"We Can Glimpse the Universe Before the Big Bang"

[n2doc]

The circular patterns within the cosmic microwave background suggest 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," according to University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who says that data collected by NASA's WMAP satellite supports his idea of "conformal cyclic cosmology".
Penrose's finding runs directly counter to the widely accepted inflationary model of cosmology which states that the universe started from a point of infinite density known as the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, expanded extremely rapidly for a fraction of a second and has continued to expand much more slowly ever since, during which time stars, planets and ultimately humans have emerged. That expansion is now believed to be accelerating due to a scientific X factor called dark energy and is expected to result in a cold, uniform, featureless universe.

Penrose, however, says Physics World, takes issue with the inflationary picture "and in particular believes it cannot account for the very low entropy state in which the universe was believed to have been born – an extremely high degree of order that made complex matter possible. He does not believe that space and time came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang but that the Big Bang was in fact just one in a series of many, with each big bang marking the start of a new "aeon" in the history of the universe."

The core concept in Penrose's theory is the idea that in the very distant future the universe will in one sense become very similar to how it was at the Big Bang. Penrose says that "at these points the shape, or geometry, of the universe was and will be very smooth, in contrast to its current very jagged form. This continuity of shape, he maintains, will allow a transition from the end of the current aeon, when the universe will have expanded to become infinitely large, to the start of the next, when it once again becomes infinitesimally small and explodes outwards from the next big bang. Crucially, he says, the entropy at this transition stage will be extremely low, because black holes, which destroy all information that they suck in, evaporate as the universe expands and in so doing remove entropy from the universe."

more

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/11/we-can-glimpse-the-universe-before-the-big-bang-one-of-worlds-leading-physicists-.html

[Itchinjim]

1. Fractal.

The universe is a fractal.

[The Doctor.]

2. How do you mean?

[RC]

5. Try Google

A fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,"

[The Doctor.]

7. That is understood.

What I was asking was 'in what respect?'

Are we talking 'fractal' in the sense that the Universe can be temporally deconstructed to every moment before probability resolves, and extrapolated homogeneously into infinity?

Or 'fractal' in the sense that every quantifiable volume of the Universe is merely an exponential representation of every other volume?

Or 'fractal' as in part of a multiverse which is a fully relative reconstruction of the Universe, thereby coalescing into an ever more complex multivers/universe model exponentially?

Or some concoction of all of the above?

Or something else?

[The Doctor.]

8. Hello?

Really... it was a serious question.

[Richard D]

3. Vedic, simply Vedic

"With his outward breath Vishnu scattered clouds of tiny bubbles into the waters, and every time he breathed in they were sucked back inside him. Each of these bubbles, which seemed so small in comparison with his gigantic sleeping form, grew into an entire universe like ours, whose lifespan was equal to a single breath of Vishnu. All these universes were clustered around the form of Vishnu like foam in the ocean."

[txlibdem]

10. Wait... Where's my copy of the Bagavad Gita?

... darn. I'll try to find it later.

:hi:

PS, yes I actually do have a copy of the Bagavad Gita.

[opihimoimoi]

4. This was thought of years ago...aeons even....

[eppur_se_muova]

6. The original paper is here ...

http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3706

[Odin2005]

9. Sounds like the Steinhardt–Turok colliding brane-world theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekpyrotic_universe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model

The problem with Penrose's hypothesis is that it requires that black holes destroy entropy, something that the vast majority of physicists believe to be impossible as per the Holographic Principle.

The Steinhardt–Turok model, on the other hand, inflates the entropy away as our brane expands normally. A new Big Bang comes from colliding with the neighboring brane. Dark Energy comes from the energy between the two branes. the ripples claimed by Penrose are also predicted by the Steinhardt–Turok model, which means +1 for M-Theory!

[Thor_MN]

11. "planets and ultimately humans have emerged"

Kind of pretentious, claiming that we are the ultimate product of the Big Bang, don't you think?

[FiveGoodMen]

12. "an extremely high degree of order that made complex matter possible"

Everything in one single point is low entropy, but is it highly ordered to create complex matter?

That doesn't sound right.

[Jim__]

13. It does sound wrong, doesn't it? I have a thought.

From the article:

The core concept in Penrose's theory is the idea that in the very distant future the universe will in one sense become very similar to how it was at the Big Bang. Penrose says that "at these points the shape, or geometry, of the universe was and will be very smooth, in contrast to its current very jagged form. This continuity of shape, he maintains, will allow a transition from the end of the current aeon, when the universe will have expanded to become infinitely large, to the start of the next, when it once again becomes infinitesimally small and explodes outwards from the next big bang. Crucially, he says, the entropy at this transition stage will be extremely low, because black holes, which destroy all information that they suck in, evaporate as the universe expands and in so doing remove entropy from the universe."

I'm not sure every physicist would agree with the bolded statement. I'm reading a book, The Shape of Inner Space, and it talks about this idea in chapter 8. It says that Hawking made a bet with another physicist that after a black hole has radiated away all its energy and it disappears (I may not be descibing that completely correctly) it takes all the information it has with it, thus information disappears. There was some advance in string theory - it has to do with computing the total energy of a black hole - Hawking and someone did it based on the density of the black hole and the surface area at the event horizon (again, this is from memory). Then 2 string theorists did this computation using some form of geometry - had to do with the number of possible configuations of branes within the space in the black hole. Based on this, they got the same answer as Hawking had - and their method is preferable because there is no constraint on their method due to relativity. This led Hawking to agree that the information contained within the black hole leaks out - within the leaking radiation.

That's what makes me think the bolded statement is, at least, questionable.