But when the feeding slows, one might expect cleaner accretion. Instead, it was like pouring a cup of water into a bucket and still splashing half onto the floor.”^[3]

“One of the most popular myths about black holes is that they suck in everything around them and devour their surroundings. In reality, the situation is a bit more complicated. Black holes do not roam the universe hunting stars and planets to devour. Most black holes stay close to the place where they formed, often within galaxies, orbiting just like other celestial objects. Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are especially stable and predictable.

Stars and planets that fall into black holes usually do so because they were already very close — not because the black hole chased them down. From the outside, it appears as if anything that crosses a black hole’s event horizon is lost forever. However, this creates a problem, because the laws of physics tell us that matter, energy, and information cannot simply be destroyed.

This leads to one of the biggest unsolved problems in modern physics: the black hole information paradox.”^[4]

Returning to the theory of Black Hole cosmology, if black holes are “home” to holographic universes, where does the two-dimensional information encoded on the black hole’s event horizon—which can later be used to create the three-dimensional hologram—where does it come from? To create a holographic universe like ours, that event horizon must contain an awful lot of encoded information in order to produce the very complicated and sophisticated universe we inhabit. Researchers say that Sagittarius A*, for example, the huge black hole lurking in the center of the Milky Way, can store the equivalent of no less than 10⁸⁰ gigabytes (that’s a 1 followed by 80 zeros – an unimaginably huge number).

But if that’s not enough space, maybe the Demiurge(s) who creates the holographic universe is not limited to the information on the event horizon and instead has access to the myriad of possibilities from “All That Is.” Otherwise, the only things that could show up in the three-dimensional image would be the things that fell into the black hole whose information was then stored on the event horizon. And that doesn’t make much sense.^[5]

I realize that a two-dimensional hologram can accommodate a huge amount of encoded information, and all it takes is aligning the projector to pick out the specific code for the desired three-dimensional image. But it still boggles the mind to think of the amount of information required on the event horizon to create the variety of images in our holographic universe alone. Perhaps there is another mechanism at work allowing the Demiurge to access what Lynne McTaggart called “The Field” to create the hologram and then “hide it” inside a black hole. Maybe one day we’ll find out.

^[1] SentinelMission.org

^[2] ScienceNewsToday.org

^[3] https://scienceblog.com/why-small-black-holes-refuse-to-eat-neatly/

^[4] (https://medium.com/@ThePhysicsNerdExplains/why-black-holes-dont-swallow-everything-common-misconceptions-explained-a24f9a3ee5fa)

^[5] Ibid.

On June 18, 2026, I wrote a post called Is Consciousness fundamental and everything else emergent? I was a little surprised at how few reads it got, at least compared to my other posts. I don’t know whether that means that not a lot of people are interested in the subject of consciousness, or perhaps not everyone understands the words “fundamental” and “emergent,” or whether the title wasn’t catchy enough to interest many people.

I’ve written about consciousness before from various angles, and I believe it is becoming more and more clear that consciousness is the most fundamental “thing” in our universe, or any universe. As Dr. Amit Goswami, Professor Emeritus in theoretical physics at the University of Oregon, said many years ago, ““Quantum Physics enables us to see directly that we can make sense of the world only if we base the world on consciousness. The world is made of consciousness; the world is consciousness…. Quantum Physics makes this as clear as daylight.”

If consciousness is fundamental, then everything else is “emergent” and based on consciousness. That means our entire universe.

But does a universe based on consciousness negate the possibility of a holographic universe? Absolutely not. Dr. Karl Pribram’s brain research led him to say that our human brain operates like a hologram and is actually a holographic receiver and projector—that “our brains mathematically construct ‘hard’ reality by relying on input from a frequency domain.”^[1] In other words, someone or something downloads information encoded in two-dimensions and stored in a “frequency domain” to a brain. Then the brain translates that two-dimensional information into three dimensions and projects that three-dimensional reality “out there,” where our senses then pick it up and bring it back to the brain for our conscious interpretation. But it is consciousness that is fundamental to our perception and interpretation of the holographic reality.

For me, that makes consciousness a very important thing to study and understand. And apparently there are a lot of people who feel that way, based on the amount of consciousness research going on. Unfortunately, much of the research is still trying to say that the brain produces consciousness using physical and neurobiological processes. And no one as of yet has been able to define consciousness—what it is or how it works.

Take, for example, a study published on ScienceDaily.com on June 28, 2026. The title of the study is Brain activity under anesthesia challenges what we know about consciousness. And this study did produce some interesting information about the brain and consciousness. Here are some excerpts from the study….

“The unconscious brain appears to be far more capable than scientists once believed. Researchers found that patients under general anesthesia could still process language at a sophisticated level, distinguishing nouns, verbs, and adjectives while listening to stories. Even more remarkably, neural activity showed signs of predicting upcoming words before they were heard. The results challenge traditional ideas about consciousness and hint at new possibilities for brain-computer interfaces.

“’Our findings show that the brain is far more active and capable during unconsciousness than previously thought,’ said Dr. Sameer Sheth, professor and Cullen Foundation Endowed chair of neurosurgery and a McNair Scholar at Baylor. ‘Even when patients are fully anesthetized, their brains continue to analyze the world around them.’”

While the study’s findings suggest that important cognitive abilities, including language comprehension and prediction, may not depend on conscious awareness, they remain stuck on the idea that “consciousness itself may arise from communication across multiple brain regions rather than from activity within a single area such as the hippocampus.” This is called physicalism.

Meanwhile, in a recent article in Popular Mechanics, Christof Koch, PhD, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute based in Seattle, points out how previous consciousness theories—like physicalism—fail to explain things like why people have love for their children, why people find Beethoven beautiful, and why we like the sunshine.

“Physicalism states every thought, emotion, and experience you have is due to underlying physical and neurobiological processes. But it doesn’t account for the subjective aspect of them. For instance, physicalism explains how your brain registers a sunset, but it doesn’t explain how you actually feel when you see the beautiful mix of colors in the sky.”

And Oxford physicist Roger Penrose has spent decades arguing that consciousness isn’t something the brain produces, but that explaining it will require physics we haven’t yet discovered.

In an article published on SpaceDaily.com on July 4, 2026, “Penrose is not simply saying the brain is complicated, or that neuroscience has further to go. He is saying that no arrangement of switches, however intricate, produces the kind of understanding a mathematician has when they see why a proof is true. Something else has to be happening, and in his view that something is rooted in quantum mechanics and, more specifically, in an unresolved question about how quantum states collapse into definite outcomes.” Here are some more excerpts from that article….

“Penrose developed the idea, called Orchestrated Objective Reduction, with the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, whose interest came from watching what general anesthetics do to consciousness. Their joint theory, laid out most fully in a 2014 review in Physics of Life Reviews, proposes that structures called microtubules, tube-shaped scaffolding found inside almost every cell in the body including neurons, are able to sustain a form of quantum superposition for a brief window before that superposition collapses.

“The “objective reduction” half of the name refers to Penrose’s own long-standing proposal, separate from Hameroff’s biology, that quantum superpositions do not collapse only when observed or measured, as standard quantum mechanics is usually read, but collapse on their own once a threshold connected to spacetime geometry is reached. The “orchestrated” half is Hameroff’s contribution: the claim that this collapse, inside microtubules, happens in a structured rather than random way, and that the pattern of those collapses is what we experience as a moment of conscious awareness.

“Put together, the theory says something specific and testable in principle: that consciousness arises not from information processing in the ordinary computational sense, but from a physical event, gravity-linked quantum collapse, occurring inside a particular cellular structure. It is this claim that the seat of experience is a physical process tied to the deep structure of spacetime rather than a pattern of neural firing, that gives the theory its appeal to people frustrated with purely computational accounts of mind. It is also the claim that most of the field rejects.

“A formal rebuttal published alongside the 2014 review, by the chemist Jeffrey Reimers and colleagues, argued that the specific mechanism Hameroff and Penrose proposed for shielding microtubules from thermal noise is not scientifically supported. On the other hand, Penrose and Hameroff pointed to a 2013 study from a group in Japan reporting vibrations in microtubules, which they read as evidence that the structures can support some form of coherent quantum behavior even in a warm environment. Critics have countered that detecting vibration is not the same as demonstrating the specific, long-lived entangled superposition the theory requires. The dispute has not been resolved by either side conceding the point, which is the normal state of an active scientific disagreement rather than a sign that one side has been quietly dismissed.

“If gravity really does trigger the collapse of quantum superpositions at the scale Penrose describes, that collapse should show up in careful physics experiments that have nothing to do with biology. One such test was run by a group including the physicist Catalina Curceanu, using an underground laboratory beneath the Gran Sasso mountains in Italy, shielded from the cosmic radiation that would otherwise swamp the measurement. Their result, published in 2022, found no evidence of the gravity-related collapse Penrose’s model predicts at the scale relevant to microtubules, and described the simplest version of the Orch-OR collapse mechanism as “highly implausible,” while noting that more complex variants of the collapse model were not ruled out. That is a narrower finding than a refutation of the theory. It closes off one specific version of the mechanism without closing off the broader idea that objective collapse of this kind occurs.

“More recently, an independent 2025 preprint by the engineer James Tagg reported an experiment on a superconducting quantum computer that the author describes as consistent with objective reduction as opposed to standard quantum measurement. The paper has not been through peer review, does not touch on biology or microtubules, and demonstrates a physical mechanism rather than anything about the brain. It is worth naming because it illustrates why the theory keeps attracting serious attention despite the skepticism: parts of it can, in principle, be checked against hard physics, one experiment at a time, rather than argued about in the abstract indefinitely.

”Penrose’s starting point is that human mathematical insight, the capacity to see that a formal statement is true rather than merely to follow rules that generate it, cannot itself be the output of a rule-following system, an argument he ties to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.^[2] Whether or not that argument holds, and many logicians think it does not, it points at something real: current computational accounts of mind do not explain why understanding feels like anything from the inside. Orch-OR is one answer to that gap. It is not the only one, and on the available evidence it is not the leading one. But it is among the few that says plainly where a physicist could go looking for proof.”

^[1] Talbot, Michael. An essay entitled “The Holographic Universe: Does Objective Reality Exist?”

^[2] Wikipedia.com, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems

I keep sending you articles like this about black holes because they are inextricably linked to the concept of the holographic principle. Just as a reminder, it was Jacob Bekenstein’s discovery, in conjunction with Stephen Hawking, that the amount of information for everything that is “swallowed up” by a black hole is determined by the surface area of the event horizon and not the volume of the black hole. This prompted Gerard ‘t Hooft (1993) and then Leonard Susskind (1995) to take the Bekenstein-Hawking area law as their starting clue and generalize it into the principle that the information content of a spatial volume can be entirely encoded on its boundary surface. In other words, that our three-dimensional reality can be a projection of the two-dimensional information encoded on the surface of our universe.

Here’s the description of a new article posted August 1^st on SpaceDaily.com written by Lachlan Brown….

Our best models for how black holes grow may be fundamentally incomplete—the early universe contains behemoths that shouldn’t exist yet.

I’ve written about this before, but this new article is an excellent summary of the conundrum facing cosmologists these days. Here are some excerpts from that article….

“The James Webb telescope keeps finding supermassive black holes in the infant universe so large that a few appear to outweigh every star in their host galaxy combined, a ratio the standard picture of how these giants grew cannot easily explain.

“Between 2019 and 2022, astronomers managed something that had never been done: they took two direct images of the region immediately around a black hole. The first, released in April 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, showed a lopsided ring of light circling the giant at the center of the galaxy M87, an object with a mass about 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. The second, released in May 2022, showed the far smaller black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, Sagittarius A*, roughly four million solar masses and about 27,000 light-years away.

“Neither is a photograph in the ordinary sense. A black hole gives off no light of its own. What the telescopes recorded was the glow of hot gas bent around the edge of the event horizon, the boundary past which nothing escapes, with a dark shadow at the center where the light falls in. The ring is the last thing we can see before the drop.

“Those two images are the closest look we have ever had at objects that, for most of the twentieth century, were a mathematical prediction more than an observed fact.

What the word supermassive is doing

“Black holes come in a wide range of sizes. The ones formed when a massive star collapses at the end of its life weigh a few to a few dozen times the mass of the Sun. Supermassive black holes are a different category entirely, measured in millions to billions of solar masses, and they sit at the centers of galaxies rather than being scattered through them.

“The current understanding is that most large galaxies host one. Sagittarius A*, at about four million solar masses, is a fairly ordinary example. M87’s black hole, at 6.5 billion, is one of the largest ever weighed. The gap between those two figures is a useful reminder that supermassive is a broad label, not a single size.

The evidence at our own galactic center

“The case that a supermassive black hole sits at the heart of the Milky Way did not rest on an image. It was built over decades by tracking the motion of stars.

“The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was split for exactly this work. Half went to Roger Penrose for showing that black hole formation is a robust prediction of general relativity. The other half went to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for the discovery of a supermassive compact object governing the orbits of stars at the galactic center. Their teams followed individual stars for more than two decades as they swung around an invisible point. The orbits only make sense if something with roughly four million solar masses is packed into a region smaller than our solar system. No cluster of ordinary stars or gas fits that description. A black hole does.

“This is the strongest single line of evidence we have that these objects are real and not just a convenient way to explain a bright radio source.

Why their masses seem to track their galaxies

“One of the more striking patterns in the data is that a galaxy’s central black hole mass tends to correlate with the motion of stars far outside its reach. The relationship, known as the M-sigma relation, links black hole mass to the velocity dispersion of stars in the surrounding bulge, and it is surprisingly tight. Reviews of the measurements put the scaling at roughly the fifth power of that velocity.

“The correlation is real and well measured. What it means is less settled. A black hole’s direct gravitational influence extends only a tiny distance compared with the size of its galaxy, so the tightness of the link suggests some shared history rather than direct control. The common interpretation is that black hole and galaxy grew together, with energy from gas falling onto the black hole helping regulate star formation across the wider system. That is a reasonable reading of the pattern, but it is an inference from a correlation, not a directly observed mechanism.

The problem the James Webb telescope has created

“For years the coevolution picture held together reasonably well. Then the James Webb Space Telescope started looking at the early universe, and the neat story developed a complication.

JWST has found a large population of compact red objects, nicknamed little red dots, in the first billion years or so after the Big Bang. Many appear to contain actively feeding black holes that are already very large for the age of the universe. In the more extreme cases, the black hole’s mass rivals or exceeds the combined mass of all the stars in its host galaxy, inverting the usual ratio seen nearby. These early accreting black holes also turned up far more often than the count of adult quasars had led astronomers to expect.

“The identity of the little red dots is still debated. Some recent work argues they are young supermassive black holes wrapped in dense cocoons of ionized gas. Other explanations remain in play. The proposed fixes for how the black holes got so big so fast, from unusually heavy initial seeds formed by the direct collapse of gas clouds to bursts of rapid feeding, are competing hypotheses rather than a settled answer.

“None of this overturns the two images from 2019 and 2022, or the star orbits at our own galactic center. What it does is reopen a question many had treated as roughly solved: where these giants came from, and whether they formed before, alongside, or after the galaxies that now surround them.

“For now, supermassive black holes occupy an unusual position in astronomy. We have photographed two of them and weighed thousands more through the motion of nearby stars and gas, and yet the basic question of how the earliest ones assembled is more open today than it was a decade ago.”

Time…. An integral part of life that we take for granted, moving at the same speed and only in one direction—from past to future, stopping for just a second in the present “now.” But is that true? Let’s take a closer look at time….

An article published on ScienceNewsToday.org on May 9, 2025, written by Muhammad Tuhin, laid out a brief history of time. Here are some excerpts from that article….

“Time surrounds us, passes through us, and shapes our every experience—yet we cannot see it, touch it, or stop it. It defines our past, frames our present, and leads us inexorably into the future.

