An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics. Sir Roger, 89, who won the honour for his seminal work proving that black holes exist, said he had found six ‘warm’ points in the sky (dubbed ‘Hawking
  • Steve2 [any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    It's called cyclic conformal cosmology or something like that! And it's very neat to think about.

    The end state of the universe after everything degenerates to just EM radiation (this is well after red dwarfs go supernova and protons spontaneously degenerate) looks similar to the universe pre-big bang. If everything is just composed of stuff that moves at the speed of light then time and distance lose all meaning. An entire 15 billion light year across patch of space is exactly the same as one crunched into the width of an atom from the point of view of completely degenerated em radiation. The "next" universe could then start from the end of ours.

    Penrose is the guy who theorized this first - although the idea of a cyclical universe with long periods of repetition is at least as old as Hinduism - and he claimed some empiracal data to back up his theory.

    What does that mean for us practically? Essentially nothing, lol, although it is possible for intelligent beings to encode a message for the next universe via radiation so I guess we could check our universe's answering machine.