David Kipping

And the energy which spews back out stops other stuff coming in.

So there's a maximum limit.

You can't build a black hole faster, in principle, than this Eddington limit.

And yet, when you do the calculation, these black holes must have been fed what we call super Eddington, so faster than Eddington.

So something's wrong with our models, right?

We've got the universe age wrong, which I think is...

But I would say that's probably a much less likely solution.

Or we've got the astrophysics wrong.

Because we've got this, you know, like in particle physics, you've got the standard model, which includes like all the particles and the electron, the baryons, all these kind of stuff.

And in cosmology, we have a similar kind of model.

It's called lambda CDM.

And so the lambda stands for dark energy, and the CDM is cold dark matter.

So this is our standard model, and we have used it to explain so much stuff in the universe, Joe.

I mean, we're talking about the cosmic microwave background, oscillations in the sky, it's baryonic acoustic oscillations, the stretching in the universe, cepheids.

You can use it to explain so much stuff, and it works beautifully.

I mean, it works down to like the 0.01% level.

So if you say the universe age is wrong, you have to give that up.

So maybe it is wrong, but if you give that up, you have to come up with a radical new idea which can now explain all of this stuff at that same level of precision.

The much more likely answer in my book is that astrophysics, like the gas swirling around, the plasma colliding with each other, that's just more complicated in my mind than the natural model of just the simple expansion of the universe, which actually is a fairly simple geometric model.

That's exciting.