“Long before physics labs and atomic clocks, ancient humans tracked time by observing the sky. The rhythmic motions of the sun, moon, and stars were the first reliable indicators of time’s passage. Day followed night. Seasons came and went in predictable cycles. Eclipses, solstices, and planetary movements inspired awe and helped early civilizations build the first calendars and agricultural systems.

“In ancient Egypt, time was measured with sundials and water clocks. The Babylonians divided time into hours, minutes, and seconds based on a sexagesimal system—a base of 60 still used today. The Mayans constructed intricate calendars tied to both solar and ritual cycles. Philosophers in Greece began pondering time as an abstract concept. Plato imagined time as the moving image of eternity. Aristotle viewed it as a measure of change.

“In the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton reshaped the understanding of the universe with his laws of motion and universal gravitation. Crucially, Newton proposed that time is absolute—a universal, unchanging flow that ticks the same for all observers, everywhere, regardless of what they are doing. In Newton’s model, time was like a cosmic metronome: constant, reliable, and entirely separate from space. Events occurred in this timeline much like beads on a string—ordered and measurable. This idea served science well for centuries. Newtonian time matched our common sense and supported everything from planetary motion to engineering.

“Then along came Albert Einstein three centuries later with his theory of relativity, first special relativity in 1905, and then general relativity in 1915. According to Einstein, time was not a fixed backdrop against which events unfolded. Instead, it was woven into the very fabric of space, forming a four-dimensional entity known as spacetime. As you approach the speed of light, time slows down. This phenomenon, known as time dilation, has been confirmed repeatedly in experiments. Astronauts aboard fast-moving spacecraft, for instance, age ever so slightly less than their counterparts on Earth

“In special relativity, Einstein showed that the passage of time is relative—it depends on the motion of the observer. But general relativity went further. Einstein demonstrated that gravity warps time. The stronger the gravitational field, the slower time moves. This reshaped our understanding of reality. The universe was no longer a static stage, but a dynamic arena where space and time flexed, bent, and stretched. Time became a participant in the cosmos, not a spectator.

“While physics seeks to define time with mathematical precision, our experience of time is deeply subjective. A minute can fly by during laughter or drag endlessly during boredom. Our brains are not precise clocks; they are time interpreters.

“Time is a dimension, a psychological experience, a scientific puzzle, and a philosophical conundrum. Einstein showed us that time is flexible, relative, and bound to space. Thermodynamics tells us why it flows in one direction. Neuroscience explains how we perceive it. And yet, time remains among the most profound mysteries science has yet to solve.”

But we keep trying. Physicists continue experimenting with time, like Giovanni Barontini, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. An article published on LiveScience.com on July 7, 2026, written by Larissa G. Capella had the title Time was speeding up, slowing down, or even stopping: Physicist demonstrates a key theory of time, talking about Barontini’s work. Here are some excerpts from that article.

“Barontini set out to look at a problem that physicists have puzzled over for nearly 60 years. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation—a central equation in quantum gravity, the field that seeks to unify Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics—describes the universe as a whole system with no external time parameter. There is no cosmic clock ticking away outside the universe. So where does our experience of time come from?

“In a new study published June 11 in the journal Physical Review Research, Giovanni Barontini, an experimental physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., used a cloud of ultracold atoms to build a mini-universe. The system was so well isolated from its surroundings that, like our universe itself, it had nothing external to use as a clock. He split that system in two and ignored one half—what he called the “dark sector”—to show that time could arise entirely from within the system.

“The result offers the first experimental look on why the universe has time at all. ‘When you put everything together, things really start to make sense,’ Barontini said. ‘How time inside the system was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping—this was quite surprising, how well everything came together. Very neatly, in a way. Which is something that doesn’t happen that often in experiments.’

“Barontini’s inspiration came from watching his son play with building toys. ‘I thought that it’s something very similar to what we do in our labs,’ he told Live Science. ‘We play with very expensive toys. We create our own small samples of reality.’

“In his lab, that sample is a Bose-Einstein condensate—a state of matter that forms only at near absolute zero. In a Bose-Einstein condensate, thousands of atoms slow to a near standstill and blur together into a single quantum object, behaving as one.

“The work is an experimental verification of ideas that have been floating around in quantum cosmology and thermodynamics for decades. This is not a bombshell claim that time is an illusion, but it is the first time anyone has put those ideas to a direct, quantitative test in the lab.

“For the first time, a physicist has experimentally watched time emerge from within an isolated quantum system—by creating a mini-universe. This bizarre experiment raises an intriguing question: If the universe has nothing outside it, where does time come from?

“One influential idea, called relational time, says that time doesn’t exist as a fundamental ingredient of reality. Instead, it emerges from relationships inside the universe, with one part of the system acting as a clock for another. But this idea had never been tested directly in the lab.

“To mimic a universe with nothing outside it, Barontini placed the Bose-Einstein condensate in a trap and divided it down the middle with a thin sheet of laser light. He watched one half, the “bright sector,” closely and deliberately ignored the other half, which he called the “dark sector.”

“The atoms in the bright sector sloshed back and forth in the trap, periodically spilling over the barrier and back again. Barontini called the moments when atoms flooded into the bright sector the ‘Big Bang’ and the times when they drained out the ‘Big Crunch’ (the nickname for one theory of how the universe will end, with the universe collapsing in on itself). Then, he tracked how entropy—a measure of disorder, or how spread out energy is within a system—was exchanged between the two halves as atoms crossed the barrier.

“Instead of using laboratory time to order events, he built an ‘entropic time’—a clock defined entirely by how much entropy was flowing between the two halves of the system. If entropy was flowing, time was ticking. If no entropy was exchanged, time stopped. ‘The entropy exchange between the two systems could be transformed into an internal time variable,’ Barontini said. What surprised Barontini most was how cleanly everything fit together. The internal, entropic time reliably ordered events in the bright sector. It matched the sequence seen in laboratory time, but it flowed at a different rate.

“When entropy was flooding between the sectors, entropic time ran fast. When the exchange slowed, so did the clock. And when the two halves reached equilibrium (no more entropy flowing), the internal clock stopped altogether. ’Time was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping, depending on what the system was doing,’ Barontini said.

“He then went a step further: Using this internal time, he derived a version of the Schrödinger equation^[1] and showed it accurately reproduced what he saw in the experiment. ‘This was quite surprising, how well everything came together,’ he said—’very neatly, in a way, which is something that doesn’t happen that often in experiments.’”

^[1] The Schrödinger equation is the quantum counterpart of Newton’s second law in classical mechanics. Given a set of known initial conditions, Newton’s second law makes a mathematical prediction as to what path a given physical system will take over time. The Schrödinger equation gives the evolution over time of the wave function, the quantum-mechanical characterization of an isolated physical system.

One of the key components of the holographic principle, on which our holographic universe concept is based, is that our three-dimensional reality is created from encoded information stored on a two-dimensional surface. The initial research into this idea came from physicist Stephen Hawking, who demonstrated that black holes aren’t entirely “black” in 1974. They are more “gray” because they leak information, called Hawking radiation. This contradicted the prevailing notion that once matter was consumed by a black hole, that information was lost forever. Hawking said, “Not true,” because it violated a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics: unitarity, which states that information cannot be created or destroyed. Instead, Hawking predicted that black holes emit thermal radiation due to quantum effects near the event horizon.

This prompted a lot of physicists to delve into what became known as the “Information Paradox,” which led to another new concept: the Holographic Duality. Holographic duality proposes that our 3D universe is analogous to a hologram, with all the information about everything within it encoded on a distant, two-dimensional surface. In 1997, Juan Maldacena demonstrated mathematical proof of the holographic duality, linking a theory of gravity in a higher-dimensional space to a quantum field theory on its boundary. This correspondence suggests that black holes in the higher-dimensional space are equivalent to entangled quantum states in a lower-dimensional space.

So, almost suddenly—in less than 25 years, which is extremely fast for new theories to take hold in science—we were looking at a holographic principle that proposed that our three-dimensional universe is the result of two-dimensional information projected from the boundary of our universe. For a black hole, this boundary is its event horizon.

I have to admit that I found this rather strange, because I had the mistaken understanding that the event horizon of a black hole was actually a very fine line (without any volume) that signified the point at which matter, falling into a black hole, would find itself no longer able to escape and succumb to the immense gravity pulling it into the black hole. I was wrong.

Classical general relativity suggests that black holes are characterized only by their mass, charge, and angular momentum; everything else is lost when matter falls in. However, in 2016, Stephen Hawking and two other researchers proposed something called soft hair, which consists of low-energy quantum excitations, like soft photons or gravitons, that exist around the event horizon of a black hole. These excitations are thought to retain some information about the matter that has fallen into the black hole, potentially allowing that information to be recovered when the black hole evaporates. The concept of soft hair challenged the traditional no-hair theorem and suggested that the event horizon is a much more complex and information-rich structure than previously imagined.

It turns out, for a black hole, the event horizon is a sphere — a 2-D surface sitting in 3-D space, enclosing the black hole inside. Every point on that sphere satisfies the same condition: the escape velocity there equals the speed of light. So, to see it as a “line” isn’t right. It’s the entire boundary shell, at a fixed radius (the Schwarzschild radius, r = 2GM/c²), where light itself can no longer climb out. More precisely, physicists describe it as a null surface — a boundary in spacetime where outgoing light rays neither escape to infinity nor fall inward; they just hover.

There was a recent article published on LiveScience.com on July 6, 2026, written by Andrey Feldman, titled What we found was striking: Physicists take the closest-ever look at a black hole’s mysterious event horizon. Here are some excerpts from that article….

“Scientists have found evidence that gravitational waves from a spectacular black hole collision carry signals from the very edge of the newly formed black hole. If confirmed by future observations, the discovery could provide an entirely new way to investigate what happens in the immediate vicinity of a black hole.

“In a new study, the researchers analyzed an exceptionally strong gravitational wave event known as GW250114. The findings suggest that gravitational wave observatories may eventually allow astronomers to probe regions that have remained inaccessible since black holes were first predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Although astronomers have photographed the glowing material surrounding some supermassive black holes and have detected dozens of black hole mergers through gravitational waves, the event horizon itself has remained frustratingly difficult to study.

“Co-author of the study, Sizheng Ma, a postdoctoral researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, said, ‘When two black holes merge, they violently shake space-time itself. For a brief moment, the region very close to the newly formed black hole’s horizon is swept into a fast, fading swirl.’

“Ma explained that the direct wave is the portion of the gravitational wave signal produced near the horizon and carries the imprint of that motion outward through space. ‘That is why it is so interesting,’ he said. ‘It may let us listen to what happens near the horizon, a region we cannot see directly with light. The remaining signal followed the expected rhythm and fading pattern of a wave shaped by the region very close to the final black hole’s horizon.’

“The researchers stressed that their findings do not reveal what lies inside a black hole.”

So, we might be learning more about the event horizon soon. But one of the best and simplest descriptions of this phenomenon comes from Dr. Brian Greene of Columbia University, in his PBS special: The Fabric of the Cosmos: What is Space. It goes like this….

Imagine I took my wallet and threw it into a black hole. What would happen? We used to think that since nothing—not even light—can escape the immense gravity of a black hole, my wallet would be lost forever. But it now seems that may not be the whole story. Recently, scientists exploring the math describing black holes made a curious discovery. Even as my wallet disappears into the black hole, a copy of all the information it contains seems to get smeared out and stored on the surface of the black hole, much the same way that information is stored in a computer.

So, in the end, my wallet exists in two places. There’s a three-dimensional version that’s lost forever inside the black hole, and a two-dimensional version that remains on the surface as information. The information content of all the stuff that fell into that black hole can be expressed entirely in terms of just the outside of the black hole. The idea then is that you can capture what’s going on inside the black hole by referring only to the outside.

And in theory, I could use the information on the outside of the black hole to reconstruct my wallet. So, if an object inside a black hole can be described by information on the black hole’s surface, then it might be that everything in the universe—from galaxies and stars, to you and me, even space itself—is just a projection of information stored on some distant two-dimensional surface that surrounds us.

There are those who would argue that the concept of a holographic universe cannot be true, simply because our universe has no “surface” or “boundary” where the two-dimensional information could be stored. But that presupposes that our universe is infinite, and that’s definitely a question that has not been resolved yet (and won’t be in this essay).

So, the question I want to address now is the idea that our three-dimensional reality might be created from two-dimensional encoded information stored on the event horizon of a black hole. And I want to start by reviewing an interesting theory called Black Hole Cosmology. I’ve written about this several times, but at the conclusion today I want to propose an answer to the question: Why can’t we see what’s on the inside a black hole? As the article I quoted above said, ““The researchers stressed that their findings do not reveal what lies inside a black hole.”

So, Black Hole Cosmology, also known as Schwarzschild Cosmology, has been hanging around since 1992 but has recently gained more followers as more and more research has uncovered new details about black holes.

Basically, the theory says that our observable universe was born in a black hole existing in another universe. Rather than a “Big Bang” starting from a singularity, there was instead a “Big Bounce” that gave birth to our universe. A “Big Bounce” suggests that the universe doesn’t just expand and then stop, but instead, it collapses back in on itself (a “Big Crunch”) and then bounces back out again, starting a new expansion phase, without arriving at a singularity. This means the universe could go through endless cycles of expansion and contraction, rather than having a single beginning and end. In other words, at some moment in time, our universe shrank in size until it could not shrink any more—without getting so small that it was a singularity—and then started expanding again.

The main point is that if, indeed, a black hole is “home” to our universe, it would then definitely have a “surface,” or a “boundary” where the two-dimensional information would be stored—called the “event horizon”—to be used to project a three-dimensional world inside the black hole.

But the more interesting thing to me is that physicists estimate that there are 40 billion billion black holes (40,000,000,000,000,000,000)[1] in our universe alone. That could mean that there are 40 billion billion different universes living inside those black holes, each with their own different rules and “themes,” and lots of different avatars to house the consciousnesses. You might even look at all these universes as God’s Great Amusement Park (God’s GAP), offering a wide choice of “rides” for a consciousness to enjoy in this multiverse.

Remember the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI)? I’ve talked about that, too. Well, my main objection to MWI has always been that if there is no such thing as collapsing the wave length, and an electron actually assumes every location possible in its wave state, the countless number of electrons that must be in our universe would require an awfully big number of universes to exist. Well, 40 billion billion is an awfully big number!

And that number is just the number they estimate for our universe. And the black hole we supposedly live in isn’t in our universe. It’s a black hole that exists in the “mother” universe our black hole belongs to. No telling how many more black holes are in our “mother” universe. (If you think about the Russian nesting dolls, you get an idea of what Black Hole Cosmology is talking about.)

But now we get to the question all this has been leading up to: Will we ever be able to see inside a black hole in our universe? Will “gravitational wave observatories eventually allow astronomers to probe regions that have remained inaccessible since black holes were first predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity—especially the inside of the black hole”? Right now, I doubt it. How would you feel if somebody stuck their nose into our universe, just out of curiosity? If these black holes are “home” to different universes, I would think that there would be some cosmic law about invading the privacy of someone else’s universe. In fact, if we can never see the inside of a black hole in our universe, it could be circumstantial evidence that Black Hole Cosmology is correct, proven by the other universe being “off limits” to our telescopes.

Whatever turns out to be true, our holographic universe is inextricably linked forever to black holes, not just for the critical part they played in the development of the theory, but in reality as well.

[1] SciTechDaily.com, How Many Black Holes Are in the Universe?, January 19, 2022

There are two recent articles challenging the concept of Dark Matter. The first was published on BigThink.com on July 1, 2026, written by Ethan Siegel. Here are some excerpts from that article….

“Is it finally time to take dark matter-free galaxies seriously? Less than a decade ago, the first allegedly dark matter-free galaxy, a dwarf galaxy on the outskirts of the NGC 1052 group (NGC 1052-DF2) was identified: a seemingly faint, massive, ultra-diffuse galaxy. An enormous controversy then erupted, as different methods of measuring its distance led to vastly different estimates of its velocity dispersion, which led to vastly different implications for its internal amount of dark matter. We’re now up to four seemingly dark matter-free galaxies, but three of them are all in the same location: the outskirts of the NGC 1052 group. Are these truly dark matter-free galaxies? Or did we simply get their distances grossly wrong?

