Ukraine POWs, Hollywood Slowdown, and Black Hole Cosmology

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/05/23

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss Ukraine’s war, POWs, civilian casualties, and the comparative human-rights records of Ukraine and Russia. Rosner then describes Los Angeles FYC events, The Boys, and the entertainment industry’s contraction. The conversation turns to speculative physics, including thermodynamic black holes, black hole cosmology, galaxy rotation, angular momentum, information, entropy, degenerate matter, and the possibility that baby universes emerge from black-hole-like systems as a challenge to standard thermodynamic assumptions in physics.

Ukraine, POWs, and Human Rights

Rick Rosner: So how is it?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It is good. I went for a conference and a podcast filming, so I missed the May 14 bombardment. That was a significant bombardment and may have been one of the largest in terms of the number of missiles and drones. I feel sorry for the people who were victims of that. The last count I saw was 24 dead and 48 injured that day, civilians. It could have been more. With soldiers and armed forces members, the total would have been higher on both sides.

Rosner: I feel like Kyiv is hitting Russia with more than Russia is hitting Kyiv.

Jacobsen: There is a shift in the exchange of short-range and long-range drones. The biggest shift is in the overall pattern of the war with regard to recruitment, casualties, and the reclamation and taking of land. Overall, we are seeing things shift more and more in favor of Ukraine at this time. If they started to fail on the human rights end, then my commentary would change. So far, with regard to the human rights record, things are more in favor of Ukraine than the Russian Federation. There are a couple of things Ukraine has done, and the scale is different, even if there might be a symmetry in the type of crime committed.

Ukrainians, for instance, have also taken prisoners. Ukraine is now holding a large number of POWs. I assume that Russia also holds many. There are definitely more than a thousand, and there are many POWs and prisoners, including civilians in Russian prisons, but it is hard to get precise numbers given the opacity of the Russian state, whether for journalists or soldiers. That makes proper counting difficult. I asked some family members of fighters from the Azov Brigade, who have relatives still in prison after five years. They noted that it is hard to get precise numbers; although, we can have indications that give a relative ballpark. So they are not making the numbers out of thin air, but they are not drawing from precise records either.

Los Angeles, FYC Events, and The Boys

Jacobsen: How is LA?

Rosner: It is fine. I went to an FYC event for the season finale of The Boys last night.

Jacobsen: What is an FYC event?

Rosner: FYC stands for “For Your Consideration.” If you belong to the Television Academy or a guild like the Writers Guild of America, you can sign up to see a special screening and generally attend a Q&A with the cast or other important people involved with the production. They usually give you food and drinks. It is basically a small incentive to make you vote for the show, or at least make you more inclined to vote for a show you might have supported anyway.

The Boys, this was the end of season four. For people who do not know, it is a show that is intentionally scatological and gross, but that is part of what makes it fun, and there is serious satirical intent. It is a show in which it is like the Marvel Universe, except that instead of Marvel, you have a company called Vought that controls, pays, and promotes all the superheroes.

Almost all the superheroes are terrible people, including their version of Superman, who becomes increasingly awful and increasingly powerful. What do you do if an unstoppable being turns into a huge problem? James Gunn, who wrote and directed Superman, also wrote and directed Brightburn, which asks a similar question: what happens if a superhero decides not to be on the side of truth and justice? It makes for a good show.

Hollywood Slowdown and Industry Contraction

Rosner: And I got noodles. One of their entrées was noodles.

Jacobsen: What kind of noodles?

Rosner: Some kind of sesame, slightly spicy, buckwheat, ramen-type noodles.

Jacobsen: Buckwheat is good for you.

Rosner: Yes. I am sure they were not good for you the way they were served, which was in some kind of spicy, greasy sauce. All the money is being squeezed out of the entertainment industry.

Jacobsen: What do you mean?

Rosner: Production is down about 50% in Los Angeles and in many other places. That also means that the spreads, the food and drink, are less lavish this year than in past years. Anyway, that is all I have on that.

Thermodynamic Black Holes and Black Hole Cosmology

Jacobsen: You have some thoughts on thermodynamic black holes?

Rosner: Yes. I sent you a number of links. It turns out there is a name for the school of thought among physicists who consider these ideas. There has been speculation for decades, since people began solving Einstein field equations for the entire universe, that we might, in some sense, be inside a black hole.

People have speculated about this because the large-scale curvature of the universe appears to be very close to flat. That view has been refined with more recent observations, but for a long time it seemed that the rate of expansion was such that the universe would continue expanding indefinitely.

Under the equations of General Relativity, you can think of the universe like a ball. You can throw a ball hard enough that it escapes the gravitational pull of the Earth and keeps going.

That can happen. The other possibility is that you throw it up, and eventually it runs out of kinetic energy and falls back down. That is similar to the classical solutions to Einstein’s equations for the entire universe: either the universe has enough energy to keep expanding forever, or it eventually stops and collapses.

