Ask A Genius 1504: Testing Informational Cosmology: Super-Old Objects, Heavy Elements, and Future Telescopes

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/31

Scott Douglas Jacobsen presses for testability in informational cosmology. Rick Rosner argues near-term tests must target present-day signs of matter older than the universe’s apparent 13.8 billion-year age, despite observability limits: dim, delocalized halo objects and small lensing. He expects space based mega telescopes and AI analytics to reveal super old objects and excess heavy element abundances versus Big Bang predictions, plus more convoluted structure near T~0 from repeated burn collapse cycles. For clarity and precision, he proposes a Gamow-style narrative. Elements beyond uranium are unstable; metallicity rises with time; long lived isotopic ratios date stars and cosmic dating.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: All right, so we talked about falsifiability in informational cosmology. Some other terms include clarity and precision. But I know the core one is testability. When you think of testability, what are you pointing to?

There are many things it could mean. The significant aspect of IC in terms of how it would be reflected in the universe—over a timescale we could actually deal with—is basically zero, because you have a theory that says the universe is much older than it appears to be.

But the universe already appears to be nearly 14 billion years old. To test it via expansion over time would take a billion times longer than we have. So, you need to test aspects of the universe in the present moment that indicate matter older than the apparent age of the universe.

Rick Rosner: Almost all of what might qualify is difficult to see, as it emits little light, and it is not highly localized. The closest star to the Sun is Alpha Centauri, four light-years away. And we are about two-thirds of the way from the center of the galaxy to the edge of the visible galaxy—closer to the edge than to the center. Then you have the halo of dark matter. So you are trying to detect things in the halo.

I forgot the exact diameter of the Milky Way. Still, you are probably looking at stuff 50,000 light-years away that emits almost no radiation. That is tough to see. Even gravitational lensing created by collapsed matter is tricky to observe, because the little lenses are not big—they are just stellar masses. So the distortion of the visual field does not have a considerable angular distance.

Especially since we are looking outward from inside the galaxy, you will not necessarily see collapsed matter pass between you and a shining star. It’s tough to observe that. That is one problem with testability—the stuff you are looking for is almost invisible.

However, you have a ton of new technology coming online all the time. It used to be challenging to make large telescopes—you had to grind glass and mirrors to exact tolerances. Now you set up arrays of photon detectors, and those can be as big as you want, coordinated by computers. So telescope technology keeps getting better.

The easiest place to set them up is on Earth—but that does not always work, because most of Earth’s locations are not suitable. You want to be 10,000 feet above sea level with no light pollution. Even then, you still do better by setting them up in space. That is harder—you have to launch and unfold them—but in 30 or 40 years, the ability to set up giant telescopes outside Earth’s atmosphere will be much greater.

And then we will be able to see a lot more. Regardless of whether the Big Bang is genuine, the Theory itself is subject to radical revision. The Big Bang has already accumulated anomalies—observations that do not jibe with the traditional Theory. So it keeps getting patched. But odds are you cannot keep patching it forever.

Eventually, a new theory will need to be developed with fewer moving parts that explains more of the anomalies. The Big Bang theory, with 50 patches, has more moving parts than a new theory with a few simple explanations. That is what is going to happen: big telescopes in space, massive analytics courtesy of big compute and AI.

That will give us a sharper and sharper picture of what the universe looked like at various distances from us, which means billions of years in the past.

So we will get a better and better picture of the overall universal structure. And we will find out more about the objects within the universe. I would bet a substantial amount of money that there will be a whole class of objects—call them super-old objects—things that appear to be older than 13.8 billion years. That is testability right there.

Another example of “old” phenomena would be elements heavier than iron. We have discussed talks: those can only be created in rare events, such as novae or neutron star collisions. They do not happen often. However, with better technology, we can assay the universe more precisely and take a census of how many of these rare, superheavy elements are out there.

Suppose the amount is significantly higher than what a 14-billion-year-old universe would predict. In that case, that might qualify as evidence of super-old processes. Say, for example, we find three times as much gold as expected, based on spectrographic data of stars or other cosmic objects. Spectrographs look for elemental signatures so that you can pick up spikes for gold or other heavy elements.

I assume stars formed from stellar dust would contain tiny traces—maybe one nucleus in a trillion could be a gold nucleus. The question is whether spectrographs are sensitive enough to detect such faint spikes. Radiation signatures might also be helpful, but I would need to look up the specifics on where astronomers actually find gold in the universe versus simply under Earth’s surface.