“For every Milky Way-like galaxy out there, there are dozens or even hundreds of small, low-mass, very faint galaxies: the dwarf galaxies of the Universe. Even though large, bright, massive galaxies contain the majority of our Universe’s stars, the majority of galaxies are faint, small, and low in mass. While some of those dwarf galaxies are compact and extremely rich in dark matter, there’s a small but now-significant population of extremely diffuse, puffy dwarf galaxies that may have little-to-no dark matter inside of them.

“The first such galaxy ever spotted is simply known as DF2: an ultra-diffuse galaxy on the outskirts of the NGC 1052 group that was spotted with the Dragonfly Telephoto Array back in 2018. In the time since, three more galaxies appear to have little-to-no dark matter inside of them:

• DF4, discovered in 2019 and also around the NGC 1052 group,

• FCC 224, discovered in 2025 in a different part of the sky (near the Fornax cluster),

• and now, most recently, DF9, identified in 2026 and also around the NGC 1052 group.

“Individually, any one of these galaxies wouldn’t make extremely compelling evidence for a dark matter-free galaxy. But taken all together, there’s a strong case to be made that these objects do represent a new class of objects: dwarf galaxies that are extremely dark matter-deficient, or possibly even dark matter-free. There’s just one nagging thought that causes some astronomers to remain skeptical.

“Dark matter and normal matter were already long-established to both be present, and in a roughly universal 5-to-1 ratio, with dark matter being more abundant than normal matter. This ratio was obtained from multiple lines of evidence: from the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, from galaxy clustering data within our Universe’s large-scale structure, from measurements of X-ray emitting galaxy clusters that exhibited gravitational lensing, and from tracking the motions of individual galaxies within galaxy clusters, as well as measuring the rotations of large, massive, individual galaxies.

“The major exceptions to that 5-to-1 rule came from just two places.

1. At lower masses, star-formation episodes expel large amounts of gas from galaxies, as their gravitational potential wells are too shallow to hold onto their normal matter if there’s a large burst of star-formation. Therefore, on the low-mass end of the galactic spectrum, we’d see a strong enhancement of the dark matter to normal matter ratio.

2. And if you had a major collision, disruption, or interaction event between large galaxies, some of the internal normal matter could be stripped out of those galaxies, creating clumps of normal matter — rich in stars — that got separated from the initial dark matter-rich structures that contained them in the process.

“That was it; those were the only primary ways we knew of at the time to make galaxies with more-or-less dark matter than the cosmic average.

“But based on their measurements, the team that discovered DF2 initially concluded that this galaxy was located at a distance of around 20 Megaparsecs (around 65 million light-years), and that its low velocity dispersion implied that all or nearly all of its mass was accounted for by stars, alone. Hence, this was the first claim of a galaxy lacking dark matter entirely.

“However, there are multiple different ways to measure the distance to a galaxy, and the values that one infers for its gravitational mass and stellar mass, as well as other properties, are highly dependent on what that distance actually is. A concern was raised early on, just months after the galaxy’s status as dark matter-deficient was announced, that if the distance were wildly wrong, and was at 13 Mpc (42 million light-years) instead of 20 Mpc (65 million light-years), then the inferred properties would be much more normal for the galaxy DF2.

“At a much closer distance, the total mass of the galaxy would have been somewhat lower, the velocity dispersions would be somewhat greater, but the biggest change would come in the estimated stellar mass of the galaxy, which would have been much lower. If this were the case, the galaxy would be made up primarily of dark matter, like nearly any other galaxy. The issue is confounded by the fact that in the vicinity of this ultra-diffuse dwarf galaxy, there are four large, massive galaxies nearby, and if the dwarf galaxy in question is nearer than the closer member, rather than to the farther member, of this grouping, then that would vastly change the story of its dark matter abundance.

“In addition, galaxy DF2 doesn’t exhibit any evidence of that tidal stripping, or that S-shaped stream of stars, that was initially proposed as its likely formation scenario. Independent measures of its distance, albeit all with large uncertainties, pointed to that closer distance, rather than the farther one.

“However, the story swiftly became a lot richer and more complicated. In 2019, galaxy DF4, also on the outskirts of this same galaxy group, was announced, and was also taken to be dark matter-free. And then, in 2025, galaxy FCC 224 was found in a completely different region of the sky: the Fornax cluster. More recently, in June of 2026, a third dark matter-free galaxy candidate was found in that same NGC 1052 group: DF9, bringing the total known number of these ultra-diffuse, dark matter-deficient (or even dark matter-free) galaxies up to four.

“The fact that three of them, including the most recent, DF9, are all in the same galactic group raises some red flags, but the fact that one of them (FCC 224) is in an entirely different region of the sky helps assuage some of those concerns. The inferred velocity dispersions of all of these objects are so significantly much lower than what would be expected if they had the expected amount of dark matter means that even if their distance estimates were somewhat off, there would still be a substantial dark matter deficiency. It’s these multiple lines of evidence, and the fact that we’re not just using one, but a series of independent objects, that bolster the confidence we have that these galaxies really are dark matter-deficient, and that some of them may well be dark matter-free.”

Why a missing halo is worth the trouble

A separate article published on SpaceDaily.com, July 3, 2026, poses a very intriguing defense of Dark Matter in light of its absence in these four galaxies. Here are a couple excerpts from that article….

“Turned into a mass, DF9 comes out at only about 100 million times the mass of the Sun, essentially all of it accounted for by the stars themselves. A galaxy that size would ordinarily sit in a halo around a hundred times heavier. That halo appears to be missing.

“DF2 and DF4 caused a stir for the same reason when van Dokkum and colleagues announced the first galaxy lacking dark matter in 2018, and a second the following year. Both were spread thin, both held strangely luminous star clusters, and both weighed little more than their starlight. What has changed is that they are no longer isolated weird cases. They are points on a line.

“There is more than one way to make a galaxy without dark matter. A high-speed bullet-dwarf collision is the explanation the trail’s discoverers favor, and simulations reproduce its tight geometry, but other groups argue these dwarfs could instead be tidal dwarfs, small galaxies condensed from the ordinary-matter debris of a long-ago merger between two massive galaxies, born without dark matter of their own. A galaxy formed that way would be missing its halo just the same, so the new measurement does not by itself decide between the two stories. What the collision picture alone predicted in advance was the trail itself, and that is what keeps it in front.

“The deeper reason astronomers care is almost the opposite of what the headline suggests. Finding galaxies without dark matter is, oddly, some of the better evidence that dark matter is real. If gravity simply behaved differently in faint galaxies, as some alternative theories propose, then every galaxy of a given size should show the same anomaly. Instead a few galaxies, all apparently born in the same collision, stand out from thousands of ordinary ones. Dark matter that can be left behind in a crash is dark matter that exists as a substance, not as a quirk of the equations.”

There was an excellent article published on QuantaMagazine.org on July 2, 2026, titled Astrophysicists Puzzle Over Webb’s New Universe. It takes a look at the recent discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and how they have upset the physics applecart and require a new understanding of our universe. I encourage you to read the original article. But I will give you some excerpts here to wet your appetite….

And after that, some excerpts from another article explaining the impact of new information from the Hubble Telescope. But first….

Astrophysicists Puzzle Over Webb’s New Universe

“Faced with observations of early black holes and galaxies that weren’t expected to exist, scientists have come up with a wealth of new theories to explain them. Now they just need to figure out which ones are true.

“Discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Little Red Dots (LRDs) were never seen before the telescope came online in 2022. But we now know that they started to appear in significant numbers roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang. Recent ideas suggest that little red dots could be black holes cocooned in thick gas, possibly representing a completely new type of object called a black hole star, in which the tight shroud of gas emits light like a stellar atmosphere.

“But there may be more to these cosmic enigmas. Charlotte Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, recently analyzed the spectrum of light emitted by one little red dot. If the dense-cloud picture is correct, then some of the light should have been altered from passing through the gas — but that’s not what she saw.

“’Now what do I do? Start again. But now if I make my gas clumpy,’ Mason said, “I should be able to get [a signal] that looks closer.”

Black Holes

“The story of black holes has become more complicated thanks to JWST, which keeps spotting ancient black holes that are too big to explain with established theories—much too big. Scientists look at two key factors that influence a black hole’s size: how massive a black hole “seed” was when it originated, and how quickly these seeds grew after that. But it’s hard to explain how black holes either formed already big enough or grew fast enough to reach a billion times the mass of the sun in early cosmic times.

“Scientists have historically believed there’s a hard limit to how fast black holes can grow. As material falls toward the black hole, it gets hot as it spins around like water going down a drain. The radiation that this “accretion disk” produces pushes back against more stuff flying in, preventing the black hole from consuming more. This intake limit, called the Eddington limit, should make it impossible for black holes to grow tens of millions of times larger in the time available. And then in 2024, JWST saw a black hole from about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang gobbling up material at about 40 times the Eddington limit. So it was back to the drawing board.

“Perhaps supermassive black holes never started as stars at all. In this case, colossal clouds of gas would have plunged directly into a black hole. This “direct collapse” mechanism can form a seed some 10,000 times the mass of the sun. but for direct collapse to work, a gargantuan cloud needs to compress into a black hole all at once, without first fracturing into smaller clouds that would form stars. This requires specific gas chemistries, and the cloud must rotate slowly.

“When people try to do this in a computer, they can make these direct-collapse black holes, but they can’t make enough of them to explain all the black holes that we see,” Jenny Greene, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, said.

“Recently, however, researchers took a long look at a little red dot from about 750 million years after the Big Bang that is gravitationally lensed by a cluster of galaxies in the foreground. They concluded that the object is a “naked” supermassive black hole, an estimated 50 million times the mass of the sun, without any discernible stars surrounding it. If that mass estimate is correct, the implication is that the black hole may have formed as a large seed, possibly via direct collapse, before any galaxy was present. ‘There’s clearly differences in how the black holes are growing that we don’t fully understand yet,’ Greene said.

Building a Galaxy

“Like early black holes that seem too big, many early galaxies spotted by JWST seem too bright. To figure out why, researchers are reassessing their ideas about how galaxies form.

‘The JWST’s bewildering discovery of bright, early galaxies initially led some scientists to suggest that our understanding of fundamental cosmology, the laws that govern the behavior of energy and matter in the early universe, may be flawed. But after a few years of studying these primitive objects, theorists now have several models to explain their brightness and abundance.

“Perhaps the first galaxies converted gas to stars more efficiently than previously thought. Or they experienced periodic bursts of star formation driven by turbulent conditions. Or maybe early star-forming regions preferentially created massive, extremely bright stars. Many astrophysicists think some combination of these factors, and perhaps others, contributed to the galaxies’ development.

“An intriguing clue has recently emerged from JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), a supercooled device that can split apart the light of distant objects. MIRI has revealed that early galaxies do not have the same traits, as scientists assumed. ‘The main surprise is the diversity of the properties of galaxies we are seeing at early epochs,’ Hakim Atek, an astrophysicist with the Paris Institute of Astrophysics at Sorbonne University, said. ‘You’re expecting that they would look the same.’

“This diversity may be an indication of star formation that occurred in bursts, as galaxies cycled through periods of fusing stars that exploded and expelled gas clouds, halting the creation of stars, only for the gas to gather again and trigger a new wave of stellar birth. A further clue comes from a group of galaxies with an overabundance of nitrogen. The presence of the element suggests that there may have been a lot of particularly massive stars in the early universe. In simulations, these massive stars generate an excess of nitrogen before exploding in supernovas and scattering the element across their host galaxies.

The Puzzle of Existence

“The first stars, thought to be hundreds or thousands of times more massive than the sun, furiously worked their way through their hydrogen and helium fuel and erupted in powerful supernovas, seeding the universe with new elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and iron — the stuff of planets and of life.

“In many ways, those first stars are the mothers of the universe. ‘We’re looking back at what created us,’ said Lise Christensen, an astrophysicist with the Cosmic Dawn Center.”

Next…. An article published on Yahoo! LiveScience.com on July 2, 2026, written by Olivia Maule. Here are those excerpts….

Hubble telescope spots ‘impossible’ light from a galaxy that shouldn’t have been visible

“Astronomers have spotted an ancient galaxy shining through the cosmic fog of the early universe, revealing a detailed view that was thought to be impossible. Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, along with data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), researchers detected “ionizing” ultraviolet photons — energetic light capable of stripping electrons from hydrogen atoms — coming from the galaxy, called MXDFz4.4.

“’This was thought to be impossible,’ Ilias Goovaerts, a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore and first author of the new study, said to Live Science. “What’s really special about this galaxy is that it’s getting through so much of the intergalactic medium [the ionized plasma between galaxies]. It’s the furthest away so it has the most intergalactic medium to get through.’

“What makes MXDFz4.4 unusual is its combination of size and star-formation rate. The galaxy is roughly 100 times smaller by area than the Milky Way, yet it forms stars around 10 times faster, packing a large number of massive young stars into a compact space. According to Goovaerts, that crowding effect helps the galaxy punch clear channels through its surrounding gas, letting ionizing light escape both the galaxy and, eventually, the murky space between galaxies. He estimates that somewhere between half and all of the galaxy’s ionizing light is escaping.

“No other galaxy from this early period had previously shown detectable ionizing light, making MXDFz4.4 one of a kind so far, study co-author Marc Rafelski, deputy mission head for the Hubble Space Telescope at STScI, noted. Researchers say bursts of vigorous star formation like the one seen in MXDFz4.4 may have played an important role in clearing the early universe’s hydrogen fog and that more galaxies like it are likely still waiting to be found.”

My nephew (TC Davis, who is a year older than I am and a retired Presbyterian minister), took the time to write a long and detailed comment to one of my posts. First, I was very grateful that he would put that much effort into writing to me. Secondly, I was very happy to have some feedback, which is the only way I can tell whether I am articulating my position correctly. And thirdly, I jump at any opportunity to talk about our holographic universe and the implications it has for our daily lives.

My response to TC was also long and detailed, even longer than his comment. So, I sent it to him in an email, rather than posting it as a reply to his comment. But I decided it was worth sharing with everyone, so I am posting it now as a stand-alone. You can read TC’s original comment here, if you like.

Dear TC,

Sorry to take so long to respond to this wonderful comment. But I just saw it for the first time today. Apparently I’m just learning how Substack works, and one of the things I’ve learned is that they don’t notify me when someone writes a comment like this.

Anyway, there are a few misunderstandings you apparently have that I want to clear up before I deal with the meat of your comment….

1. You said, “A hologram is a projection of three-dimensional input onto a two dimensional plane. The demiurge is the projector of that input.” I hope I have not misled anyone else to think that, because you state it backwards, Here is the actual wording I would use…. “A hologram is a projection of information encoded on a two-dimensional surface (Black Hole event horizon, film, plate, etc.) into a three-dimensional image. The Demiurge, using Plato’s term, is the one positioned properly to choose which information on the two-dimensional surface is used to create the three-dimensional image. According to Dr. Karl Pribram, the human brain receives that two-dimensional information downloaded by the Demiurge, translates it from its native state as a wave, and then projects it “out there” for us to perceive as it comes back to our 5 senses, where it has to go through our filters of beliefs, fears and judgments that determine exactly how we interpret our perceptions.”

2. You said, “It seems to me that you need a way to account for the fact that shit happens. The demiurge is your solution.” If “shit happens,” then “good shit happens, too.” The Demiurge, being the one outside our holographic universe while we are inside the hologram, as I said, is the only one positioned properly to choose which information on the two-dimensional surface is used to create the three-dimensional image. Inside the hologram, we have no access to the two-dimensional encoded information. So, we simply cannot, according to the rules of holography, create either the bad shit or the good shit. And the Demiurge has created a lot of good shit in my life, and yours, too. So, I don’t need to find “a way to account for the fact that shit happens.”

