Nobel Prize Winner, Roger Penrose believes that the Big Bang was "not the beginning" of our universe, rather it was the end of the previous one

Eric

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Interesting take.

Big Bang Did Not Start The Present Universe: Physicist Roger Penrose​

The nonagenarian Nobel laureate had been Stephen Hawking's collaborator and discovered among other areas the cycle of time, a breakthrough of perpetual evolution of our universe from one aeon to another.

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Herdfan

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Makes sense.

The idea that the universe began as a point of singularity from nothing is hard to grasp. But the idea that it cycles from expansion to contraction over billions of years seems to be easier to grasp.
 

Pumbaa

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Makes sense.

The idea that the universe began as a point of singularity from nothing is hard to grasp. But the idea that it cycles from expansion to contraction over billions of years seems to be easier to grasp.
Easier to grasp for the current (and previous) cycles perhaps, but where did the first universe come from?
 

dada_dave

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Interesting - a lot of physicists think it’ll be infinite expansion followed by heat death. I guess we’ll start collapsing again or is something more exotic thought to happen?
 

lizkat

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Interesting - a lot of physicists think it’ll be infinite expansion followed by heat death. I guess we’ll start collapsing again or is something more exotic thought to happen?

Not sure how much more exotic it could all get. On the other hand all those pictures from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes are not even the tip of the iceberg in the observable universe. Still there are rules, so what could be new under the gaze of so many galaxies... no matter their manner of moving on from where they were yesterday or 13 billion years ago?

The Atlantic has an "Advent calendar" up this month, a curated offering of NASA/Hubble or Webb photos, tacking on one more every day in December until Christmas. Scroll down and look at #7, photo of the Messier 92 cluster. Every time I think I sorta get how incomprehensibly vast the universe is and how it's expanding, I run into a photo like this and it just takes my breath away, All the glitter in that amazing photo are 330k stars packed into a little piece of space only about 100 light years wide. Just "sitting there" 27k light years away from Earth.


The magazine is paywalled but you get a few free page views. Must be fun to put a collection like that together and get paid to do it. I never make enough time to visit NASA's treasure trove of photos, so I like this idea of The Atlantic picking some for an Advent calendar.
 

Nycturne

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A more in depth article on this idea that has more meat from 2014: https://futurism.com/sir-roger-penrose-alternate-theory-of-the-big-bang-2

Interesting - a lot of physicists think it’ll be infinite expansion followed by heat death. I guess we’ll start collapsing again or is something more exotic thought to happen?

Everything we know up to this point says heat death of some kind. It’d take some drastic evidence to shake that view at this point, even if it is Penrose making the claim.

A couple ideas suggest that we wouldn’t be the only universe to form, such as eternal inflation or m-theory (a variant of string theory). In some versions of eternal inflation, we should be able to see imprints of colliding bubbles show up in the cosmic background. So far it hasn’t shown anything compelling. Penrose’s paper claimed to find something in the cosmic background to support the idea of a cyclical universe instead, but considering it’s been something like 8 years since that paper, I don’t think it’s gotten much traction.

But at least for now, without a good way to understand how information can survive a singularity (which itself kinda breaks our understanding of physics and it may be a side effect of the math rather than a physical thing, there’s a lot of debate here), it’s going to be incredibly difficult to demonstrate that information can leak from one universe to another. Currently solutions to the information paradox require that the information be stored on the event horizon of the black hole, which would suggest that the information would need to be stored in the cosmic event horizon when talking about the big bang I would think. But that lies beyond the cosmic background, past the earliest era of the universe when it was opaque. Tricky.

There are a couple ideas that could lead to something new after heat death, but they are just that ideas, and would happen on unthinkable time scales. Think 10 to the googol years.

Not sure how much more exotic it could all get

Hard to say. What we have now is pretty weird, for sure.
 

dada_dave

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Everything we know up to this point says heat death of some kind. It’d take some drastic evidence to shake that view at this point, even if it is Penrose making the claim.

Aye the missing words in my earlier post are: “I guess under his hypothesis we’ll start collapsing again or …”
 

theorist9

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I skimmed through the paper by Gurdzadyan and Penrose ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3706 ) and nowhere does it explain how an old, high-entropy universe could give rise to a new, low-entropy one. Are they claiming the 2nd Law doesn't apply, or are they saying that there is an entropy increase elsewhere (outside our cycling universe) that keeps the 2nd Law intact?

Easier to grasp for the current (and previous) cycles perhaps, but where did the first universe come from?
Their paper discusses some wild stuff, but even that's proasic compared to what you raised, which is the big question: How does existence...exist? [Or, to borrow phrasing from Hawking: Why is there something rather than nothing?] I love this question because it puts us face to face with the seeming impossibility of existence: Either nothing existed—no reality whatsoever—and then reality spontaneously came into being from absolutely nothing (not to be confused with, say, the spontaneous generation of particles from quantum fluctuations in spacetime, since spacetime, and all its associated laws, is something), or reality has existed forever, with no possible explanation for its existence.
 
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lizkat

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So there was once no there there, or else there was always a there there. Either way we don't know why.

I like that. It leaves room for so much more sci fi, and so many more creation stories as well, not to mention ongoing job opportunities for everyone from poets to scientists.... until "the end of time."
 

theorist9

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So there was once no there there, or else there was always a there there. Either way we don't know why.

I like that. It leaves room for so much more sci fi, and so many more creation stories as well, not to mention ongoing job opportunities for everyone from poets to scientists.... until "the end of time."
It's not only that we don't know why, but that it seems we can't ever know why.

Everything else—like the origin of our universe, the existence of multiverses, how the human brain works, whether there is other intelligent life in our galaxy, etc.—is at least potentially knowable. But this is qualitatively different. It's a question to which (to all appearances) we can never know the answer.

I enjoy fantasy and sci-fi, but the mere existence of reality is, to my mind, more wildly mystical than anything dreamed up by fantasy or science fiction (or the various paranormal hucksters).
 
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