However, they have already discussed the fact that there seems to be more gold than expected. Therefore, techniques for detecting these things will improve significantly over the next 30–40 years. And I think we will find heavier elements than expected in a universe that is supposedly only 14 billion years old.

That is where I would go with testability.

Also, I would expect that the universe near T=0—as far back as you can see—would be more convoluted, more crumpled. Suppose galaxies or galaxy clusters burn out and are pushed to the outskirts, a process that has occurred thousands of times. In that case, the geometry of all these collapsed regions within an already collapsed region should be more complicated than the smooth picture painted by standard Big Bang cosmology. Improved technology might eventually let us observe evidence of that repeated expansion-and-collapse structure.

There you go.

Jacobsen: So what makes an IC proposal clearer? What makes it more precise? One more thing. IC draws analogies between the information structure of an individual consciousness and the universe itself. 

Rosner: Another possible test is through mapping connectomes. Maybe not for a human brain—that is too complex—but maybe for a grasshopper, or a simple reptile.

If you map a connectome and then try to optimize it—not just a raw map of connections, but one that reduces lengths and redundancies into an information space—you might end up with structures that resemble the universe. If an information-processing system, when mapped optimally, resembles large-scale cosmic structure, that could be evidence that both mind and universe are information spaces.

For example, mapping relational structures might initially yield a 150-dimensional space. That is computationally wasteful, since most of that space is empty. There are techniques for collapsing dimensions that are not used much. If, by reducing the number of dimensions from 150 down to 12, the structure starts to resemble the universe, that could be a clue.

Jacobsen: What makes this argument—IC as a whole—more precise, and what makes it clearer?

Rosner: Think of it like the “neutron cycle.” That is probably not the best name, but if you can clearly and physically show how big parts of the universe can light up, burn for billions of years, exhaust their fusion fuel, collapse, and then light up again, that would be a clear argument for IC’s possibility.

It is like running into a drunk George Gamow at a party in 1956. He could have given you a convincing rundown of how Big Bang cosmology might work—nucleosynthesis, hydrogen and helium ratios, expansion and cooling, star and galaxy formation—even without much math. IC needs a similar intuitive, evidence-based story.

You could describe how specific regions of the universe burn out, collapse, fade, and then light up again via networks and filaments. That cyclical model could be explained convincingly in the same way. Rotten Tomatoes.

Additionally, some parts of the universe may remain lit for extremely long periods. How do you keep a galaxy, or a galactic cluster, or some filament stretching across eight billion light-years—how do you keep that going?

Jacobsen: There’s a common idea in physics and cosmology about how elements form and are distributed in the universe. We often hear that naturally occurring elements evolve into uranium, which has an atomic number of 92. If the universe were much older, you might expect more time for extreme, localized events that forge heavy elements.

Rosner: Right—but everything heavier than uranium (atomic number >92) is unstable and radioactive. Some isotopes last a long time, but none are truly stable.

Jacobsen: Follow-up: if those heavy elements decay in specific ways, could that change the distribution you’d expect in one cosmological model versus another?

Rosner: Probably not in the way you’re thinking. Big Bang nucleosynthesis primarily produced hydrogen, helium, and a small amount of lithium; everything heavier was formed later in stars and through events such as neutron-star mergers and supernovae. With more time, you’d see higher overall “metallicity” (more heavy elements), but not stable elements beyond uranium.

Jacobsen: So, is there something like elemental homeostasis?

Rosner: Not precisely. Gold-197 is stable, so it sticks around. Plutonium mostly doesn’t: common isotopes like Pu-239 have half-lives of about 24,000 years, and the long-lived Pu-244 is ~80 million years—long on human scales, short geologically compared to Earth’s age. Uranium has very long-lived isotopes—U-238 is ~4.5 billion years; U-235 is ~704 million years. Also, uranium isn’t rarer than gold—on Earth, uranium is thousands of times more abundant in the crust than gold. The heaviest long-lived naturally occurring elements are thorium (Th-232, ~14 billion years) and uranium (U-238). Heavier transuranics can be produced; they decay much faster than the Earth’s age, though not necessarily in mere decades.About sixty years ago, people predicted an “island of stability” for superheavy nuclei around proton numbers of 114–126 and neutron numbers of 184 (mass numbers near 280). Experiments have found a modest stability bump: some isotopes live seconds to minutes—much longer than microseconds—but still short-lived. So elements beyond 92 don’t really help you find matter “older than the universe.” What helps with cosmic dating are long-lived isotopic ratios, such as uranium-to-thorium ratios in ancient stars; unsurprisingly, nothing predates the universe itself.

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