And I ended up using Plato’s term for the creator of our universe simply for convenience. Call it anything you want. (I called it an “Infinite I” in my first book, but never really liked the term and it isn’t accurate at all.) I just object to it being called “God” for the simple reason that to say an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, infallible God (which I believe in) created our very flawed reality—especially the human body—in my mind, is illogical and actually an insult to Its talent and capabilities.

3. You said, “The metaphor of a holographic universe is one way to help us acknowledge that our perceptions are shaped by our prior experience….” The holographic universe is not a metaphor, at least according to many experts in the field of physics. “Metaphor” is defined as “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.” The holographic universe is based on the holographic principle[i] for which there is a plethora of evidence available to support its veracity, both mathematical and circumstantial (though not experientially yet, admittedly), with quite a few experts in the field of physics behind it. It IS “literally applicable” to the reality we live in.

[i] https://modern-physics.org/holographic-principle/

Okay, now to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception….

There’s not a lot I argue with. In fact, the example you gave of fitting volunteers with glasses that turned the world upside down, in my mind, is a great example that supports a holographic universe. The only real objection I have is your statement that “Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception [is] adequate to explain the errors of a common sense realism, but without invoking a metaphysical demiurge.” I do not find the two in conflict at all. Merleau-Ponty is talking about the way we perceive things at the very last stage… after the Demiurge has downloaded the two-dimensional information to a human brain, after that brain has converted it into a particular reality and projected it “out there” for us to perceive. He’s talking about the filters that we have put in place to interpret the inputs that come back to our senses that we consider our “reality.” Dr. Bruce Lipton also talks a lot about those filters, focusing mainly on the beliefs, fears and judgments we have that pervert the actual reality that we project when it comes back. One could argue that that perversion actually occurs when the brain first converts the two-dimensional information and in fact projects it “out there” already filtered by our beliefs, fears, and judgments, but I think the preponderance of evidence that two people hardly ever perceive the same reality makes more sense if the perversion occurs on the way back to an individual brain.

Now, you called the Demiurge “metaphysical.” Here’s what I get when I ask Yahoo for a definition of “metaphysical” ….

Metaphysical refers to concepts related to metaphysics, a branch of philosophy. It explores fundamental questions about existence, reality, and the nature of being. Metaphysical ideas often delve into abstract, subtle, or supernatural themes, examining what lies beyond the physical world.

• Philosophical Inquiry: Metaphysics investigates the nature of reality and existence, addressing questions like “What is being?” and “What is the nature of objects?”

• Abstract Concepts: It encompasses ideas that may not be tangible or observable, such as time, space, and causality.

• Relation to Other Disciplines: Metaphysical discussions often intersect with theology, science, and ethics, influencing various fields of study

So, I assume you would call your God (and my God) “metaphysical” as well. Let me be clear: I don’t suggest that the Demiurge is physical, and therefore I don’t object to it being called “metaphysical.” While the holographic universe is not a metaphor, the Demiurge certainly is. And so is your God. In fact, Plato’s Demiurge was a lesser angel in the hierarchy of angels the Christian church believes in. Exactly where it belongs on this list, I don’t know….

First Hierachy

Seraphim: Closest to God, known for their love and light.

Cherubim: Guardians of divine mysteries and knowledge.

Thrones: Represent God’s authority and justice.

Second Hierarchy

Dominions: Govern the lower choirs and oversee the duties of angels.

Virtues: Bestow divine grace and strength.

Powers: Protect against evil spirits and maintain cosmic order.

Third Hierarchy

Principalities: Guide nations and rulers.

Archangels: Deliver important messages and lead other angels.

Angels: Guardian angels who interact directly with humans

(https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/angelic-hierarchy-9897)

My only point is that, according to the rules of holography, a hologram can only be created by someone outside the hologram who chooses which information encoded on a two-dimensional film—and there is a LOT of different information that can be stored on one piece of film—which information is going to be used to create the three-dimensional image. Therefore, there has to be something or someone outside of our holographic universe that created it and is maintaining it by choosing what goes on inside it from a countless number of possibilities stored on the surface of our universe. If you can think of a better name, I will definitely consider it. Meanwhile, I’m going with Plato, who was a lot smarter than I will ever be.

I hope this clarifies things.

Love, Uncle

This is a continuation of my last post, which is available at

There have been about a half-dozen articles in the last month, published in various places, all suggesting that the concept of our universe we have had so much confidence in for a few decades—called the Standard Model (ΛCDM)—is falling apart based on new information from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). I could only cover three of them in my last post. I will start with the fourth one here.

There were also three articles dealing with the concept of time. I’m going to try to summarize these articles for you and talk about them all in this post. So here goes….

A Galaxy Far Too Large, Far Too bright, and Far Too Soon

An article published on ScienceDaily.com on July 2^nd, 2026. Here are some excerpts from that article….

“Light from a galaxy called JADES-GS-z14-0 left on its way to us when the universe was only about 290 million years old, and the James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed both how far away it sits and how oddly grown-up it already looks. The puzzle is not that the galaxy exists. It is that it appears far larger, far brighter and far more chemically developed than anything the Standard Model (ΛCDM) says should be possible so soon after the Big Bang.

“The strangeness starts with its size. The galaxy spans something like 1,600 light-years and shines brightly in ultraviolet light. The important detail is where that brightness comes from. When a distant object is unexpectedly luminous, one usual suspect is a feeding black hole, a compact point of light at the center. Here the light is instead spread across the galaxy and looks like the combined glow of many stars. That points to a genuinely large, star-filled galaxy that had already assembled, at a time when The Standard Model expects the first galaxies to be small, dim and still gathering themselves together.

“The second surprise came from a different telescope. In 2025, the ALMA array in Chile detected oxygen in the galaxy, the most distant detection of that element ever made. Oxygen is not left over from the Big Bang. It is forged inside stars and scattered into space when they die, particularly when massive stars end as supernovae. Finding it in quantity this early means that whole generations of stars had already lived and died within those first 290 million years. The measured abundance of heavy elements ran to roughly ten times what the Standard Model predicts for such an early galaxy. An object that should have been at its very beginning already looked chemically middle-aged.

“The candidate explanations all point in the same direction. Perhaps the first galaxies turned their gas into stars far more efficiently than assumed. Perhaps the feedback that normally slows star formation, the winds and blasts from young stars, was weaker in these early conditions. Perhaps the very first stars were more massive and more luminous than their modern counterparts, so a galaxy could look enormous without being quite as massive as its brightness suggests.

“And this is not a story about one freak object. Since Webb began looking, it has been finding bright galaxies this early far more often than the Standard Model predicts, by a wide margin. JADES-GS-z14-0 is the clearest single example of a pattern, which is what makes it hard to dismiss.”

Time May Not Be a Basic Ingredient of Reality

An article published on SpaceDaily.com on July 1^st, 2026. Here are some excerpts from that article….

“The unsettling possibility in quantum gravity is not just that our clocks might be inaccurate. It is that the clock may not belong in the deepest description at all. In ordinary life, time feels like the background condition for everything else. Events happen in it. Clocks measure it. Causes seem to move through it. Even in much of physics, time is the parameter against which change is described. But when general relativity and quantum mechanics are pushed together, that familiar role becomes unstable.

“The point is not that physicists have proved time is an illusion. The point is that some of the most serious equations and proposals for quantum gravity do not treat time as a basic external ingredient in the way everyday intuition expects.

“General relativity already prepared the ground for this discomfort. It does not treat time as a universal stage that ticks identically everywhere. Time is woven into spacetime and depends on gravity, motion and geometry. Quantum gravity pushes the question further: if spacetime itself is quantum, what happens to time?

“This is where entanglement enters the story. If parts of a quantum system are correlated, one part can serve as a clock for another. The deeper state may not change with respect to an external time, but observers inside the system can still recover an internal notion of sequence.

“Temperature is real, but it is not usually treated as fundamental in the way individual microscopic motions are. It emerges from the collective behaviour of many particles. Some approaches to quantum gravity ask whether time may be similar: real at the level of experience, measurement and cosmology, but not a basic ingredient in the underlying quantum description.

“The image that unsettles people is a universe with no external metronome. From inside, there are clocks, memories, causes, histories and futures. From the deeper quantum view, there may only be a structure of relations, correlations and constraints, with time appearing only when one part of the universe is read against another. If that is right, time is not abolished. It is demoted. It becomes something the universe does internally, not something the universe sits inside. That is why quantum gravity makes time feel less secure than almost any other concept in physics. The clock on the wall may be perfectly reliable. The clock underneath reality may not exist.”

Time May Be an Illusion Derived from Quantum Entanglement

An article published in The Brighter Side of News on June 27, 2026, written by Shy Cohen. Here are some excerpts from that article….

“Time has always seemed like the one thing physics could count on. Matter changes, stars die, particles flicker in and out, but time keeps moving. That assumption sits so deep in modern science that it often passes without notice. A new theoretical study suggests time could emerge from quantum entanglement, the strange connection that links separate systems at the microscopic level. In this view, time is not a universal stage on which events unfold. It appears only when one quantum system is used to track another.

“Physics still holds two incompatible pictures of time. In quantum mechanics, time is treated as an external parameter, something imposed from outside the system. It is the ruler used to measure change, but it is not itself an observable inside the theory. General relativity treats time very differently. There, time is woven into spacetime and can stretch or slow depending on gravity and motion.

“The mismatch is more than a technical annoyance. It blocks one of physics’ biggest goals, a theory that can connect the microscopic world of quantum mechanics with the large-scale structure of the universe described by relativity. A new approach starts with a radical step. It assumes the universe as a whole can sit in a timeless quantum state. Nothing evolves globally. There is no master clock ticking in the background.

“What looks like motion appears only inside that frozen whole, through correlations between subsystems. One part serves as a clock, the other is the system whose change gets tracked. If the two are entangled in the right way, the second system appears to evolve relative to the first.

Without that internal relationship, there is no time in any meaningful sense, only a static quantum state. That is the heart of the claim. Time, in this picture, is not fundamental. It is relational. For all its elegance, the idea remains speculative.”

Scientists Make Quantum Time Flow Backward in Stunning Physics Breakthrough

A press release published on ScienceDaily.com on July 3, 2026, from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Here are some excerpts from that release….

“A quantum system, such as a group of qubits, follows the rules of quantum mechanics rather than classical physics. Using the newly developed control protocols, researchers can suppress the usual emergence of the arrow of time or even reverse its apparent direction, making quantum processes look as though they are unfolding backward.

“’Unlike phenomena we observe around us, at the microscopic level most fundamental laws of physics see forward and backward movement in time as physically possible,’ said Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Luis Pedro García-Pintos. ‘In other words, those laws of physics are symmetrical under time reversal; the equations work just as well if you reverse time.’

“In everyday classical physics, making a measurement has little effect on the object being observed. Quantum systems behave very differently. Measuring them randomly changes their state, naturally creating an arrow of time. To overcome that effect, the researchers combined measurements with feedback to produce time reversed stochastic trajectories. This allowed quantum systems to follow paths that appear consistent with time flowing in reverse.”

The amount of new research going on in the field of physics these days is hard to keep up with. There have been about a half-dozen articles just in the last month, published in various places, all suggesting that the concept of our universe we have had so much confidence in for a few decades—called the Standard Model (ΛCDM)—is falling apart based on new information from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). I’m going to try to summarize these articles for you and talk about them all in two posts. So here goes….

The universe isn’t as uniform as we thought

An article published on Asiatimes.com on July 2^nd, written by Francesco Sylos Labini and Marco Galoppo. The subtitle says, “New findings show its time for a radical rethink of cosmology as we now know it.” Here are some excerpts from that article….

“Modern cosmology rests on a simple assumption: if we look on large enough scales, matter should be distributed evenly, with no preferred direction within the cosmos. This is known as the cosmological principle. Now, as new telescopes both on Earth and in space, such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Euclid, deliver ever more detailed maps of the universe, this assumption can finally be properly tested.

“In our new paper, we uncover evidence that the distribution of galaxies does not become uniform on the largest scales we can currently test. Using DESI data, we find directional patterns extending across distances of several billion light years. If confirmed, our results would force physicists to rethink some basic ideas about the universe, including what dark matter is, and how gravity shapes matter on the largest scales.

“The rate of cosmic expansion is known as the Hubble constant, but precise estimates of the present expansion rate of the universe do not all agree. This has led to a much-debated challenge of the ΛCDM model—the Hubble tension. Recent observations of ancient galaxies by the James Webb telescope also put into question our understanding of early cosmic structure formation.

“However, many recognize the most perplexing puzzle is an anomalously large dipole—a “one direction versus the opposite direction” asymmetry in the sky—in the distribution of very distant quasars and radio galaxies. This is in stark contrast with the ΛCDM model.

“Finally, last year’s data from DESI have challenged the very nature of dark energy, which may not be a constant after all. This shakes the foundation of modern cosmology.

“Our results reveal coherent structures spanning billions of light years, much larger than expected in the standard cosmological model. If confirmed, they would directly violate the cosmological principle…. We need a more complex general description of the Universe, one that allows large-scale inhomogeneities to play a greater role.”

Mammoth Structure Found in Deep Space Challenges Our Understanding of The Universe

An article published June 20, 2026, on ScienceAlert.com, written by Michelle Starr. Here are some excerpts from that article….

“A massive structure detected in the distant Universe is defying our understanding of how the Universe evolved. In 2024, astronomers found a giant, almost perfect ring of galaxies, some 1.3 billion light-years in diameter. It doesn’t match any known structure or formation mechanism.

“The signal was picked up in light that has traveled for 6.9 billion years to reach us. The existence of ‘The Big Ring’, as the structure has been named, could mean that we need to amend the standard model of cosmology.

“It’s the second giant structure discovered by astronomer Alexia Lopez of the University of Central Lancashire…. The first, called the Giant Arc, is actually in the same part of the sky, at the same distance away. When the arc’s discovery was announced in 2021, it puzzled astronomers. The Big Ring only deepens the mystery.

“’Neither of these two ultra-large structures is easy to explain in our current understanding of the universe,” Lopez said in January 2024. “And their ultra-large sizes, distinctive shapes, and cosmological proximity must surely be telling us something important – but what exactly?’

“Cosmologists calculate the current theoretical size limit of structures in the universe to be 1.2 billion light-years, yet both of these structures are much larger – the Giant Arc is almost three times bigger and the Big Ring’s circumference is comparable to the Giant Arc’s length. ‘From current cosmological theories we didn’t think structures on this scale were possible,’ Lopez said.”

This physicist is hunting for the biggest black hole in the universe

An article published on NewScientist.com on June 30, 2026, written by Matt von Hippel. Here are some excerpts from that article….

“No black hole could ever be described as small. Even the most diminutive are many times the mass of the sun. But there is now talk of a variety that throws shade on all others: the Stupendously LArge Black holes, otherwise known as SLABs. These dark monsters could be as massive as whole galaxies or even bigger.

“New Scientist spoke with astronomer Brian Lacki at the Breakthrough Listen project based at the University of Oxford about the wild new idea of these gigantic black holes, our chances of finding one and how it would shake up cosmology if we did.

“’Hypothetical black holes from the dawn of time are called primordial black holes.’ Lacki said. ‘And if those fluctuations were large, spanning huge regions of space, then you might get these SLABS—a population of black holes that were a trillion solar masses or larger…. It’s a possibility, and people just hadn’t considered it. It seems possible under the laws of physics. Are they there and we’ve just not thought to look for them?’

“’The particular type of evidence I’m looking for is its shadow’, Lacki explained. ‘You may have seen the images of Sagittarius A and M87, which are nearby supermassive black holes (but not SLABS), where it literally looks like a black “hole” surrounded by this ring of light from the matter falling in around it. If you have a black hole against a background of light, the black hole absorbs some of that light, so you actually literally see a black “hole” against the sky. Some of these black holes can be very large. If you have a quintillion-solar-mass black hole, then it’s significantly larger than a galaxy, so that forms a black spot against the cosmic microwave background.

