Ask A Genius 1318: Dog Cancer, Senolytics, and Anomalies in Big Bang Cosmology
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/25
Rick Rosner: One of the dogs turned 14. The other one turned 12—according to best estimates. You never know with dogs.
The 14-year-old has a tumor growing off the top of her right rear leg. The vet thinks it might be a fibrosarcoma. But she’s 14. She’s happy. She’s doing well.
It would cost $10,000 to get a conclusive diagnosis and then either operate or do chemo. My wife talked to a bunch of people, including the vet. Maybe it would buy the dog a few more months—maybe a year. But it would also make the dog miserable.
So, I’m doing homebrew shit.
I’m giving the dog fisetin—a senolytic. Senolytics make damaged cells commit suicide. Normally, when cells get too messed up, they go through apoptosis—a self-destruct process. But cancer cells refuse to die, even when they should. Fisetin helps push them toward cell death. It reduces the likelihood that the cancer metastasizes.
We’re not even sure it’s cancer. It feelsa tumor, but it could be benign. Either way, I’m giving the dog a lot of fisetin.
When we first found it, the tumor was 5 cm by 3 cm. Now, it’s 4.5 cm by 3.5 cm—so it’s gotten rounder, less ovoid.
And I read a study—a cruel fucking study from the 1960s—on tying off tumors in dogs.
Cancer cells love glucose. They use oxygen, too, but many thrive in low-oxygen environments. In the ‘60s, researchers took four dozen stray dogs with tumors. They tied off the tumors—cut off blood supply for eight hours.
The surrounding healthy tissue survived. in three-quarters of cases, the tumors died.
So, this tumor is hanging there, on the dog’s leg. I’ve been putting rubber bands around it for hours at a time, trying to cut off its blood supply. Carolehates this. It freaks her out.
. The tumor might be shrinking. It’s at least not growing.
Fibrosarcomas don’t metastasize that often—only 2–40% do. So, if the fisetin stops it from spreading and I can keep the size down, we might buy the dog a lot of time—without spending $10,000 to make her miserable.
The 12-year-old dog has eye problems—cloudy eyes, early cataracts, retinal degeneration, a scratched cornea with calcium deposits. She’s on three kinds of eye drops plus an ointment.
It’s pills, drops, and treats all day long. You have to pay the dogs for letting you fuck with them.
And the 14-year-old—she’s dumb. Dogs are dumb, in general. But this one? Specially dumb. yet, she’s growing on me.
So, there you go.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the average lifespan for their breed?
Rosner: Depends. The smaller the dog, the longer they live. A Great Dane? You’re lucky to get eight years. A German Shepherd? Twelve is good.
A small dog? You can break 15 years. That’s what we’re trying to do.
Jacobsen: I’ve discovered evidence that the universe is non-isotropic.
The cosmological principle states that the universe is expanding at the same rate in every direction—that no point in the universe is favored in terms of velocity relative to everything else. The idea is that the universe is regular—a three-dimensional surface on a four-dimensional balloon that’s being blown up evenly in all directions.
And now, the Webb Telescope is detecting anomalies.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: In an isotropic universe, you’d expect a smooth, uniform expansion—small quantum perturbations from inflation, but nothing large-scale. By and large, the mass distribution should be isotropic.
Rosner: And you’re not seeing that at all. I haven’t read the actual studies yet—just some dumb articles on it.
But if there are real non-isotropic anomalies—like blips in velocity and structure—they should smooth out at sufficiently large scales. You might get a rogue galaxy here and there, but you shouldn’t get a rogue galactic filament or anything more extreme.
However, under IC (Information Cosmology), a non-spatially isotropic universe is expected. You’ve got an active center—the “Big Bangy” region—but at the outskirts, things are retarded (slowed down in space and time).
Some articles are calling this a crisis in Big Bang theory. But that’s how science works—big theories accumulate anomalies over time. They get revised, refined, or, eventually, supplanted by something better.
If you want a historical model of this process, look at how Newton’s Universal Gravitation was replaced by Einstein’s General Relativity. Newton’s model wasn’t wrong—it was a special case within a broader framework.
Newtonian dynamics work fine most of the time. But when experimental results started showing discrepancies—like Mercury’s anomalous orbit—scientists had to come up with a more precise framework. That’s where General Relativity came in. It didn’t throw out Newtonian physics—it expanded it into a more all-encompassing model.
So, the same thing will happen to Big Bang Theory. It won’t be thrown out. It’ll become part of a more comprehensive framework. Maybe that framework will incorporate things we currently consider metaphysics—concepts that seem too speculative right now but will eventually be validated by a successful theory.
For instance, a scientific explanation for why the universe is locally three-dimensional might have something to do with information theory.
Rosner: Comments?
Jacobsen: Not so far.
Rosner: We need to think about the margins of the theory—push out the edges. We keep working within a reorientation of standard physics, but that’s how you do mathematical theory. You start by reorienting gravitation—but still within the rules.
Einstein had two things going for him:
- Elegant math
- Precise predictions
He predicted things the precession of Mercury’s orbit—how Mercury doesn’t move in a perfect ellipse but follows a spirograph-like pattern.
He even predicted the rate at which Mercury’s orbital ellipse shifts over time. No planet retraces its orbit exactly—instead, it blooms a flower. Mercury’s effect is the most extreme because it’s closest to the Sun, so the curvature of spacetime around it is strongest. But where was I going with this? What did you originally say that got me on this tangent?
Jacobsen: It was about coming up with constants around the edges rather than reorienting existing ones.
Rosner: Right.
Jacobsen: Yes. It’s an extension—both metaphysically and within regular physics. Especially now, since Big Bang Theory has so many anomalies that need explaining.
One of the goals of IC is to merge information theory with cosmology. That might sound hocus-pocus, but information behavior is already deeply embedded in physics. Quantum mechanics, for example, is all about information—particles and waves behaving according to the available information in the universe.Every particle is fuzzy—not because it wants to be, but because there isn’t enough information in the universe to make it not fuzzy. And yet, paradoxically, quantum mechanics is insanely precise about that fuzziness. Its predictions are more accurate than any other physical theory—by orders of magnitude.
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