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Mass alone doesn’t do it. You need energy, namely the CMB, to push the observable universe close to its Schwarzschild limits.


Ohh, I see, you mean "mass" should have been "mass and energy" rather than e.g. that (mass,volume) should have been replaced by (mass,energy) or something.

I confess I just ... take it for granted in this kind of context that "mass" or "energy" or "mass+energy" all mean the same thing. Someone who wants to refer just to the total amount of matter will say something like "the total mass of the matter in the universe".

It's commonplace for physicists to write just "mass" when talking about this sort of thing. E.g.,

P T Landsberg, "Mass scales and the cosmological coincidences", Annalen der Physik, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/andp.19844960203:

"Theories involving the parameters h, c, G, H (in a usual notation) are considered. A huge ratio of 10^120 of the mass of the universe (m_u) to the smallest determinable mass m_0 in the period since the big bang occurs in such theories."

(Not cherry-picked; I went to the Wikipedia article on "Black hole cosmology", noted that it just says "mass" rather than "mass-energy" or whatever, and followed the link in the attached footnote. Also, so far as I know, not crankery; Landsberg was an eminent physicist.)




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