The interesting point is that observations indicate the universe is very close to flat gravitationally. In simple terms, that means it has about the critical energy density needed to keep expanding indefinitely. There is a threshold: just above it, expansion continues forever, slowing over time; just below it, everything eventually collapses. The universe appears to sit very close to that threshold.

And that makes people wonder. It also implies that the universe has flat curvature. Again, I do not know the equations or how to use them, but the flatness of the universe suggests that the amount of energy is such that it sits right at that threshold.

Well, I suppose the flatness is somewhat immaterial to this point, except that it is a strangely coincidental feature that the universe appears so close to flat. The universe has this self-attraction: everything in it is gravitationally attracted to everything else. That curvature of space is just enough that it raises the question of whether we could, in some sense, be inside a black hole.

In recent years, that idea has contributed to a line of speculation sometimes called black hole cosmology, which involves a number of cosmologists considering whether black holes might contain their own internal universes, or whether our universe could be associated with such a structure.

Galaxy Rotation, Angular Momentum, and Information

Rosner: One piece of discussion sometimes cited involves observations of the rotational axes of galaxies. A study examining on the order of a few hundred galaxies reported a possible asymmetry in their rotation directions. Not every galaxy behaves the same way, but many are structured systems, somewhat analogous in form to a solar system, in that stars orbit around a central region.

With improved observational and analytical tools, astronomers have been able to estimate the rotation directions of hundreds of galaxies. One reported result suggested an imbalance, for example, something like 60% rotating one way and 40% the other relative to a chosen frame of reference. That would be somewhat unexpected, since, on large scales, the universe is generally assumed to be isotropic, with no preferred direction.

However, this kind of result remains debated, and it is not established as definitive evidence for any particular cosmological model.

In a standard black hole model or a standard Big Bang universe, you would expect something more chaotic, a single starting point, an expansion of space. Then matter clumps into galaxies, and any net rotation is incidental. As matter condenses from a large cloud of gas into smaller structures like galaxies and stars, it acquires some random angular momentum.

That angular momentum should point in all directions. But if it does not, that raises questions.

It leads to the idea that the entire universe might have angular momentum, or that our universe originated from something that was already spinning. A commonly discussed candidate would be a black hole, because nearly every astrophysical black hole is expected to have angular momentum.

The usual analogy is an ice skater: when they pull their arms in, they spin faster due to conservation of angular momentum. With gravitational collapse, matter goes from something very large to something extremely compact. Any small amount of initial angular momentum becomes very significant in terms of rotational speed. The total angular momentum stays the same, but the rate of spin increases dramatically.

That is one of the arguments people raise when discussing whether we might be in a black hole, an idea that has been considered for many years.

It is also a question that appeals to cosmologists because of the problem of information. According to quantum theory, information should not be destroyed. But there are different perspectives on what happens when matter, which carries information, falls into a black hole.

Is the information destroyed? Is it somehow emitted again? Or is it preserved in some form? This is known as the black hole information paradox, and it remains an open question.

I do not know if it has been examined sufficiently from the standpoint of information, but it is something that has received more attention in recent years, looking at black holes in informational terms.

Entropy, Degenerate Matter, and Baby Universes

Rosner: I have been saying that information is what powers an expansion within a black hole, a black-hole-like region of collapsed matter. Collapsed matter is degenerate, meaning that all the details have been compressed out of it. It will naturally, almost by definition, tend to expand into structures that contain information.

That expansion, or apparent expansion, because if everything is inside a black-hole-like region, means that if you take a bunch of degenerate matter and place it into such a system, then as that matter goes from having very little information to having a great deal of information by differentiating itself, it can appear to expand into its own “baby universe,” becoming a unique configuration with increasing structure.

The standard idea in thermodynamics is that matter in a closed system moves toward less information-rich configurations. A simple example is a box with hot material on one side and cold material on the other. That is an information-rich system: there is a clear distinction between regions. Over time, the system mixes, becoming uniform and information-poor, with no meaningful distinction between one part and another.

So, degenerate matter is information-poor. If you take everything on Earth and throw it into a black hole, the details are effectively erased at the macroscopic level. All the atoms are pulled into an extremely compressed state, often described as something like a featureless, dense medium, though in reality it would be governed by extreme physics not fully understood.

Where you once had structured complexity, people, animals, artworks, objects, you now have something far more uniform. But as a universe expands, it can, in principle, move from that uniform state into structured forms again: planets, stars, and complex systems. Detailed structures re-emerge, which are information-rich and differentiated.

That would imply a transition from a high-entropy state to a lower-entropy, more structured one, which runs counter to the usual interpretation of second law of thermodynamics. That law states that entropy in a closed system should not decrease over time.

The idea being suggested here is that such a reversal, going from high entropy to lower entropy, might relate to the arrow of time itself. That would be a significant claim, and it is not part of the standard view in physics. It remains speculative, though some researchers are exploring related questions, particularly by examining black holes and cosmology in terms of information.

They are talking about how information works in this, but they are not looking at it as the origination or creation of information being the driver.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rick.

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