“’The fact that we don’t see that kind of thing so far doesn’t rule out SLABs,’ Lacki continued. ‘But it does tell us that, if they do exist, they’re very rare. Our analysis has shown that black holes bigger than a hundred quadrillion times the mass of the sun are so rare that there aren’t any within our observable universe.”

The oldest, most distant galaxies we can see at the moment are about 13.5 billion years old. But there’s a gap between that and the cosmic microwave background, which is the very oldest thing we can see, having been released shortly after the Big Bang, around 300 million years before the oldest galaxies. What’s interesting about this period – this cosmic dark age, as it’s called – is that if you consider how far it is expanded out and how fast the universe was expanding at the time, it’s actually a surprisingly large part of the universe. Even with things like the James Webb Space Telescope, where we’re seeing those furthest, oldest galaxies, we can’t see back to this period of cosmic history.’

“’That gets the mind going. What gems might be out there in this unexplored volume of space? SLABs are one thing, but there might be other things out there that are left over from the big bang, just waiting to be found,’ Lacki pondered.”

Bullet Cluster observations reopen dark matter debate with MOND-compatible explanation

An article published on Phys.org on June 19, 2026, written by Johannes Seiler. Here are some excerpts from that article….

“The Bullet Cluster has so far been considered evidence of the existence of dark matter. An international team of researchers has now analyzed new data and current images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). According to the team, the observations are also consistent with an alternative explanation that does not involve dark matter.

“If you look closely at images of the formation, you can see that the galaxies behind the Bullet Cluster appear distorted into crescent shapes. The reason for this is the gravitational lensing effect. This refers to the phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein, according to which large masses deflect light. Incredibly, however, this deflection is not particularly large in the region of the two luminous clouds of matter—i.e., where the greatest mass should be concentrated. Instead, the galaxy clusters to their right and left exert a much stronger lensing effect, despite their low mass. It thus appears that further matter is hidden here that we are unable to see.

“’This observation has so far been considered evidence of the existence of dark matter,” explains Prof. Dr. Pavel Kroupa from the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. This is because, according to current theory, dark matter exerts gravitational forces but does not otherwise interact with normal matter. As a result, unlike the gas clouds, it is not slowed down by friction and is also not separated from the visible matter in the galaxy clusters.

“However, we still do not have any direct evidence that dark matter exists. The Israeli physicist Prof. Dr. Mordehai Milgrom already suggested an alternative hypothesis four decades ago that does not involve dark matter—modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND).

“The Bullet Cluster is actually particularly consistent with the MOND scenario. New data from the James Webb Space Telescope allows a better, more precise calculation of the number of stars in both clusters… and the observed gravitational lensing effect can be explained by the newly calculated number of visible stars, neutron stars and black holes, rather than dark matter.”

Continued in the next post….

We have believed for quite a few years that the answer was: a galaxy. Now, we’re not so sure, and are actually leaning heavily toward: Black Hole. Here’s why, as explained by Leah Crane in an article published by Newscientist.com on June 15, 2026….

“Every massive galaxy we’ve ever seen, across the entire universe, has a supermassive black hole at its center. The two are inextricably linked: galaxies and black holes. All the stuff of the galaxy feeds the black hole, which, in turn, shapes the galaxy’s evolution. But how that symbiosis begins is a long-standing question in cosmology. Does a black hole form and then gather material around it to create a galaxy, or does a galaxy grow and then collapse in the middle to forge a black hole?

“A key part of that question is the seeming impossibility of supermassive black holes themselves. They are simply too big to exist. Or at least they’re too big to have started to exist when they did, which was less than 500 million years after the Big Bang. That might sound like a lot of time to grow, but if the lifetime of the universe were a calendar, with the Big Bang being January 1st, the first supermassive black holes were already hundreds of millions of times the mass of the sun by the middle of January. According to the laws of physics as we understand them, there is no obvious way they could have grown so enormous so fast.

How do we know that? Remember Little Red Dots? Well, “a coincidence of geometry magnified the light of a little red dot called Abell 2744-QSO1 (or just QS01), which gave astronomers an unprecedented view of a galaxy that existed just 700 million years after the Big Bang. By measuring the velocity of the gas orbiting the center of it, which is moving extraordinarily fast, they managed to calculate the masses of QS01 and its central black hole—a measurement that has never before been made for any black hole within a billion years of the Big Bang. The black hole, it turns out, is about 50 million solar masses. The entire galaxy is at most around 75 million.

“There are only two ways to explain that, either direct collapse or a primordial black hole, and neither involve the galaxy forming before the black hole. So, it seems that the black hole at the center of this particular galaxy, at least, was the egg, and came first. Problem solved.

Or is it? This is just one of the problems cosmologists are facing these days.

Let’s take just a minute to review what has happened in cosmology, as outlined in a good article by Daniel Cossins on NewScientist.com….

“Our current best picture of the origins and evolution of the universe was pieced together over the course of a century. It began in 1915 with Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the result of massive objects warping space-time.

“At the time, the universe was thought to be static, so Einstein added a calming term to his equations called the “cosmological constant”. But in 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble observed distant galaxies speeding away from one another, indicating that the universe is expanding and prompting Einstein to ditch his constant.

“Then came the Big Bang theory. While it is gospel these days, it wasn’t until the 1960s that the rival steady-state theory gave way, as astronomers discovered a sea of primordial radiation left over from the Big Bang—the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—with properties that matched predictions.

“As our ability to peer deep into space improved, the Big Bang theory was no longer enough. In the 1980s, astronomers found that the gravity of visible matter was insufficient to hold galaxies together or explain the formation of galaxy clusters. The fix was to invoke invisible dark matter. A decade later, observations of distant exploding stars led by Riess and his colleagues revealed, contrary to all expectations, that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. The cosmological constant was reinstated, albeit rebranded as dark energy.

“And this, essentially, is the current standard model of cosmology, known as lambda-CDM. The Greek letter lambda denotes the cosmological constant and CDM stands for cold dark matter, assumed to be made of heavy, slow-moving particles. Added to general relativity and with a few key assumptions—most importantly that the universe, on average, looks the same in all directions—it offers a compelling framework for how large-scale structures formed from quantum fluctuations in the early universe through a brief burst of exponential inflation in the first moments.

“In the case of lambda-CDM, the loose ends are obvious. Dark matter and dark energy were only ever placeholders: they were invoked in response to observations, but without physical explanations. Despite decades of effort, physicists have yet to directly detect dark matter particles. And while dark energy is thought of as vacuum energy, the result of quantum fluctuations in empty space, it has always been troubling from a theoretical perspective. Quantum theory predicts that its strength must be some 10¹²⁰ times greater than what is required to drive the expansion of the universe we see.

“Right now, dark energy and dark matter… they’re tack-ons,” says Mike Turner, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. They both serve functions. There is strong empirical evidence that they exist. “But they are just phenomenological descriptions, so they’re pointing to something more fundamental.”

Then something comes along to spoil everything, called Hubble Tension. “It is so named because two different ways of measuring the rate at which the universe is expanding, known as the Hubble constant, disagree. When cosmologists extrapolate forwards from the CMB using the current model, they get a value of about 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec. But when astronomers measure the local universe directly, using supernovae and variable stars, the value is around 73. “It’s an end-to-end test of the universe,” says Adam Riess, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, who argues that the fact that the two ends don’t meet is a strong hint there is something seriously wrong with lambda-CDM. “It’s been a decade since we discovered the Hubble tension and it hasn’t gone away,” he says. “It’s only grown more pronounced.”

And now, as new research comes in, the data says dark energy appears to be weakening, and isn’t a cosmological constant after all. In a paper published in August 2025, Riess and observational cosmologist Alexie Leauthaud at the University of California, Santa Cruz, argued that we may be witnessing the demise of lambda-CDM and that we must now prepare to move beyond it.

“When you live with a standard model for 20 years, a lot of people have spent most of their career with it,” says Riess. “Even the idea that this might not be the whole story, it’s jarring.”

But all the newer models of dark matter and dark energy have problems too. For example, we should have seen evidence for them in existing observations of planetary orbits, and we haven’t. Moreover, while it is possible that the interactions are so vanishingly small that they would have evaded detection, they could still violate the sacrosanct law of energy-momentum conservation.

What we have, then, is an abundance of ideas—none of which does the trick. “We really have no idea,” says Pedro Ferreira, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford.

“Maybe this is just the nature of paradigm shifts. They will always be marked by conflict, and lambda-CDM will not go gently into the night. But that’s not necessarily a problem. “You want the defenders to look for anything that looks a little suspicious in the data. You also want the revolutionaries, the people who are willing go beyond what we already have,” says Eric Linder, a physicist and cosmologist at the University of California, Berkeley. ‘The back-and-forth, while it may look antagonistic, it’s actually healthy.’

Indeed, the fact that cosmologists are gearing up for a fight might itself indicate we really are poised for another revolution. The one thing we can say for certain is that, after a long period of harmony, cosmology is entering an era of tensions that make it a whole lot more interesting. “We’re looking forward to all this new data, which, I think, will thrill us all,” says Linder. “It’s just an incredibly exciting time.”

Of course, I’m banking on the revolution finally validating that we live in a holographic universe. And I don’t think we’re that far away from it.

Any time I have written about “consciousness,” I have mentioned that I spent almost two years living on a ship around the Canary Islands with daily contact with pilot whales and dolphins. And I came away convinced that cetaceans possess a level of consciousness at least equal to a human’s, and probably greater.

There are numerous stories I could tell, but I so clearly remember one day I was at the wheel of our 80-foot schooner with 20 paying passengers on board for a workshop, almost all of whom were in the water next to the ship swimming and having fun with a small pod of pilot whales. When, all of a sudden, I hear the high-pitched screams of more pilot whales off to the aft port side. I turned and looked and saw maybe a dozen mothers and babies jumping out of the water heading straight for our ship.

First of all, it was highly unusual that we would see the mothers and babies, who usually stayed away when we were making contact with the males. Secondly, although a pilot whale is really just a big dolphin, it was also highly unusual to see them jumping out of the water. And thirdly, their screams were a sound we had not heard from them before.

So I immediately assumed they were trying to warn us of danger and quickly called everyone to get out of the water and back on the ship. Fortunately, everyone complied instantly with my command, and also noticed that all the males had suddenly left as well, so there was no one left to play with anyway.

We all stayed on board for about 15 minutes. I admit that we never saw the shark, which I assume was lurking around and causing the pilot whales to be concerned for us. But eventually the males came back and I decided it was safe to swim again.

There are many, many stories of dolphins protecting humans from danger. You can read one here, and watch a video of other examples on YouTube here.

And, if you’re interested, you can also read a true short story of my own encounter with a wild pilot whale one day as we danced and made contact with each other here.

But now there is evidence coming in that an octopus might also possess a high level of consciousness. (Unlike whales and dolphins, an octopus is not a cetacean; it is a cephalopod, a class of mollusks that includes squids and cuttlefish.)

You might remember the story of Paul the Octopus, a common octopus who predicted the results of international association football matches. Accurate predictions in the 2010 World Cup brought him worldwide attention as an animal oracle.

During divinations, Paul’s keepers would present him with two food-containing boxes decorated with the flags of the teams in an upcoming match. Whichever box Paul ate from first was considered his prediction for which team would win the match.

His keepers at the Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, Germany, mainly tasked him with predicting the outcomes of international matches in which the German team was playing. Paul correctly chose the winning team in four of Germany’s six Euro 2008 matches, and all seven of their matches in the 2010 World Cup—including Germany’s match for a third place win over Uruguay on July 10th. He also correctly chose Spain as the winner of the 2010 FIFA World Cup final.^[2] In all, Paul amassed an overall record of 12 correct predictions out of 14: a success rate of approximately 85.7%.

The probability of a human being able to do that is 3.1%. It requires being able to predict the future correctly 87.5% of the time, which no human consciousness can do. I also think it’s interesting that all of Paul’s wrong predictions came early in his career (2008), like it took him some time and some practice to figure out how to do it accurately.

On a sad note, Paul was last checked by staff on October 25, 2010, and was in good health. But the following morning he was found dead. He was two-and-a-half years old, a normal lifespan for the species.

Now, BBC Wildlife Magazine publishes an article titled Scientists gave an octopus a mirror. Here’s what happened next. Here are some excerpts from that article….

“Octopuses are some of the most intelligent animals in the world - here’s yet another skill they seem to be able to pick up quite fast.

“Researchers from Dartmouth College conducted an experiment involving three California two-spot octopuses (Octopus bimaculoides) – the goal was to find out whether the animals could be trained in using a mirror to locate an out-of-sight food source.

“’We don’t enter the world knowing how to use a mirror but learn how to use a mirror,’ said cognitive neuroscientist and professor at Dartmouth, Peter Tse. ‘Octopuses can also learn how to use a mirror to infer where things are in the world.’

“During the first mirror-use training trial, all the octopuses moved toward the mirror reflection of prey first – it took around 10-12 trials per animal to learn to approach the actual crab instead of its reflection.

“Each octopus was placed inside a box open at the front and top, with a mirror positioned directly in front of them. The virtual crab was positioned behind the octopus, visible only through the mirror. To receive a reward (an actual live crab), the octopus had to recognize where the live crab was located and move towards it.

“The animals successfully chose the right location in 73 per cent of the trial, even though the learning and testing tasks were quite different. During training, the octopuses only needed to make a 90° turn near the mirror. During testing, they had to leave the starting area, make a 180° turn, and either move to the back of the tank or climb over the wall of the start chamber.

“Despite these changes, all three octopuses succeeded on their very first test. This suggests they understood the spatial relationship shown in the mirror, rather than just memorizing visual cues linked to a reward.”

Using a mirror to locate otherwise not visible objects is a form of mediated perception[1] and is even seen by some as a precursor to self-recognition. Does this mean that an octopus has a consciousness?

One expert zoologist and biologist, Professor Tim Coulson of University of Oxford suggests that when the day comes that humans no longer exist on Earth, octopuses will take over the world. They have the physical and mental attributes to evolve and build the next civilization. They will colonize the world and build an underwater colony resembling Atlantis using complex tools that they will create themselves.

“Octopuses are among the most intelligent, adaptable and resourceful creatures on Earth,” Coulson said. “They have the dexterity, curiosity and ability to communicate with each other. They can solve complex problems, manipulate objects and even camouflage themselves with stunning precision, which means that in the right environmental conditions, they could evolve into a civilization-building species following the extinction of humans.”

And, of course, Sally Field and Marcellus the octopus recently entertained us in the movie Remarkably Bright Creatures and allowed Marcellus to dazzle us with his intelligence, compassion, and distaste for being locked up in an aquarium.

I’m a SCUBA diver and feel more at home 35 feet underwater than I do on land. I remember one day I was at 40 feet, leaning on a rock watching an octopus go in and out of its home. I was fascinated, so relaxed and into what the octopus was doing that I reached for the cigarettes that were usually in my left breast pocket, and it took me a minute to realize how ridiculous that was.

But I’m not convinced yet—despite Paul’s amazing success at predicting the future—that an octopus possesses a level of consciousness that would enable them to rule the world. Whales and dolphins do, but they wouldn’t want the job. I don’t think an octopus has the ability to make decisions that would violate their instinct and breeding, as humans and cetaceans do[2]. Maybe I’m wrong. However, I also think that if it came to pass that octopuses took over the world, they would do a hell of a better job at it that humans seem to be doing. As Marcellus said at the end of Remarkably Bright Creatures, “humans, for the most part, are dull and blundering, but occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.”

[1] https://lifestyle.sustainability-directory.com/area/mediated-reality-perception/

[2] Pilot whales, for example, annually commit mass suicide in the Faroe islands, trying to wake up humanity to its biased judgments that lead to horrific slaughters such as this.

I’ve written several essays about a physics phenomenon called Little Red Dots (LRDs)….

