Nobel Prize winner says the universe has gone through multiple Big Bangs:
When it comes to how the universe started, science holds that the universe began in what's known as the Big Bang. Many have wondered over the years what the end of the universe will be like. A 2020 Nobel Prize winner in physics named Sir Roger Penrose believes that the universe goes through cycles of death and rebirth.
He believes that there have been multiple Big Bangs and that more will happen. Penrose points to black holes as holding clues to the existence of previous universes.
[...] He calls his theory, "conformal cyclic cosmology." Penrose says he discovered six "warm" sky points known as "Hawking Points" first discovered by the late Prof. Stephen Hawking. Hawking believed that black holes leak radiation and eventually will evaporate. That evaporation could take longer than the current age of the universe, according to the scientist.
Penrose believes that we can observe what he calls dead black holes left by past universes. If he's correct, it would validate some of Hawking's theories. The theory is controversial, and like many theories, it may never be proven to be true or false. If he is right, the universe we know will one day explode, and a new one will come into existence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @12:15AM (5 children)
Hasn't Penrose been saying this for literally decades?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @12:22AM (1 child)
Yes and neither conformal math or the theory of a cyclical universe are especially controversial. They're just wrong, FSM clearly created a simulation of a one-electron universe.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 15 2020, @05:05AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @12:25AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @12:44AM
I'll believe it when I see Galactus.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday October 15 2020, @01:15AM
According to his Wikipedia article:
But he may have been thinking about it for a long time before that I suppose.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday October 15 2020, @01:13AM (3 children)
Multiple big bangs, so what should we call that? An astronomical orgy?
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Thursday October 15 2020, @01:48AM
Yeah, kinda. I was banging the universe on Sunday night, but I have no idea how many other people may have been banging away at the same time.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 15 2020, @01:49AM (1 child)
Nah, that requires many in each event. Every CCC bang seems to be a conformal cyclic solitary experience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @02:31AM
The universe is a serial wanker
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @03:21AM
I was five and he was six
We rode on horses made of sticks
He wore black and I wore white
He would always win the fight
Bang bang, he shot me down
Bang bang, I hit the ground
Bang bang that awful sound
Bang bang, my baby shot me down
Seasons came and changed the time
When I grew up I called him mine
He would always laugh and say
Remember when we used to play
Bang bang, I shot you down
Bang bang, you hit the ground
Bang bang that awful sound
Bang bang, I used to shoot you down
Music played and people sang
Just for me the church bells rang
Now he's gone, I don't know why
Until this day, sometimes I cry
He didn't even say good bye
He didn't take the time to lie
Bang bang, he shot me down
Bang bang, I hit the ground
Bang bang that awful sound
Bang bang, my baby shot me down
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Thursday October 15 2020, @03:38AM (1 child)
We just need to find a black hole older than the universe https://www.sciencealert.com/new-evidence-hints-black-holes-do-form-directly-from-a-star-collapse [sciencealert.com]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @04:58AM
We have...it's called Runaway.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday October 15 2020, @04:24AM (10 children)
One of the problems with the whole idea of a Beginning is that it too obviously arises from theological thinking. I have never found convincing any of the arguments that time or the universe are finite. Why should they be finite? Admittedly, the universe does and will change greatly over time, with such scenarios as star formation eventually declining to nothing as all the raw materials are absorbed into black holes, and a dark age falling upon the universe when the last remaining stars finally exhaust their fuel. What mechanism could reboot things, I don't know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @04:36AM
was there a Beginning?
About when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @06:09AM
In the beginning there was goetze.
That's why it's so terrifying. And bad for your eyes, too.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @12:10PM (1 child)
There is a limit to the size of the observable universe, a necessary consequence of the speed of light. Few cosmologists believe that the observable universe is the same as the entire universe. There's not really any evidence that the total universe is finite, and a lot of things work better if it is infinite. (But there are upsetting consequences if it is infinite, too).
As for time, we're quite sure that the Big Bang happened, although the specifics are still quite unknown, and conditions then are such that time might not be meaningful. The (scientific) argument isn't exactly that time begins with the Big Bang, it's more that asking what happened before it isn't meaningful. It's like asking what's on the other side of a Mobius strip. It seems like it has side A and side B, but it doesn't. The Big Bang seems like it has a before and after, but (as far as we can tell) it doesn't.
Someday, hopefully, we'll have a good theory of quantum gravity, and while that still won't answer the question of exactly what happened at the Big Bang, it'll at least be a clue.
