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JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

quantamagazine.org

21–30 of 186 posts

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#21
So this is one of them "shower thoughts", you know, those stupid things you think about while working on something else.That is, purely science fiction.

Can an analog be drawn between galaxies and solar system creation theories, with several orders of magnitudes in time required for formation due to scale difference. That is, the galaxies we see with their billions of stars are actually young proto accretion disks. while mature galaxies will have most of the mass localized in a small(1-2) number of points with a few(~10) point masses orbiting it. a sort of galaxy sized solar system if you will. However due to the scale of things involved all these late stage point masses would be black holes.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#22
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> internally consistent limits on what the player can know Interesting thought. Can you expand? What do you mean by this?

Not the original author but my first interpretation is that this means, if it were in a video game, it would be a way to self-reinforce "fog of war" where you can only have extremely local information and you don't want extra information to leak to the players.

Has anyone re-written a classic RTSG with a slower speed of light? Like, Red Alert, but with time dilation.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#23
post #19
post #14

I wish stories like this were a more straight forward counting of the interesting facts and relevant input from experts. I don't really need the origin story of the conference this finding was discussed at.

The stuff you're complaining about seems limited to a little bit of POV text in the first seven (!) sentences of a rather long article. Does it really bug you so much that they gave you just a tiny taste of the perspective of a woman who works on this stuff? That seems a bit much. This kind of text is everywhere in science journalism.

> of a rather long article

I utterly despise the current “long form” style where all long form stories start by talking about something old and unimportant.

Sure it’s a nice appetizer to whet the palette. But only if I already know I’m gonna read the whole thing! There’s too much long form for me to read. I want a tastier first bite to see if it’s worth my time.

I blame the New Yorker. Bastards.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#24
post #19
post #14

I wish stories like this were a more straight forward counting of the interesting facts and relevant input from experts. I don't really need the origin story of the conference this finding was discussed at.

The stuff you're complaining about seems limited to a little bit of POV text in the first seven (!) sentences of a rather long article. Does it really bug you so much that they gave you just a tiny taste of the perspective of a woman who works on this stuff? That seems a bit much. This kind of text is everywhere in science journalism.

I likewise do not like the front loaded flavor text.

A good news article should be written in order of priority. Each word, each sentence should be written in order of decreasing priority starting with the headline. "JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe" is a great headline, it encompasses the entire story. Especially at the beginning of the article, the purpose should be expand and clarify the most important pieces.

I really dislike the kind of journalism that goes into biography mode and starts off with an anecdote about Jane Einstein's childhood dog leaving the most relevant bits 2/3 the way through.

I'd like to be able to choose the level of detail I get from an article by being able to stop when I'm done.

I don't like having to dedicate several minutes to finding a piece of information that took several seconds to deliver. Much like the 10 minute youtube howto video hiding the five seconds of information I needed.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the original author but my first interpretation is that this means, if it were in a video game, it would be a way to self-reinforce "fog of war" where you can only have extremely local information and you don't want extra information to leak to the players.

Has anyone re-written a classic RTSG with a slower speed of light? Like, Red Alert, but with time dilation.

Not to my knowledge, but there is a game called A Slower Speed of Light, which probably needs no further clarification.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Slower_Speed_of_Light

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#26
post #21

So this is one of them "shower thoughts", you know, those stupid things you think about while working on something else.That is, purely science fiction. Can an analog be drawn between galaxies and solar system creation theories, with several orders of magnitudes in time required for formation due to scale difference. That is, the galaxies we see with their billions of stars are actually young proto accretion disks. w…

I'm here for shower thoughts-driven discourse.

But I missed the point. Stars eventually wind up as black holes. So it stands to reason so would galaxies.

But then why would they be all over the early universe?

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the original author but my first interpretation is that this means, if it were in a video game, it would be a way to self-reinforce "fog of war" where you can only have extremely local information and you don't want extra information to leak to the players.

Has anyone re-written a classic RTSG with a slower speed of light? Like, Red Alert, but with time dilation.

Wouldn't that be incredibly hard, considering that the players perspective is disconnected from the units?

I observe my base and order a group of units to go to some place on the minimap. I see them moving along on their way, and decide to scroll to them. Only to realize that they already arrived and got massacred by the enemy. I go back to my base only to realize that it was destroyed ages ago (in its frame of reference) and I'm dead. Game over. Thanks for playing SR Red Alert.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#28
post #3

This is super cool. I think it's funny how Quanta writes, "It is expected because JWST was built, in part, to find the ancient objects." "Ancient" is equivalent to "distant" because of special relativity. It's an odd thing, astronomy - it's a real world time-traveling observation, except we're limited in resolution and we can't look here only there . If it was a game mechanic I'd call it a cunning way to impose inter…

> Ancient" is equivalent to "distant" because of special relativity

This is from the finite speed of light, not special relativity [1]. Light is very slow, compared to these distances. Heck, it's slow compared to distances in our solar system, taking 8 minutes for the Sun's light to hit us.

[1] https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2014/10/23/how-does-looking...

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#29
post #3

This is super cool. I think it's funny how Quanta writes, "It is expected because JWST was built, in part, to find the ancient objects." "Ancient" is equivalent to "distant" because of special relativity. It's an odd thing, astronomy - it's a real world time-traveling observation, except we're limited in resolution and we can't look here only there . If it was a game mechanic I'd call it a cunning way to impose inter…

> If it was a game mechanic I'd call it a cunning way to impose internally consistent limits on what the player can know.

But if you assume it's a multi-player game, wouldn't it be easier to implement a global space-time? The reality is that you have to keep an internal clock for each player.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#30
post #14

I wish stories like this were a more straight forward counting of the interesting facts and relevant input from experts. I don't really need the origin story of the conference this finding was discussed at.

I agree. I feel like they are taking "story" too literally now. Science news is soon approaching the level of superfluous meandering of online recipes. I'm not saying I don't care about the context, but a news article should be different to a short story. And, I still think there is a place for these things, but not for all articles, only some.
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