“Since NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope started peering into the universe four years ago, hundreds of the puzzling objects have appeared in its images. Their unknown origins effectively launched a scientific case that hundreds of studies have attempted to crack.” (March 18, 2026)

My essay included the following…

“I had the gut feeling that these “little red dots” showing up everywhere in the universe through the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are the keys to providing the experiential evidence the physicists require to announce that we are living in a holographic universe. Since I am not a physicist, or an expert in holograms, I can’t tell you why I got so excited. I also can’t tell you how these little red dots will provide the experts with what they need. And I’m not even going to hazard a guess.”

So along comes another article published June 10, 2026 on Space.com titled James Webb Space Telescope finds evidence the mysterious ‘little red dots’ are black hole stars. Here are just a few excerpts from that article….

“Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope may be close to solving the mystery of ‘little red dots’ in the early universe. The team has studied one of these strange objects, designated GLIMPSE-17775, finding evidence it is a black hole star — a ravenously feeding, growing supermassive black hole cocooned in a dense cloud of partially ionized gas.

“[LRDs] appear in large numbers around 600 million years after the Big Bang, but they appear to disappear before the universe reaches 2 billion years old. Several explanations for little red dots have been proposed, but one that has emerged as a frontrunner is the concept of black hole stars. If black hole stars exist, the little red dot disappearance would be the result of their intense, short-lived growth spurts that cause them to burn out—or, because the growing supermassive black holes at their centers eventually clear away the dense gas and dust obscuring them, changing their appearance as they evolve into more typical active galaxies.

“The JWST imaged little red dot GLIMPSE-17775, seen as it was just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang, while making observations of the gravitational lens galaxy cluster Abell S1063. This data represents the deepest spectrum of light from a little red dot collected to date and, according to this team, contains multiple lines of evidence pointing to a black hole star.”

So, hold on to that thought while I remind us of something called “Black Hole Cosmology,” also known as “Schwarzschild cosmology,” which suggests that our observable universe is the interior of a black hole. Black holes have been normally thought of as the result of a collapsing massive star. But black hole cosmology posits that instead of compressing completely into an infinitely dense singularity, the collapsing matter instead reaches a state with an extremely large but finite density, stops collapsing, undergoes a bounce, and then starts rapidly expanding.

So, rather than a Big Bang starting from a singularity, there is instead a non-singular Big Bounce, at which the Universe had a non-zero, minimum scale factor. The scenarios in which the universe is formed in the interior of a black hole might naturally solve the horizon problem and the flatness problem in cosmology.[1] The idea that baby universes form in black holes, which could also solve the black hole information paradox, was popularized in 1993 by Stephen Hawking. And in some such models, all universes created by black holes form a multiverse.

There are an estimated 40 billion billion black holes in our universe alone.[2] Astronomers estimate that about 100 million black holes roam among the stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone; however, some studies propose that the actual number could be as high as 200 billion, considering the potential for undiscovered black holes and the vast number of stars in the Milky Way.[3]

So, this is an astronomical number of black holes, each with the potential of being “home” to an entire universe like ours. And let’s put this in perspective….

Black Hole cosmology suggests that universes are born inside a black hole. With 40 billion billion black holes in our universe, that could mean that there are 40 billion billion other universes within our universe. But that’s not where it ends. Each one of those 40 billion billion universes might have 40 billion billion black holes in them as well. (I’m not going to try to multiply 40 billion billion by 40 billion billion, but it’s a big number.)

Where does it stop? Think of the Russian nesting dolls. Inside one is another doll, and another doll, and another doll. Except instead of dolls, we’re looking at entire universes.

And then imagine each of those universes having its own “theme” or primary focus, with completely different rules that govern it—like our universe has general relativity, gravity, cause-and-effect, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and now quantum mechanics, etc.

I’ve talked a little about the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI). One of the arguments against it is that—instead of collapsing the wave function and assuming one specific location—if a particle manifests in every possible location demonstrated in the wave, and each singular position of that particle creates a new and different universe, the number of different universes required to accommodate all the different “particular” locations would be astronomical. Well, I just said that the number of black holes in the nesting dolls of universes (if each doll had 40 billion billion black holes) would be astronomical, so I guess MWI is possible. It’s just too big a number for my little brain to work with.

But let me get back to the Little Red Dots which turn out to be black hole stars. Am I really stretching things to suggest that they might be evidence of our holographic universe?

Maybe. But consider this….

In September 2022, primordial black holes were proposed by some researchers to explain the Little red dots, formed very early in cosmological time as observed by the James Webb Space Telescope. They were called “primordial black holes,” extremely dense pockets of subatomic matter that may have been tightly packed to the point of gravitational collapse, without the supernova compression typically needed to make black holes today.

And if Black Hole Cosmology is correct, they may have been home to various universes.

But isn’t it possible that our black hole and our universe inside it came much later chronologically, much further down the line, like a much smaller doll near the end of the nesting dolls after a lot of bigger ones have been opened? And where does the “holographic part” come in?

Yes, I think that’s also possible. And the holographic part comes in with the announcement on August 15, 2015 by Stephen Hawking that information entering a black hole is stored in two dimensions on the event horizon[4], rather than being lost forever as we had always thought. It is from that 2-dimensional information stored on the event horizon of a black hole that a holographic universe is created and projected into the black hole as a 3-dimensional reality.[5]

[SIDENOTE:] Many people might think that black holes suck in anything that gets close to them. But it’s not true that black holes “suck.” There’s no force that a black hole exerts that a normal object (like a moon, planet, or star) doesn’t also exert. In the end, it’s all just gravity: the average gravitational force exerted on an object’s center-of-mass and the tidal forces that stretch, compress, and tear apart the object around its center-of-mass. The biggest difference between black holes and other massive objects is that black holes are:

• denser than most objects,

• occupy a much smaller volume of space than other objects,

• and are capable of being far more massive than any other single object in the Universe.[6]

So…. If little red dots that show up soon after the Big Bang are actually primordial black holes, what’s to say they aren’t the first ones to house holographic universes?

And to make things even more interesting, there’s another kind of black hole called a “relic” black hole—ancient black holes theorized to have formed before the Big Bang or during cosmic events that preceded our current universe. That suggests the possibility that they may be remnants of a previous universe that spilled over. In other words, they may represent the “mother” universe that housed our black hole universe—the next larger nesting doll that left a piece of itself for us to find.

These are all questions that may or may not get answered as the research continues. But I think it’s always good to stop our daily lives for a minute to imagine a bigger picture. For me it’s a humbling experience, and I could use more of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology

[2] https://scitechdaily.com/how-many-black-holes-are-in-the-universe-40000000000000000000/

[3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-james-webb-telescope-turned-up-a-hidden-population-of-giant-black-holes-that-slip-past-nearly-every-traditional-way-of-spotting-them/ar-AA25cTsy?cvid=6a2de4111b42401ebad6c52c50b4499a&ei=21

[4]

[5] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/holograms-black-holes-and-the-nature-of-the-universe/

[6] https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/black-hole-myth-suck/

Research has shown that our universe is expanding, and it actually might be expanding at a faster rate every time we try to measure it. That expansion has been attributed to something called “dark energy.” However, no one has ever been able to find dark energy or explain what it is or where it comes from. It has simply been made up out of thin air as an explanation for an expanding universe—in other words, to make the math add up the way they want it to.

Perhaps you’ve heard physicists, or maybe your friends at a cocktail party, trying to explain the expansion of the universe with an analogy to a balloon. When you blow up a balloon, it expands equally outward. And if you paint red dots on the surface of the balloon, when you blow it up, all the red dots keep getting further away from each other.

It’s a nice try, but it doesn’t work. Unfortunately, the expansion of the universe is much more complicated than that, and much harder to wrap our heads around.

For example, if we paint those red dots on the surface of the balloon, the dots themselves expand as the balloon expands. That’s not true with the universe, we’re told. If those red dots represent individual galaxies, for example, as the universe expands, the galaxies do not. They stay the same size. In physics terms, “bound systems—such as galaxies, stars, and planets—are not affected by the expansion of the universe.”[1] The gravitational forces within these systems are strong enough to counteract the effects of cosmic expansion. The distance between the galaxies grows but the galaxies themselves do not. In other words, the gravitational forces holding our galaxy together are stronger than the dark energy supposedly expanding the entire universe. Really? If it’s true, that would nullify the balloon analogy right off the bat.

But that’s not all….

Another reason the balloon analogy doesn’t work is that it portrays the entire universe as being on the surface of the balloon, and what’s inside that surface is nothing—just air. That’s not true for our universe. Supposedly, there are galaxies and things all over the place—not just on the surface, but filling up the interior as well. And they are all somehow moving away from each other, too.

But then they tell us our universe is flat[2], not a sphere like a balloon. Try to imagine a flat universe that is expanding in all “directions” at once. Bet you can’t!

Lastly, in the balloon analogy, as you pump air into the balloon, it expands from the center outward. Apparently, that’s not what our universe did, or is doing. There is no center of the universe. And this may be the hardest part to comprehend. How can all the galaxies be moving away from each other unless there is a center they are moving away from as well? It makes no sense. But that’s what the physicists are saying. Even those who believe in a Big Bang coming from a singularity say that the singularity itself is not the center of the universe….

“According to the theory, our universe is currently expanding, and it emerged from a single point of infinite density and temperature, which we call a singularity (but this isn’t the center of the universe)…. This very homogeneous image of the early universe is proof of two things. First, that the ‘bang’ was not triggered by something, and second, if there is no point of origin for an explosion, there is no center of the universe.”[3]

Now, I’m not a genius, nor am I dumb. And I rely a lot on my training in Logic. So, I gotta tell you…. when physicists tell me the universe is expanding, but the galaxies are staying the same size, and that expansion applies to galaxies on the interior part of the universe that do not get any closer to any other galaxy during the expansion, and that expansion occurs without there being any center to the universe, my tendency is to go…. BS! It’s simply not logical, at least to me. But then again, I might have said the same thing in 1974 when the Double Slit experiment proved that all the matter we see in the universe exists as waves until observed (or measured). So, I have come to the conclusion that it is my limited capacity to think (or imagine) an expanding universe that meets these criteria. It was a whole lot easier when I didn’t know the balloon analogy was wrong.

And I am secretly hoping that one day all those physicists will say, “Ooops, we made a mistake. The universe is actually static,” which is what Einstein proposed in 1917. (He later relented when the evidence began to pile up for an expanding universe.)

But what if the universe isn’t actually expanding? What if the expansion is an illusion? This possibility is actually being considered seriously by respected researchers. In June of 2023, in an article published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, Professor Lucas Lombriser, a theoretical physicist at the University of Geneva, argued that the expansion of the universe, which is mainly based on the phenomenon known as “redshift,” is actually an illusion.

A longstanding hypothesis suggests that redshift—the stretching of light wavelengths toward the redder end of the color spectrum as an object moves away from the viewer—is an indicator of an expanding universe because further-off galaxies have higher redshift than those closer to us. However, a paper published December 30, 2025, “demonstrates that cosmological and gravitational redshift phenomena are not changes in photons during transit, but are instead direct manifestations of differences in the rate of time between emission and observation points. We show that the conventional interpretation—that photons “lose energy” or “stretch” during travel—represents a fundamental category error stemming from Aristotelian substance metaphysics. By applying a rigorous relational measurement framework, we prove that redshift is purely an artifact of comparing measurements made with clocks running at different rates. This insight resolves long-standing paradoxes in cosmology, eliminates the need for expanding space as an explanatory mechanism, and restores the principle that nothing changes in transit except the measurement context.”[4]

While many physicists explain the accelerating expansion of our universe with a term known as the cosmological constant, or Λ (lambda), Professor Lombriser suggests that particles are the ones changing in mass, accounting for the difference in redshift — and not the expansion of the universe. And the cosmological constant has been a major problem for cosmologists as the predictions of its value made by elementary particle physics differ from actual observations by 120 orders of magnitude (that’s a lot!). Hence, the cosmological constant is referred to as the “worst prediction in the history of physics.”[5] Cosmologists often attempt to resolve the discrepancies between different values of Λ by proposing new hypothetical particles or theoretical physical forces.

Professor Lombriser resolves it instead by reinterpreting what already exists in science. “In this work, we put on new glasses to look at the cosmos and its unsolved mysteries by performing mathematical transformations of the physical laws that govern it,” explained Lombriser.

“In Lombriser’s mathematical interpretation, the universe is not expanding but rather flat and static, as once believed by Einstein. The effects indicating expansion that we observe are explained in this model by the evolution of the masses of protons and electrons over time. According to this picture, these elementary particles arise from a field that permeates spacetime. The cosmological constant is determined by the mass of the field, and since the field fluctuates, the masses of the particles it generates also fluctuate. The cosmological constant still changes over time, but in this model, this change is associated with the change in particle masses over time, not the expansion of the universe.

“Lombriser’s new concept also addresses other pressing problems in cosmology, including the nature of dark matter. This elusive material outweighs ordinary baryonic matter in a ratio of 5:1 but remains mysterious as it does not interact with light. Lombriser proposed that the strange material could work like an axion field, a hypothetical particle that’s considered one of the top contenders for dark matter’s identity.

“These fluctuations could also potentially overturn the theory of dark energy, a hypothetical force that stretches the fabric of space, causing galaxies to move apart at an accelerating rate.

’In this picture, dark energy is essentially not needed,’ Lombriser added.”[6]

Well, I might not understand all of that, but at least I don’t have to try to understand an expanding universe that doesn’t work like a balloon!

[1] https://www.physics.umd.edu/grt/taj/675e/Price%26Romano.pdf

[2] There isn’t the slightest reason to doubt the universe is flat, just not the two-dimensional kind we often encounter in everyday life. All other measurements of the CMB, like those by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, are consistent with flatness. Data from other sources, most notably baryon acoustic oscillations — the imprints left on galaxies from primordial sound waves that occurred after the Big Bang — also suggest flatness. (https://www.astronomy.com/science/what-shape-is-the-universe/)

[3] https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/space-astronomy/cosmology/where-is-the-center-of-the-universe-or-is-there-even-one/

[4] https://mystry-geek.blogspot.com/2025/12/redshift-unmasked-clock-rate-illusion.html

[5] https://etherphysics.org/blog/vacuum-catastrophe-worst-prediction-physics

[6] https://universemagazine.com/en/the-illusion-of-universe-expansion-research-shatters-the-worst-prediction-in-the-history-of-physics/

If you wanted to build a new house, you would hire a contractor, right? But when the house is finished and someone asks, “Who built that house?”, nobody would say the name of the contractor. You’d say: “I did.” In fact, very few would ever know the name of the contractor unless they specifically asked for it.

For those of you who believe the Holy Bible when it says God created our universe, I want to assure you that I’m not raining on your parade. When the Holy Bible says God created our universe, it’s simply saying that God commissioned it to be built, but didn’t necessarily do the work Him/Herself. Personally, I think God had a lot more important things to think about than creating an in-patient rehab center for “judgment junkies.” But I’ll bet S/He had time to hire a general contractor, give them the overall plan, and delegate the work. I’ll also bet S/He also had time to occasionally take a look at the progress and say to that contractor, “Let there be light”—make it sunny and bright and cheery, not some dark and dreary environment. And checking back later, “God saw the light, that it was good.”

But just because the Holy Bible doesn’t name the contractor, it doesn’t mean that God did the work Him/Herself. I’m sure this is why, nearly 2400 years ago, Plato came up with the word “Demiurge” to give a name to that general contractor. Stephen Hawking said, “Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation.”

So, I think it’s time we set the record straight, because for too long, too many people in too many religions around the world have based their daily decisions and actions on a false premise: that God created our universe, meaning that S/He did all the actual work. And by now I hope we all know the dangers of using a false premise because of the flawed outcomes it will produce.

Believing that God did all the work creating our universe is what I call “model misassignment.” The traditional “God Model”— where God created the Heavens and the Earth and all the animals and humans on it— while widely accepted, predicts features that are not objectively observed and fails to predict features that are. Rather, it is human beings who have misassigned the creation of our world and misunderstood its purpose, and so made up bizarre stories and beliefs to try to explain an apparently flawed and ill-conceived universe.

