Julian Gough is a prolific writer of children's books (Rabbit and Bear, a successful pop musician, a BBC playwright, a contributor of the End Poem to the popular sandbox game Minecraft, and the creator of the Substack The Egg and the Rock. He writes...

What is The Egg and the Rock?...

Looked at from a sober and respectable angle… The Egg and the Rock is a non-fiction exploration of the strange fact that our universe, in its development, behaves far more like an egg than a rock – that it has cascaded upward into complexity, rather than simply slowly losing order over time. (For a prime example of that – just look at you and me, now, talking of complex phenomena, via technological marvels, while embedded in a self-sustaining biosphere of astounding intricacy, orbiting an energy source of extreme efficiency and stability. All of which emerged from an initial hot, dense cloud of undifferentiated gas.) So it’s an attempt to understand just how and why our universe behaves more like an evolved organism than a pile of dead matter.

Gough has developed a theory of the early universe evolution of black holes and quasars that show large departures from the spherically symmetric stellar objects assumed by twentieth-century cosmologists like Arthur Stanley Eddington. Based on the observed jets of energy and matter (blazars) seen in quasars and the long filaments in the "cosmic web" seen in the James Webb Space Telescope's images of the universe less than a billion years old. Gough calls his work the Blowtorch Theory.

Eddington's isotropic model balanced the outward radiation pressure with the inward gravitational force to give us his limit to accretion of matter building up stars. But many objects in the early universe era known as reionization (redshift Z ≈ 7, age ≈ 750 million years) show massive anisotropies.

In July 2022, just before the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, Gough put together a number of predictions about what the JWST would discover about the formation of galaxies, stars, and black holes in those early times of reionization at the end of the"dark ages."

Here's a small quote from Gough's prediction...

Galaxies will form efficiently, and early. I argue that huge numbers of supermassive black holes and their quasars will be blazing away merrily, well inside the first fifty million years. There will be absolutely loads of recognisable, rapidly growing (rapidly star-forming) galaxies within the first 100 million years (probably much sooner). This is earlier than the mainstream have traditionally assumed. (They keep having to shuffle a bit further back, as they find new quasars, and their galaxies, ever further back in time. But they are pushed there, reluctantly, against the logic of their paradigm; I am leaping there, exultantly, because my paradigm predicts it.)

So the James Webb Space Telescope will basically see galaxies with active galactic nuclei (ie, quasars and jets) all the way back, because those active nuclei come first and are what form galaxies.

And here's his September 2023 commentary...

An extraordinary new paper was published a few days ago, on September 22nd, in the Astrophysical Journal. It confirms something which had already become increasingly clear over the last year (as the James Webb Space Telescope released more and more data): large spiral galaxies occur far earlier, and in far larger numbers, than mainstream astronomy or cosmology had expected or predicted.

The old assumption was that highly structured spiral galaxies came about slowly and late, through bottom-up structure formation. Bottom-up structure formation essentially means order arising very, very slowly from a lot of randomness, as early solitary stars clump (under the influence of gravity) to form star clusters, which clump to form dwarf galaxies, which merge to form small, irregularly-shaped galaxies, which merge to form larger also peculiarly-shaped galaxies, some of which eventually settle down and find a spiral structure. But the assumption was that you simply couldn’t get large numbers of spiral galaxies in the first few billion years of the universe’s existence, as, even if they had somehow managed to form, they would be disrupted by all that clumping and merging.

This model had come under strain in the Hubble Space Telescope years, as we looked back further and further into the past, closer and closer to the Big Bang, and still saw large spiral galaxies, and thus began to run out of time for all this slow, random, accretion. But a LOT of early galaxies still looked pretty irregular or peculiar to the Hubble (though the resolution of those images was poor, so it was hard to tell); and so the model just about survived.

Not any more.

Here’s the key finding, from the paper (with a breakdown of what it all means underneath):

> “…galaxies with M* > 10^ 9 M⊙ at z > 3 are not dominated by irregular and peculiar structures, either visually or quantitatively, as previously thought. We find a strong dominance of morphologically selected disk galaxies up to z = 6 in this mass range. We also find that the stellar mass and star formation rate densities are dominated by disk galaxies up to z ∼ 6, demonstrating that most stars in the Universe were likely formed in a disk galaxy.”

–from the paper, The JWST Hubble Sequence: The Rest-frame Optical Evolution of Galaxy Structure at 1.5 < z < 6.5, by Leonardo Ferreira, Christopher J. Conselice, Elizaveta Sazonova, et al, published in the Astrophysical Journal, September 22nd 2023. (Official citation, in case that’s useful for you: Leonardo Ferreira et al 2023 ApJ 955 94)

That’s devastating for the old model. And FANTASTIC news for the model of rapid, early, galaxy formation, driven by direct-collapse supermassive black holes, that I’ve outlined on this Substack.