Recently awarded the Nobel prize for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity, Sir Roger Penrose had earlier developed a theory known as “conformal cyclic cosmology“ (CCC) which posits that the universe iterates through infinite cycles, from one aeon to the next, such that the universe became uniform before rather than after the Big Bang. Each cycle starts out from a singularity before expanding and generating clumps of matter, which eventually gets sucked up by supermassive black holes, which over the very long term disappear by continuously emitting Hawking radiation. This process restores uniformity and sets the stage for the next Big Bang. In CCC, the future time-like infinity of each previous iteration being identified with the Big Bang singularity of the next. Penrose popularized this theory in his 2010 book Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe [2].
“Unexpected hot spots in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) could have been produced by black holes evaporating before the Big Bang. So says a trio of scientists led by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose in a paper presenting new evidence that our universe is just one stage in a potentially infinite cycle of cosmic extinction and rebirth.”[1]
In 2010 Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia claimed that they had found evidence to support CCC in the form of rings of uniform temperature within the CMB, which would be the signature in our aeon of spherically-emitted gravitational waves generated by colliding black holes in the previous aeon[1].
Such rings where found by Penrose and Vahe in data from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Then, when carrying the standard simulations of the CMB they saw no such pattern, but other groups claim that simulations do indeed contain rings once they have been modified to take account of the distribution of hot and cold spots at various angular scales that are seen in the real CMB, and which are predicted by the inflationary model.
To that respect, Penrose has provided a different kind of evidence in support of CCC. Instead of rings of near uniform temperature, he has instead identified patches within the CMB that are much hotter than the surrounding region, coming probably from the electromagnetic radiation given off during the Hawking evaporation of supermassive black holes in the previous aeon[1]. Those emissions, although originally very feeble, would have been concentrated in our own aeon into spots with huge amounts of energy, called Hawking points.
When comparing the CMB data for hot spots of various sizes and analyzing how quickly the microwave temperature drops off around, to spots in 1000 simulated maps of the CMB, Penrose and colleagues found no evidence of theses Hawking points. In and around small spots, not one simulated map had higher temperature gradients than the real cosmos, with the temperature variations in the latter being about an order of magnitude higher (about 3×10-4 K) than the CMB average.
According to Penrose, this disparity between real and simulated data provides strong backing for CCC over inflation. “We certainly welcome attempts to explain these observations in terms of currently accepted models,” he says, “but we think this will be hard unless radically new ideas come forth”.
Highlights:
As Nassim Haramein explains, “in principle there would be no reason why universe creation would not be cyclical instead of one event that eventually peters out. Furthermore, the mechanism most likely has to do with black hole information exchange across Event Horizons since the universe obeys the condition of a black hole. Maybe Penrose believes this, and that would explain why he is treating the CMB as Hawking radiation. As a matter of fact, the CMB is black body radiation at the Universal scale, which means that Hawking radiation would be written on the wrong metric.
Additionally, following the approach proposed by the Generalized Holographic Model, the mechanism is a little different than Penrose though. It resembles more information escaping from a black hole, like a proton, arriving in a larger universe that has lower pressure gradients an inflating very rapidly to eventually reach stability. The remnant relationship that we see on the CMB maybe the entanglement information from that mother universe from which the proton escaped.”
