Yesterday, the inward spiral and axial stretching in OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes announcement made something click. Its technical paper constructs a smoothly forced fluid flow whose velocity becomes unbounded in finite time while its total kinetic energy remains bounded. Viscosity is still present. The flow concentrates despite it.
My mind went straight to black holes.
I have been circling this territory for literally two decades. In 2005, I was writing about nonlinear dynamics, singularities, and the difficulty of reconstructing whatever preceded our observable universe. By 2007, I was enthusiastically discussing Steinhardt and Turok’s cyclic cosmology. What held my attention was the possibility that the beginning we can describe might belong to a larger physical history.
Yesterday gave that old intuition a more specific shape: what if one transition could briefly hold the door open for another?
Suppose a quantum transition inside a collapsing region changes the surrounding conditions. If that change persists, and if it lowers the barrier to another transition, the next event might occur before the first event’s influence fades. Further events could reinforce the conditions that enabled them. The system would retain a temporary memory of what it had just done.
That is what I mean by “holding the door open”: a short-lived change in the conditions governing a transition between gravitational states.
The extreme stretching and squeezing called spaghettification is where my intuition keeps returning. Could that directional deformation help establish or sustain such a response? Could a process within collapse help an expanding daughter universe become possible? Spaghettification has a tidal explanation already; the additional feedback I am imagining remains a hypothesis.
I am only beginning to grope around in the dark for mathematical models that could describe this. I have not derived the proposed memory, established that it lowers the relevant barrier, or demonstrated an expanding universe. The resemblance between fluid motion and gravitational deformation gives me a question to pursue. It does not establish a shared mechanism.
I have collected the first assumptions, candidate models, and failure conditions in Geometric Memory and Critical Nucleation in Black-Hole Interiors, an early concept manuscript.
The next task is to give the intuition enough mathematical shape that it can be wrong. I asked ChatGPT to help me make some graphics and have pasted them below:
Related posts
- The Advance of the Cyclic Model of Cosmology (2007): Steinhardt, Turok, entropy, and the possibility of a physical history beyond the apparent beginning.
- What a Strange Universe We Inhabit (2006): An early exploration of black holes and cosmic origins, including a subsequent correction and doubts about the cited proposals.
- Of Claws and Clauses: I (2005): Nonlinear dynamics, the Big Bang singularity, and the limits of reconstructing the universe’s past.
- Uberkuh on Deism (2006): Why the beginning of the observed expansion need not settle the question of an absolute beginning.
- Outward Bound and the Call of the Wild (2009): Wanting cyclic cosmology to be true while remaining willing to admit that we do not know.
