Sir Roger
Penrose, a mathematician and physicist from the University of Oxford who has
just shared this year's Nobel Prize in physics, claims our universe has gone
through multiple Big Bangs, with another one coming in our future.
Penrose
received the Nobel for his working out mathematical methods that proved and
expanded Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, and for his
discoveries on black holes, which showed how objects that become too dense
undergo gravitational collapse into singularities – points of infinite mass.
As he
accepted the Prize, Penrose reiterated his belief in what he called "a
crazy theory of mine" that the universe will expand until all matter will
ultimately decay. And then a new Big Bang will bring a new universe into existence.
"The Big Bang was not the beginning," Penrose said in an interview with TheTelegraph. "There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future."
What proof
does the physicist have for this theory he dubbed "conformal cycliccosmology" (CCC) that goes against the current Big Bang dogma? He said he
discovered six "warm" sky points (called "Hawking Points")
which are all about eight times larger than the diameter of the Moon. The late
Professor Stephen Hawking, whose name they bear, proposed that black holes
"leak" radiation and would eventually evaporate. As this might take
longer than the age of the universe we are currently inhabiting (13.77 billion
years old), spotting such holes is very unlikely.
Penrose
(89), who collaborated with Hawking, thinks that we are, in fact, able to
observe "dead" black holes left by previous universes or
"aeons". If proven correct, this would also validate Hawking's
theories.
The
physicist's 2020 paper, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society, offers evidence of "anomalous circular spots"
in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that have raised temperatures. The
data revealing the spots came from Planck 70 GHz satellite and was confirmed by
up to 10,000 simulations.
Penrose's
2018 paper pinpointed radiation hot spots in the CMB as possibly being produced
by evaporating black holes. A 2010 paper by Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan from the
Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia found support for cyclic cosmology in the
uniform temperature rings within the CMB. The scientists proposed then that the
rings were caused by signatures of gravitational waves from colliding black
holes in a universe that preceded ours.
These ideas
are controversial within the cosmologist community, with some pointing to the
difficulty of conforming an infinitely big universe in one aeon to a
super-small one in the next. This would necessitate making all particles lose
mass as the universe gets old.
Check out
Penrose's most recent paper, titled "Apparent evidence for Hawking points
in the CMB Sky" here.
For another
fascinating Penrose theory, check out his views on the quantum-level origins of
our consciousness.
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