In fact, rather than what I’m suggesting being a criticism of God, it is a glorification. I am simply saying that a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, and infallible (like my God is) could not possibly create the world we see around us—S/He is both smarter, more capable, and more loving than that—and to suggest otherwise is not only illogical, but an insult to Him/Her. And obviously, Christians are not the only ones who have made this serious mistake. Jews do it, too; Muslims do it with Allah; Hindus do it with Brahma. The Sikhs do it as well, with Waheguru. Only Buddhists seem to have sidestepped this issue and kept any “God” out of creation.

But I think anyone who can let go of their prior beliefs and objectively look at the world around us cannot help but conclude that an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, infallible God would have done a much better job if They had done the work Themselves.

It’s true that someone did an incredible job of creating the Earth Experience environment. There is little controversy in noting that the Earth is visually and structurally extraordinary. Its magnificent landscapes display immense variety, symmetry, and beauty. Mountain ranges, oceans, forests, deserts, and polar regions arise from the same underlying physical laws and yet produce radically different environments. The planet is not only stable but productive: it supports chemistry, self-replicating biology, and increasingly complex forms of life over vast spans of time. The oceans alone host highly intelligent, social, and self-aware species such as whales and dolphins (and maybe octopuses). Hats off to whatever architect designed them!

But when it comes to creating “man” or “woman,” no omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, infallible God would have done such a lousy job. As I’ve said before, I’ll admit that the human body is amazing in many respects—like its self-healing capabilities—but it’s also very fragile and very high maintenance. For example, we have to be so careful about what we eat—can’t have sugar, can’t drink alcohol, can’t smoke, can’t consume too many calories or too many carbs; and, worst of all, NO BACON! The human body is susceptible to a number of life-threatening diseases, like cancer—not to mention dementia—and after a certain number of years, it seems that things stop working like they should—usually a different thing every morning we wake up. The list of design flaws of the human body is actually quite long.

I just have a hard time saying the “architect” of the human body was “God.” But if you’re going to give credit to God for all the incredible, fantastic, amazing things we find in our holographic universe, God also has to be the source of the not-so-incredible things. And my God has all those well-deserved adjectives after His/Her name, including “infallible.” At least I certainly hope God is infallible, or we might be in big trouble.

And it seems clear someone or something has to still be involved in maintaining our universe. It wasn’t just “create it and walk away.” What’s happening points to some kind of active participation.

So, let’s talk honestly about this. There are too many things “wrong” in this world for my God to be responsible for creating them. Here are just a few….

· continuous wars killing millions of people for the wrong reasons

· malnutrition and hunger for far too many

· abject poverty for the masses while a few wallow in their riches

· blatant discrimination based on personal choices of gender, race, religion, etc.

· unconscionable emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of children

· humanity on a perilous course of self-destruction for itself and the Earth from nuclear annihilation and environmental degradation

· natural disasters that can wipe out thousands of people at one time

· just to name a few

And on top of all that, whoever is running this shitshow does nothing about any of it—doesn’t step in, make some corrections, or mitigate the damage. The opposite seems to be true: they look the other way and tolerate it all. “God loves His children,” the saying goes. Well, if I saw my children suffering with pain and misery from such horrible lives on Earth, I can’t imagine sitting by and doing nothing. And please don’t give me that “Only God knows why” excuse.

Let’s call a spade a spade. This Earth Experience is operated with moral indifference.

In the past, I have suggested a good reason for that: God was very concerned about all the consciousnesses S/He created that were getting embroiled in biased judgments to the point where it was causing them to be violent and ill, resulting in the above list of “defects.” So S/He commissioned a Demiurge to create an “in-patient rehab opportunity for these “judgment junkies” to “go sober.” And if that were true, it would explain a whole lot of things, especially the moral indifference. A rehab environment designed to eliminate judgment could not itself participate in judgment, and therefore there could be no corrective actions taken to change these things that seem to be out of sync with an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, infallible God. The whole point of a rehab opportunity for a consciousness is for it to come face to face with the consequences of its biased judgments and decide, of its own free will, to give them up. To step in and mitigate those consequences would ruin the whole point of the experience.

So it might be that God really does love His/Her children, and therefore came up with this solution of an in-patient rehab opportunity, especially one located in such a beautiful place as the Earth Experience that the Demiurge created. It also validates the Demiurge and the moral indifference it operates the rehab opportunity with.

I don’t know about you, but I would have a hard time watching as my children suffered in pain, even if I knew it was the best for them. I would much rather delegate someone I trust completely to create and run an experience like we see around us. So, I have to keep reminding myself not to judge God or His/Her Demiurge for what we consciousnesses have created with our biased judgments. And isn’t that the point after all?

On May 27, 2026, I posted an essay called Are days getting longer than 24 hours?, in which I talked about the Earth being like a child’s spinning top, and as the top slows its spin rate, it starts to wobble and eventually falls over. It appears that climate change is slowing Earth’s spin—and there’s been nothing quite like it in 3.6 million years.

Think again about that top as it slows down. If you carefully watch the polar axis on which it is rotating, you will see it change locations, and slowly makes its way toward 90 degrees from where it started before it falls over and completely stops spinning. Does that mean that the Earth will eventually topple over—that we’ll experience a permanent “pole shift”?

In my essay, I also quoted from an article published on Futurism.com which was concerned about the imminent disintegration of the “Doomsday Glacier,” which means that the ice on the south pole is melting at an alarming rate, and all that water is making its way from the pole to the equator. “On the order of 1,000 gigatonnes moving from the poles to the oceans,” says Prof Benedikt Soja of ETH Zurich. This relocation of mass is apparently enough to significantly change the rotational speed of the Earth.

But then on June 4, 2026, Popular Mechanics published an article titled Earth Has Tilted 31.5 Inches. That Shouldn’t Happen. It talked about a study led by Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University. “Earth’s rotational pole actually changes a lot,” he said. “Our study shows that among climate-related causes, the redistribution of groundwater actually has the largest impact on the drift of the rotational pole.”

So, which is it: Glacier melt or groundwater that is causing the Earth to wobble on its axis?

Here are some excerpts from that article….

“A study in Geophysical Research Letters used data from 1993 through 2010 and estimated that the depletion of about 2,150 gigatons of groundwater helped move Earth’s rotational pole roughly 31.5 inches. Much of that pumping was for irrigation and human use, with water that had been stored underground eventually making its way to the oceans.

“In the study, researchers modeled observed changes in Earth’s rotational pole and tested different water-redistribution scenarios. The scenario that best matched the observed drift included 2,150 gigatons of groundwater depletion. While the pole motion helped constrain the groundwater estimate, it wasn’t exactly a before-and-after picture of pumps yanking Earth off balance.

“Moving water out of the midlatitudes has an outsized effect on polar motion, and the 2023 study pointed to heavy groundwater depletion in western North America and northwestern India as especially important to the modeled drift.

“In a 2026 Journal of Geodesy reappraisal, the longer-term trend was driven mainly by snow-water-storage changes tied to snowfall patterns and Greenland melt, while groundwater and reservoir storage showed up as smaller but still detectable contributors. The paper also found that its modeled long-term trend still didn’t fully agree with GRACE and satellite-laser-ranging observations.

“A longer view is badly needed. Polar motion involves groundwater, snow, ice sheets, glaciers, sea-level redistribution, reservoirs, and processes inside Earth itself. While newer research has tightened some pieces of that budget, it hasn’t yet turned the planet’s wobble into a solved equation.”

I guess the answer to my question, then, is: We don’t really know, yet. Maybe it’s both.

* * *

You might wonder why I’m writing about this phenomenon. What does a pole shift have to do with a holographic universe?

Good question….

Let’s start the answer with this: In a holographic universe, nothing is “real.” Everything is like a total immersion movie. Remember the movie “Twister?” Watching it in the theater, you knew that the tornado wasn’t real, but it sure seemed real to Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, who were experiencing the tornado from inside the movie. Right now, we are experiencing the possibility of a pole shift (which might just wipe out all of humanity, like what happened to the dinosaurs) from inside the movie.

But the fact that we are inside the “Pole Shift” movie means that it looks and feel very real to us, and very frightening to imagine the consequences.

If, in fact, a Demiurge is creating our holographic universe, why in the world would it create a pole shift that would be potentially fatal for all of humankind?

Of course, I have no actual knowledge of that answer, but I can imagine some possible answers that would logically work….

1. To really bring it home that we live in a holographic universe—it’s all just a total immersion movie—and encourage us to use more appropriate and accurate premises when we make our decisions and choices of how we want to react or respond to the experiences we encounter.

2. To point out that we base a lot of our decisions on the fears we have accrued over our lives—from parents, teachers, pastors, gurus, media, and our own experiences—that act as filters on our senses and color the way we perceive “reality.” Obviously, one of those fears is the fear of death, below which actually lies a fear of non-nonexistence.[1] But if we are, at our core, a consciousness, the death of the avatar body does not mean the death of “me” as a consciousness. “I am,” and will always be. I might have different avatar bodies to experience various holographic universes (different “rides” in God’s Great Amusement Park) from time to time. It’s even possible I once had a dinosaur body on Earth, and maybe that increases my fear of a pole shift, considering what happened to me “back then.” And the “I am” that I am most aware of in this Earth Experience might be just a small portion of who “I am” as my full consciousness.

What it does mean is the death of the ego, and it is actually the ego that is resisting its own annihilation. Consciousness has nothing to be afraid of. Who cares if the ego dies? It’s time we recognize that we have become so identified with our ego that we mistake it for “I am.” What we really should be concerned about is the biased judgments that have taken over our perceptions so that we no longer can view our reality as it actually is.

3. To make it more obvious that many of us live in denial—denial, for example, that we have long abused our planetary home, and the decisions and choices we have made about how to relate to the Earth are just as responsible for a potential pole shift as the Demiurge is for creating it.

And/or….

4. To give us the opportunity to change our reactions and responses right now and start basing our relationship to the Earth (and to each other) on something other than fear (like love, to paraphrase A Course in Miracles). Otherwise, the Demiurge might decide that things have gotten so far out of hand, the kindest thing would be to let humanity destroy itself and start over rather than to continue the suffering and violence from its own beliefs, opinions, fears, and especially biased judgments.

Can we stop a pole shift from happening? Perhaps. Maybe if we take serious steps to let go of the beliefs, opinions, fears, and biased judgments, and begin to make decisions and choices more in line with the holographic universe we live in, the Demiurge might decide to make the consequences of all the things about the groundwater and glacier melt less severe and actually turn all that new fresh water into a cleansing action instead of a catastrophic disaster, like giving Earth a bath.

But the Demiurge knows full well that we are consciousnesses, and that allowing a pole shift to go ahead and kill off all the avatars doesn’t mean anything about damaging the consciousness. After all, IT created the avatars (we’re only “leasing” them) and has every right to do whatever it wants with them, as long as it conforms to the request God made when S/He commissioned the Earth Experience. And the Demiurge may decide that a pole shift that would allow these consciousnesses to start over from a clean slate might be the most effective way to give God what S/He asked for.

If the Demiurge makes the more drastic decision to start over, I just hope that it does a better job next time on the avatar’s body. Yes, it was progress from a dinosaur body to what we’ve got now, but there are still some critical improvements that need to be made. For example, if the male genitalia are an absolute necessity, it should at least retract up inside the body when not in use. And get rid of that ball sack, for crying out loud. And find a better way than the prostate!

[1] For a more detailed look at the fear of non-existence, please read Chapter 19 in my free ebook, Butterflies Are Free to Fly.

In my very last post, I wrote about consciousness, agreeing with an article in Popular Mechanics with the title: Consciousness Is the Only Thing That Truly Exists, Scientist Claims, written by Danielle Zickl, that in the words of Christof Koch, PhD, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute, “everything we experience in the external world—from seeing the sun set over the horizon or feeling—is mediated by our conscious experience.” To Koch, this implies that only conscious experience truly exists. Everything else, like the material world, is secondary, he says.

And Koch is not the first scientist to suggest that consciousness is fundamental and the world of matter we see around us emerges from it.

Then on May 29, 2026, another article appeared in Popular Mechanics written by Stav Dimitropoulos (whose articles I’ve referred to several times previously), titled You See a Unique Version of Reality, Neuroscientists Say, with the subtitle “Turns out we’re not all watching the same version of the world unfold, just continuously updating our own personal ‘simulation.’”

Here are some excerpts from that intriguing article….

“We would be surprised to learn that each of us carries a tiny “black hole” inside our own personal micro-universe: the human head. Inside the retina, the eye tissue responsible for vision, lies a literal physical gap where visual information simply disappears. While it affects how we see, it also could be the seat of far-reaching implications—even raising provocative questions about the nature of consciousness itself and how we perceive reality.

“Normally, visual regions of the cortex—the brain areas responsible for processing sight—receive direct signals from the retina through the optic nerve, the bundle of nerve fibers that carries visual information from the eye to the brain. But at the blind spot, no photoreceptors, the cells that detect incoming light, exist.

“Yet, we never experience these spots as “holes” or “darkness” because the brain seamlessly fills in the missing information, constructing a continuous picture of the world. ‘In part, that is because our two eyes compensate for each other: the missing patch in one eye is usually visible to the other,’ explains Lars Muckli, PhD, a professor of visual and cognitive neurosciences at the University of Glasgow. Even when one eye is closed, the brain uses surrounding visual patterns to silently rebuild the missing region.”

This is different that the classic blind spots, like the large hole in vision behind our heads, where neither eye receives any visual information at all. “Unlike the tiny blind spots, your brain does not fake an image there. You are consciously aware of the absence,” says Muckli. So consciousness, it appears, sometimes hides missing information from us, while at other times it openly admits the void exists.

“Predictive processing theories, meanwhile, see consciousness more like a skilled computer-generated imagery (CGI) artist, stitching together gaps in perception so expertly that the illusion becomes indistinguishable from reality. In other words, says Muckli, the brain’s internal models have become so adapted to the blind spot that we experience it no differently from fully represented regions of the visual world.

This brings up an interesting question: If the brain can fill in these “black holes” of perception, without us realizing it, are we also fabricating our conscious experiences rather than directly perceiving them?

Ramses Alcaide, PhD, a neuroscientist and CEO/cofounder of Neurable, a “cognitive wearables” technology company, proposes one answer….

“’The brain is not a passive receiver of sensory input. It is an active prediction machine that builds a model of the world and updates it as new information arrives,’ he says. Alcaide describes the retinal gap as a clean proof of concept because at the gap, the update never comes—yet the brain does not show us a hole. Instead, it presents us with a complete scene generated internally from prior expectations and surrounding context.

“If that is true, Alcaide argues, then the implications extend far beyond the optic blind spot itself. The world we consciously experience may not be raw reality, but rather ‘... a continuously updated simulation of the world, and sensory input is primarily used to keep that simulation calibrated,’ he says. And ‘when the input disappears, the simulation [just] keeps running.’

What are the deeper ramifications of such ideas? “If different brains rely on different histories, expectations, and sensory weighting to construct reality, Alcaide says, people may end up experiencing the same physical world in subtly different ways. “The Dress,” the viral image that appeared blue-and-black to some viewers and white-and-gold to others despite everyone receiving the exact same visual input, is a splendid example of this. ‘We are not all watching the same movie,’ Alcaide says.

“Ultimately, it reveals that what we receive from the outside world and what we experience in our own inner world are not the same thing. ‘Sensory input is the raw data. Consciousness is the interpreted model,’ says Alcaide.

“If the brain can take a literal black hole in perception and cover it up, smooth it over, and fashion it into a believable reality before serving it to awareness, neuroscientists are left confronting a far larger mystery: how much of reality has your brain quietly been rewriting all along?”

At the end of my previous post, I offered a (fairly complex) theory of my own about how consciousness, the Demiurge and our brain might work together to create what we experience in our holographic universe. I will try to summarize that again here (having promised to figure out how to articulate it more simply)….

