Slashdot Mirror
Was There Only One Big Bang?
goldaryn writes "Physorg.com is running an interesting story about the work of Oxford-based theoretical physicist Roger Penrose. Penrose has been studying CWB radiation and believes it's possible that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of 'aeons.' He believes that he has found evidence supporting his theory that the universe infinitely cycles."
There is a BBC Horizon episode up on youtube called What Happened Before the Big Bang. Interviews with several physicists about different ideas on the topic of what might have preceded our universe.
The Long Now Foundation
According to the article, concentric circles of temperature variation in the cosmic background radiation were caused by successive massive black holes, some of which supposedly predate the big bang.
cat * >> sig
Galactus, the sole survivor of the universe existing before the Big Bang, disagrees.
Milliseconds, not minutes, but yeah. At about t+4ms, the strong forces came into existence. Before that, the math completely falls apart, and we have no idea what was happening. We don't even know if time itself was constant, and as we percieve it those first 4ms could have taken a billion years or more.
This isn't, by any stretch, a new idea, though. It's very similar to the Hindu/Buddhist cosmologies, which have been around for thousands of years. Sure, the hindus do use the notion of Brahma and the Manus to explain the passing of cycles, but both faiths teach that the universe goes through an infinite cycle of expansion, stability, and collapse, and that time goes off into infinite in either direction from here. This scientist's "new idea"? It's been around for at least 5,000 years.
More people are alive today than all humans who have ever died.
That's an urban myth (how you defend it with flawed math probably nicely demonstrates our propensity to attaching to ourselves undue importance). 100+ billion homo sapiens dead already:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-living-outnumber-dead
http://www.prb.org/pdf/PT_novdec02.pdf
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx
One that hath name thou can not otter
I saw Penrose speak on this topic at the Perimeter Institute about two years ago. He has been working on this for quite a while.
You captured the essence of his hypothesis. The idea is that in the latter stages of a universe, you eventually get two supermassive black holes orbiting each other - each containing half of the matter in the universe. As they rotate around each other, they're effectively ripping each other apart from the massive gravity wells. His theory is that the point at which they finally coalesce after billions of years of orbit, space and time "reset", and in that same instant the big bang takes place.
His premise is that not all of the energy has been completely contained within the singularity. When the big bang happens, the outlying energy causes rings in the background radiation.
Funny thing was, two days before his talk he got the first results back from the radiation survey. They didn't find rings, they found ovals. And in his words "we have no idea what that means".
It's great to see that he's making progress.
.