As for why, ask your spiritual adviser of choice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @05:11PM
"There is a limit to the size of the observable universe, a necessary consequence of the speed of light. Few cosmologists believe that the observable universe is the same as the entire universe. "
"Stuff" outside the observable universe is as meaningless as time before big bang.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday October 15 2020, @02:49PM (2 children)
I read the entirety of the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series of books. (Well, the ones he wrote. Haven't read the later book(s), he didn't write.) It does a pretty good job of summing up an atheist's views of the world and the universe at large. By which I mean, there is no purpose to life, it just is, we can to be from a primordial ooze, and eventually the earth with be cooked by the sun / froze by the lack of sun / destroyed by the heat death of the universe / destroyed to make way for a new super space highway or the like. In the face of that doom and gloom, you have pretty much any religion, that doesn't believe we're a tiny accident of evolution and we don't matter anyway. Then atheists wonder how we could be so stupid as to not believe in their un-provable doom and gloom fairy tales. As the saying goes "the truth is out there", it's just not as UFO creepy, as the origin of that saying. Believing that a loving creator, who wants beings that can think for themselves, instead of robots, isn't such a leap of faith as believing in Atheism.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @07:36PM
That is an interesting twist you put on there. A lot of these models are built up on our observations of the visible universe, and they are nicely complimentary with each other (background radiation, everything moving away from everything else proportional to their separation, genomic analysis, fossil records, etc., etc., etc.). So there is a lot of scaffolding there and it is holding up a lot of self consistent models. From here it comes down to how one wants to assign a bigger meaning to all of that, whether you are Stephen Hawking or Guy Consolmagno (the Vatican's chief astronomer). Some, like Pierre-Simon Laplace when writing his Mécanique Céleste, didn't need to invoke the hypothesis of a grand architect, whereas Newton relied heavily upon it.
I can't speak for atheists, as there is no guiding doctrine and it means different things to different people, but what I find interesting is your claim that it is a bigger leap of faith to believe there is no Grand Design rather than the leap of faith required for the existence of an omnipresent (benevolent?) and eternal intelligence who is interested in the day to day minutia of every living being in existence.
For me, I consider that we appear to be located about an unremarkable star in the outskirts of a galaxy containing 100 thousand million stars, which is already a number that is incomprehensibly too large for the human mind to contemplate. Then I look at something like the Hubble Deep Field and realize that there are 200 billion galaxies in only the observable universe leading to at least 200 billion trillion stars in the observable universe. I personally have a much harder time making the leap to a being overlooking all of that, plus being personally involved in the lives of me and my fellow beings, and it is a very ad hoc assumption to impose.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday October 16 2020, @10:41PM
Ah, worship of Purpose. Because Purpose gives meaning to our little lives, and without Purpose, there is only Despair. Like in that movie The Big Lebowski where his best friend takes it for granted that Nihilists can't possibly have any drive because they are Nihilists.
I make a distinction between Ultimate Purpose, and lesser purposes. We have to be content with the latter. The former is logically impossible. I've heard it said, many times, that no one knows the Purposes of the Almighty. I regard that as a massive cop out. We don't know what God is up to, but whatever it is, it must be Good. Or so we hope and pray. Ask yourself why God has a Plan. What is The Plan for? To win Armageddon? Show the Devil that he is wrong? But no matter what the reason,
can always ask of it why, like the Animaniacs cartoon character Mindy does.
I'm saying we shouldn't let our wishful thinking warp our view of the universe. Monotheistic religions are quite clearly designed to appeal to the sort of person who finds great comfort in order, hierarchy, structure, and purpose.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by leon_the_cat on Thursday October 15 2020, @03:54PM
Seems overcomplicated to me. Projection of human lifespan onto the cosmos. So what happened before the big bang is the obvious childs question. If there was nothing you are accepting a nothing->something senario. If there was something you haven't answered the question. Maybe leave it in the inconceivable category.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @05:43PM
"I have never found convincing any of the arguments that time or the universe are finite. "
Does time or space still exist when all else is gone from the universe?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @04:55AM
There was a steady-state theory that required matter just randomly popped into existence in free space. (a la Hawking radiation maybe) Given current expansion rates and matter densities etc, the rate of formation required was tiny. Far below what we could detect. Can't find the figure, but from memory it was like one proton+electron per cubic KM per millenium.
Of course a steady-state universe makes the Fermi problem much worse.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @09:16AM
His actual scientific contributions are very substantial, but he believes a lot of crazy things too. He is a guy who needs to be filtered by the rest of the scientific community, to separate the breakthroughs from the crazy.
This is the crazy. Hawking radiation cannot produce these signatures. It is mathematically impossible unless our understanding of Hawking radiation is completely wrong, which is not very likely. Black holes large enough to produce this type of signature radiate extremely dimly, and black holes that radiate brightly are far too small and short-lived. And still too dim: even the brightest black hole is dimmer than a star.
On top of everything else, this doesn't fit with dark energy or inflation, either of which would have separated the supposed black holes widely enough so that they wouldn't all be visible from the same place.
The Hawking points might be evidence of something, but not this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @07:42PM
so if the universe were a piece of paper it crumbles to a point and then de-crumbles and some creases remain?
pretty cool.
something for future real-estate agents to think about:
"here we have a prime location where the sub-space remains of a bygone universe remain detectable and water has a tiny
bit less friction when flowing so it should help with your electricity bill"
(Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday October 15 2020, @09:35PM
If it can't proven to be true or false it is not science.
Scientists, like everyone, love speculation, but the fact that they are high level scientists don't turn speculation into science. Speculation is not bad, it is the seed of research, but you must know where you are, not yet in the science zone.
Lately I've read too many news like this one that are shown as science, or serious hypothesis, but they are no more than declarations out of the thin air.