An individual consciousness sees what’s going on here and chooses to “take a ride” on the Earth Experience, one of many rides in the amusement park. I can imagine purchasing a ticket from the Demiurge who created the ride, whereupon the Demiurge then fashions an avatar for the consciousness through which it can be aware of the physical experiences it will encounter on the ride.

Part of the avatar the Demiurge creates is a holographic brain—a requirement to be able to participate on the ride (like some rides today require 3D glasses). The Demiurge then chooses the 2-dimensional information stored on the boundary of our universe based on what experiences the Demiurge thinks best suit the consciousness—and which the Demiurge wants the avatar to encounter on the ride—and downloads them to the brain.

The brain receives the 2-dimensional information chosen by the Demiurge, translates them into a 3-dimensional reality, and projects them “out there” like a total immersion movie. The brain then receives the movie coming back to its senses from “out there,” and consciousness interprets those inputs based on its beliefs, opinions, fears, and especially its biased judgments (“We are not all watching the same movie,” Alcaide says), and then chooses how it wants to react and respond to what it decides it has experienced.

Depending on the reaction of the consciousness, the Demiurge chooses the next experiences that best suit why the consciousness bought the ticket to the ride in the first place.

Rinse and repeat.

[P.S.] The day after I wrote that, another article appeared in Popular Mechanics quoting Donald Hoffman, PhD, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine: “We’re playing a multiplayer game,” he says. “My body is just an avatar in a VR game.” You should read this whole article yourself here.

Meanwhile, I go back to my original thesis in my first book, Butterflies Are Free to Fly, that our beliefs, opinions, judgments and fears have a major influence on our perception of the experiences we encounter, and it would behoove us to clear those away so that the movie our senses perceive coming back are the most accurate pictures of what the Demiurge has sent us, in order to more effectively choose the most appropriate reaction or response to those experiences.

Instead, many of us alter the experiences we encounter because of our beliefs and opinions and fears, and especially our biased judgments, or as Dr. Alcaide put it, “different brains rely on different histories, expectations, and sensory weighting to construct reality.”

If Dr. Alcaide is correct and we have black holes that our brain fills in automatically, shouldn’t do our best to have those filled in with the most accurate simulations?

It may not matter as much “how much of reality your brain has quietly been rewriting all along” as it does: “how accurate is the simulated rewrite to the actual experience downloaded to our brains?”

I ended a recent post with this paragraph…

“Unfortunately, we might not laugh as loud as the child did when our “top’s” rotation slows even more, wobbles and falls over, moving the poles. But we might, if we understand that this is a holographic universe—a total immersion movie—and that our consciousness survives no matter what. Maybe not our bodies or our egos, but our consciousness, which is the only thing that’s real anyway.”

And shortly thereafter there was an article in Popular Mechanics with the title: Consciousness Is the Only Thing That Truly Exists, Scientist Claims, written by Danielle Zickl. So naturally I have to follow up on this article with some additional comments. But first, some excerpts from the article….

“The question is whether—and to what extent—the entire physical world is a manifestation of something mental,” says neuroscientist Christof Koch, PhD, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute, a multidisciplinary research organization based in Seattle.

“He explains that everything we experience in the external world—from seeing the sun set over the horizon or feeling—is mediated by our conscious experience. To Koch, this implies that only conscious experience truly exists. Everything else, like the material world, is secondary, he says.

“Koch explains how previous consciousness theories—like physicalism—fail to explain things like why people have love for their children, why people find Beethoven beautiful, and why we like the sunshine.

“Physicalism states every thought, emotion, and experience you have is due to underlying physical and neurobiological processes. But it doesn’t account for the subjective aspect of them. For instance, physicalism explains how your brain registers a sunset, but it doesn’t explain how you actually feel when you see the beautiful mix of colors in the sky.

“For Nicco Reggente, Ph.D.—research director of the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, a research lab based in Santa Monica, California—“consciousness” is the capacity for experience. Like Koch, Reggente also believes consciousness is a basic component of reality, rather than something produced solely by the brain.

“He compares our working minds to a flying kite, where the kite is the brain and the wind is consciousness as a fundamental part of reality. ‘The kite has to be built from the right materials in the right configuration with the right tether, but its flight depends entirely on the wind,’ Reggente says.”

But Koch is not the first scientist to suggest that consciousness is fundamental and the world of matter we see around us emerges from it. In November of 2025, I wrote a post talking about a paper written by Maria Strømme, Professor of Materials Science at Uppsala University and published in AIP Advances.

Professor Strømme’s paper begins: “The nature of consciousness and its relationship to physical reality remain among the most profound scientific and philosophical challenges. This paper presents a novel framework that integrates consciousness with fundamental physics, proposing that consciousness is not an emergent property of neural processes but a foundational aspect of reality.”

Perhaps Professor Strømme’s credentials are not as acceptable to the field of physics as Dr. Koch’s. Her thesis and his thesis are virtually identical, and what matters more to me is that more people are singing the same tune: Consciousness Rules! It should be obvious that I agree with them both. (See Chapter 11 of my book, Hacking the Hologram.)

So, what I want to talk about is how this understanding of consciousness fits into our holographic universe, if at all….

I have suggested many times that our holographic universe was created and is maintained by a lesser “angel” (whom Plato called a “Demiurge”), probably at the request and direction of “God.” It’s possible that that universe is contained within a black hole (Black Hole Cosmology), which would provide the “surface” or boundary where the two-dimensional information is stored which is used to create our three-dimensional hologram. But just hang on to that thought….

Because I want to go back to Dr. Karl Pribram, whom I talked about in my first book, Butterflies Are Free to Fly. Here’s what I said in 2010….

Dr. Karl Pribram has had a long and illustrious career. Born in Austria in 1919, Pribram is both a neurosurgeon and a neurophysiologist who spent many years trying to find out where memories are stored in the brain. [Pribram was still alive when I wrote that. He died in 2015.]

The problem was that in the 1920’s a brain scientist by the name of Karl Lashley had found “no matter what portion of a rat’s brain he removed, he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery.”[1] So Pribram set out to solve the mystery of memory storage that seemed independent of brain cells (neurons).

But it wasn’t until Pribram met David Bohm, one of the pioneers in quantum physics, that he found his answer. “Bohm helped establish the foundation for Pribram’s theory that the brain operates in a manner similar to a hologram, in accordance with quantum mathematical principles and the characteristics of wave patterns.”[2]

Technically, “Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.”[3]

Memory storage is not the only thing that becomes more understandable in light of Pribram’s theory.

“Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, etc.) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.”[4]

In short, Pribram believes “our brains mathematically construct ‘hard’ reality by relying on input from a frequency domain.”[5]

Okay. Let’s translate all of this into simple English. According to Karl Pribram and the results of many scientific experiments, the human brain itself is a hologram. Its function is to receive holographic wave frequencies and translate them into the physical universe we see “out there.”

[end of my book quote]

The question today is, was Pribram right and—rewording Talbot to incorporate what we now know in the language we’re now used to—the human brain is itself a hologram that receives wave frequencies [from the 2-dimensional source on the surface of our universe] which it uses to construct and project the “hard” reality we see “out there” [as our 3-dimensional holographic universe]? If so, where does consciousness fit into this process?

I mean, does the Demiurge create what we experience, or does our consciousness, or does our brain?

I am inclined to think that it is all three, working in tandem, maybe like this, called the Earth Experience….

An individual consciousness sees what’s going on here, is interested and attracted, and soon chooses to ‘take a ride” in the amusement park called Earth (thank you, Bill Hicks). I can imagine purchasing a ticket from the Demiurge who created the ride, whereupon the Demiurge then fashions a physical avatar (human body) for the consciousness through which the consciousness can be aware of the experiences it will encounter on the ride.

The Demiurge then chooses the 2-dimensional information (frequencies) stored on the boundary of our universe (perhaps the event horizon of a black hole) based on what experiences the Demiurge wants the avatar to encounter on the ride. [Like any good amusement park ride, the experiences are chosen by the creator of the ride, not by the consciousness or the avatar.]

Part of that avatar is Pribram’s holographic brain—a requirement to be able to participate on the ride—that receives the 2-dimensional information (frequencies) chosen by the Demiurge, translates them into a 3-dimensional reality, and projects them “out there” like a total immersion movie. The brain then receives the movie coming back to its senses from “out there,” and consciousness interprets those inputs based on its beliefs, opinions, fears, and especially its biased judgments, and then chooses how it wants to react and respond to what it decides it has experienced.

Depending on the reaction of the consciousness, the Demiurge chooses the next experiences (and maybe the next lives) that best suit the original wishes of the consciousness when it originally decided to take the ride.

To give a specific example, I have suggested in the past that the Earth Experience (in an amusement park of many different ride choices) might be designed to offer a consciousness who has become addicted to using biased judgments as a substitute way to perceive their reality, an opportunity to observe the consequences of their biased judgments and choose to “let go” of that addiction.

In this scenario, consciousness is not the product of the brain or any “physical or neurobiological processes,” but is fundamental as the part that first chooses to “take a ride” on the Earth Experience the Demiurge created, and then chooses how its avatar reacts and responds to the experiences it encounters while on the ride.[6] The possibility that consciousness might not have created the ride itself or the experiences does not negate its fundamental nature, especially when talking about what is fundamental and what is emergent concerning the Earth Experience.

Right now, that description seems fairly complicated, and it might take me some time to figure out how to articulate it better. Stay tuned….

[1] Talbot, Michael. An essay entitled The Holographic Universe

[2] Wikipedia – David Bohm

[3] Talbot, Michael. Id.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Please read Chapter 11 of Hacking the Hologram for a more complete look at consciousness and some of its fundamental qualities.

Very recently I wrote a post about consciousness, agreeing with an article in Popular Mechanics with the title: Consciousness Is the Only Thing That Truly Exists, Scientist Claims, written by Danielle Zickl, that in the words of Christof Koch, PhD, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute, “everything we experience in the external world—from seeing the sun set over the horizon or feeling—is mediated by our conscious experience.” To Koch, this implies that only conscious experience truly exists. Everything else, like the material world, is secondary, he says.

And Koch is not the first scientist to suggest that consciousness is fundamental and the world of matter we see around us emerges from it.

Then on May 29, 2026, another article appeared in Popular Mechanics written by Stav Dimitropoulos (whose articles I’ve referred to several times previously), titled You See a Unique Version of Reality, Neuroscientists Say, with the subtitle “Turns out we’re not all watching the same version of the world unfold, just continuously updating our own personal ‘simulation.’”

Here are some excerpts from that intriguing article….

“We would be surprised to learn that each of us carries a tiny “black hole” inside our own personal micro-universe: the human head. Inside the retina, the eye tissue responsible for vision, lies a literal physical gap where visual information simply disappears. While it affects how we see, it also could be the seat of far-reaching implications—even raising provocative questions about the nature of consciousness itself and how we perceive reality.

“Normally, visual regions of the cortex—the brain areas responsible for processing sight—receive direct signals from the retina through the optic nerve, the bundle of nerve fibers that carries visual information from the eye to the brain. But at the blind spot, no photoreceptors, the cells that detect incoming light, exist.

“Yet, we never experience these spots as “holes” or “darkness” because the brain seamlessly fills in the missing information, constructing a continuous picture of the world. ‘In part, that is because our two eyes compensate for each other: the missing patch in one eye is usually visible to the other,’ explains Lars Muckli, PhD, a professor of visual and cognitive neurosciences at the University of Glasgow. Even when one eye is closed, the brain uses surrounding visual patterns to silently rebuild the missing region.”

This is different that the classic blind spots, like the large hole in vision behind our heads, where neither eye receives any visual information at all. “Unlike the tiny blind spots, your brain does not fake an image there. You are consciously aware of the absence,” says Muckli. So consciousness, it appears, sometimes hides missing information from us, while at other times it openly admits the void exists.

“Predictive processing theories, meanwhile, see consciousness more like a skilled computer-generated imagery (CGI) artist, stitching together gaps in perception so expertly that the illusion becomes indistinguishable from reality. In other words, says Muckli, the brain’s internal models have become so adapted to the blind spot that we experience it no differently from fully represented regions of the visual world.

This brings up an interesting question: If the brain can fill in these “black holes” of perception, without us realizing it, are we also fabricating our conscious experiences rather than directly perceiving them?

Ramses Alcaide, PhD, a neuroscientist and CEO/cofounder of Neurable, a “cognitive wearables” technology company, proposes one answer….

“’The brain is not a passive receiver of sensory input. It is an active prediction machine that builds a model of the world and updates it as new information arrives,’ he says. Alcaide describes the retinal gap as a clean proof of concept because at the gap, the update never comes—yet the brain does not show us a hole. Instead, it presents us with a complete scene generated internally from prior expectations and surrounding context.

“If that is true, Alcaide argues, then the implications extend far beyond the optic blind spot itself. The world we consciously experience may not be raw reality, but rather ‘... a continuously updated simulation of the world, and sensory input is primarily used to keep that simulation calibrated,’ he says. And ‘when the input disappears, the simulation [just] keeps running.’

What are the deeper ramifications of such ideas? “If different brains rely on different histories, expectations, and sensory weighting to construct reality, Alcaide says, people may end up experiencing the same physical world in subtly different ways. “The Dress,” the viral image that appeared blue-and-black to some viewers and white-and-gold to others despite everyone receiving the exact same visual input, is a splendid example of this. ‘We are not all watching the same movie,’ Alcaide says.

“Ultimately, it reveals that what we receive from the outside world and what we experience in our own inner world are not the same thing. ‘Sensory input is the raw data. Consciousness is the interpreted model,’ says Alcaide.

“If the brain can take a literal black hole in perception and cover it up, smooth it over, and fashion it into a believable reality before serving it to awareness, neuroscientists are left confronting a far larger mystery: how much of reality has your brain quietly been rewriting all along?”

At the end of my previous post, I offered a (fairly complex) theory of my own about how consciousness, the Demiurge and our brain might work together to create what we experience in our holographic universe. I will try to summarize that again here (having promised to figure out how to articulate it more simply)….

An individual consciousness sees what’s going on here and chooses to “take a ride” on the Earth Experience, one of many rides in the amusement park. I can imagine purchasing a ticket from the Demiurge who created the ride, whereupon the Demiurge then fashions an avatar for the consciousness through which it can be aware of the physical experiences it will encounter on the ride.

Part of the avatar the Demiurge creates is a holographic brain—a requirement to be able to participate on the ride (like some rides today require 3D glasses). The Demiurge then chooses the 2-dimensional information stored on the boundary of our universe based on what experiences the Demiurge thinks best suit the consciousness and which the Demiurge wants the avatar to encounter on the ride, and downloads them to the brain.

The brain receives the 2-dimensional information chosen by the Demiurge, translates them into a 3-dimensional reality, and projects them “out there” like a total immersion movie. The brain then receives the movie coming back to its senses from “out there,” and consciousness interprets those inputs based on its beliefs, opinions, fears, and especially its biased judgments (“We are not all watching the same movie,” Alcaide says), and then chooses how it wants to react and respond to what it decides it has experienced.

Depending on the reaction of the consciousness, the Demiurge chooses the next experiences that best suit why the consciousness bought the ticket to the ride in the first place.

Rinse and repeat.

So, I go back to my original thesis in my first book, Butterflies Are Free to Fly, that our beliefs, opinions, judgments and fears have a major influence on our perception of the experiences we encounter, and it would behoove us to clear those away so that the movie our senses perceive coming back are the most accurate pictures of what the Demiurge has sent us, in order to more effectively choose the most appropriate reaction or response to those experiences.

Instead, many of us alter the experiences we encounter because of our beliefs and opinions and fears, and especially our biased judgments, or as Dr. Alcaide put it, “different brains rely on different histories, expectations, and sensory weighting to construct reality.”

If Dr. Alcaide is correct and we have black holes that our brain fills in automatically, shouldn’t do our best to have those filled in with the most accurate simulations?

It may not matter as much “how much of reality your brain has quietly been rewriting all along” as it does: “how accurate is the simulated rewrite to the actual experience downloaded to our brains?”