"We Can See Through the Big Bang to the Universe That Existed in the Aeon Before Ours"

[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, said 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."

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/03/we-can-see-through-the-big-bang-to-the-universe-that-existed-in-the-aeon-before-ours-todays-most-pop.html

We live in an age of incredible wonder and unthinkable cruelty......what will future historians think of our time?

[Zoeisright]

1. That is too cool.

[Deep13]

2. Mind blown. nt

[StandingInLeftField]

3. Very cool, but to be expected.

Buddhist Cosmology 101. Early 21st-century Science and exquisitely-nuanced 1st-century BCE Buddhist(Hindu) cosmology tend to mesh very well.

[brooklynite]

4. Why did God put these false measurements in the Universe?

Considering its only 6,000 years old, and is ending in October...

[damntexdem]

6. Well, the god in question is Coyote the Trickster.

And the reason is obvious. ;-)

[damntexdem]

5. New evidence, or at least argument, for the Gnab Gib!

I can hardly wait to find out who's right. We'll know in a few billion years. ;-)

[caraher]

7. Not likely to turn out to be correct...

There are lots of problems with this analysis, evidently - which, one must note, is something on arxiv and not a peer-reviewed publication. Of course, the arxiv does result in plenty of scrutiny, which is good, but anything found only there must be regarded as, at best, preliminary results or inspired speculation.

[dimbear]

9. Wouldn't a sufficiently massive gravitational lens in the center

produce that same pattern? A simpler explanation.

[thereismore]

8. This is disputed. The circles are there, but they occur in inflationary universe as well.

See http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1656 .

[originalpckelly]

10. "Mommy, where do universes come from?"

"Other universes."

"And where did they come from?"

"Other universes.

"But where did they come from, mommy?"

"Kid, if I knew that, I'd be a professor at some famous university. But then again, they don't have a much better idea either, I'm betting."

[DetlefK]

11. Unbelievable major flaws in this theory:

First flaw:

quote from article:
"The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation is the remnant heat from the Big Bang. This radiation pervades the universe and, if we could see in microwaves, it would appear as a nearly uniform glow across the entire sky. However, when we measure this radiation very carefully we can discern extremely faint variations in the brightness from point to point across the sky, called "anisotropy". These variations encode a great deal of information about the properties of our universe, such as its age and content. "

The CMB wasn't created at the Big Bang. The CMB was created 200,000 years after the BB, when particle density in the universe became so small, that photons were for the first time able to travel cosmic distances without hitting something. The anisotropies in the CMB stem from plasma oscillations in the universe's content, from the time right before the light was freed. (If you expand the anisotropies into spherical harmonics, you will see a peak at l=~220.)

Translated: Your data was created 200,000 years after the event you want to measure.




Second flaw:
quote: "and in particular believes it cannot account for the very low entropy state..."
2nd Law of Thermodynamics: The state of Entropy=0 is placed arbitraryly. The scale is moved until we have Entropy=0 at temperature=0.
This means, there might very well be further entropy we don't know about, because we can't measure phenomenons stemming from these undiscovered degrees of freedom.

[qazplm]

12. slightly off topic but I think still relevant

what's always confused/made me ponder is time.

We know that time generally requires change. If things are static (say a zero dimensional singularity) then there is no time, but then something changes (literally boom).

So how can something change in an environment where these is, arguably, no time yet? Did time come into being the moment the change first started, or was time in being prior to the big bang because some form of the universe existed prior to the most recent big bang? (whether because of this theory, or brane theory or some other theory suggesting an oscillating universe).

I get that our current understanding suggests the universe did in fact have a beginning and appears likely to have an end, of sorts.
However, that current "reality" seems logically unappealing to me. Not because I believe the universe or reality has to have some purpose (it doesn't, although it's possible it may) but just because it seems to me that the likelihood of a phenomena happening once, and then never again seems counter to everything we know.

[DetlefK]

13. I have a simple explanation, but it leads to the conclusion, that our universe has a twin...

For example, take a finite volume that is completely empty, a perfect vacuum. If you try to calculate what kind of electromagnetic fields can exist inside, you will find standing waves.
On average, the electromagnetic field is perfectly zero. But there is a standard deviation to that average, allowing the existence of virtual photons. So, there can be particles inside the vacuum, as long as they cancel each other out on average.



Maybe the singularity also had no width in the time-dimension, but with fluctuations that allowed a "virtual time".

Ok, maybe my idea is total bullshit, but that leads me to the conclusion that the Big-Bang created two time-dimensions in opposite "directions" and with opposite energy scales. (Because everything still has to be zero on average.) That means, our universe would have a twin filled with (following Dirac's argument) some kind of anti-matter.
Separated at birth and with no chance to meet again...

[qazplm]

14. still makes me ask

how can you have time start when no time existed before time started?

At some point, time will end as every last star burns out, proton decays (maybe) and black hole evaporates.

Then what? Is that it? Time freezes? Could something start it again?
Is time actually not infinite in the future because at some point it ends?

[RagAss]

15. We create time...it's the 4th demension of space that we cannot directly perceive.

[DetlefK]

17. you are mistaken: just because nothing happens, doesn't mean there is no time

As I laid out, my idea would be, that our time is just one side of a quantum-fluctuation. That way, there could be different times/universes, as long as they equal each other out.

That's the nice part about virtual particles: They exist and don't exist at the same time.

[qazplm]

19. how would you know

if nothing happened, and I mean nothing, how would you know time was passing? By what could you measureit?

[DetlefK]

20. difficult...

Your question is unclear: Something has to happen, or you can't witness time passing. Take for example an entity thinking "Now" and "Now". Time passed between those thoughts.

Let's take a system close to T=0. Nothing happens, but time still passes by.

We use this definition of the time-unit "second": We take an atom (Caesium, I think) and excite the uppermost electron to the lowest empty orbital. If we know the energy-difference between those states, we can easily calculate how long the decay should take on average. We take this amount of time so-and-so many times and define that as a "second".

Honestly, I have no good answer to your question, but I would try to find a solution with energy and Planck's constant in it.

[qazplm]

21. I think my question is clear

at some point a trillion years or more from now.

Every star will be dead, every bit of matter sucked up into a black hole, or decayed through proton decay, every photon gone, every neutrino out of energy/gone, every black hole evaporated, the entire universe will be absolutely still, not a single vibrating atom, not a single photon whizzing through space, all of the universe at absolute zero with matter either gone, or frozen in place with no movement.

There will be no "thoughts", no now versus then because there will be no change, everything exactly the same, in this hypothetical, forever.

If your argument is that the universe will always have some sort of vacuum energy or zero point energy I suppose that could assume time still passes.
Of course that would then raise the opposite problem, then doesn't time go infinitely in the other direction too? Hard to imagine something having a start but no stop.

[somone]

16. If you stare long and hard enough at anything, you'll see a pattern

A search for concentric circles in the 7-year WMAP temperature sky maps
Authors: I. K. Wehus, H. K. Eriksen
...We do reproduce the claimed ring structures observed in the WMAP data as presented by Gurzadyan and Penrose, thereby verifying their computational procedures. However, the results from our simulations do not agree with those presented by Gurzadyan and Penrose. On the contrary we obtain a substantially larger variance in our simulations, to the extent that the observed WMAP sky maps are fully consistent with the LCDM model as measured by these statistics.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1268

No evidence for anomalously low variance circles on the sky
Authors: Adam Moss, Douglas Scott, James P. Zibin
Gurzadyan & Penrose claim to have found directions on the sky centred on which are circles of anomalously low variance in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These features are presented as evidence for a particular picture of the very early Universe. We attempted to repeat the analysis of these authors, and we can indeed confirm that such variations do exist in the temperature variance for annuli around points in the data. However, we find that this variation is entirely expected in a sky which contains the usual CMB anisotropies. In other words, properly simulated Gaussian CMB data contain just the sorts of variations claimed. Gurzadyan & Penrose have not found evidence for pre-Big Bang phenomena, but have simply re-discovered that the CMB contains structure.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1305

Are There Echoes From The Pre-Big Bang Universe? A Search for Low Variance Circles in the CMB Sky
Authors: Amir Hajian
The existence of concentric low variance circles in the CMB sky, generated by black-hole encounters in an aeon preceding our big bang, is a prediction of the Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. Detection of three families of such circles in WMAP data was recently reported by Gurzadyan & Penrose (2010). We reassess the statistical significance of those circles by comparing with Monte Carlo simulations of the CMB sky with realistic modeling of the anisotropic noise in WMAP data. We find that the circles are not anomalous and that all three groups are consistent at 3sigma level with a Gaussian CMB sky as predicted by inflationary cosmology model.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1656

[laconicsax]

18. Thanks for posting this. n/t