Controversial claim from Nobel Prize winner: The universe keeps dying and being reborn

Roger Penrose, who will win the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020, says that the universe goes through cycles of death and birth. The scientist says that there have been many Big Bangs and that more are coming. He also says that black holes show that there were other universes in the past. These claims are very controversial, and not everyone in the cosmology community agrees with them.

Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematician and physicist from the University of Oxford who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020, thinks that our universe has had many Big Bangs and that another one is coming.

Penrose won the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing mathematical methods that proved and expanded Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He also won the prize for his discoveries about black holes, which showed how objects that become too dense collapse under the force of gravity into singularities, or points with infinite mass.

As soon as he found out he had won the Prize, Penrose said he still believed in “a crazy idea of mine” that the universe will keep expanding until all matter breaks down. After that, there will be a second Big Bang, which will make a new universe.

“The Big Bang was not the start,” Penrose told The Telegraph. “Before the Big Bang, there was something, and that something will be our future.”

What proof is there for the physicist’s “conformal cyclic cosmology” (CCC) theory, which goes against the current “dogma” about the Big Bang? He said he had found six “warm” spots in the sky, which he called “Hawking Points,” that were each about eight times the size of the Moon. They are named after Professor Stephen Hawking, who suggested that black holes “leak” radiation and eventually disappear. Since this could take longer than the age of the universe we live in (13.77 billion years), it is very unlikely that such holes will be found.

Penrose (89), who works with Hawking, thinks that we can see “dead” black holes from other universes or “aeons” If this is true, it would prove that Hawking’s ideas are correct.

In his 2020 study, which was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the physicist found “anomalous circular patches” in the CMB that had higher temperatures. Using information from the Planck 70 GHz satellite and up to 10,000 simulations, the spots were found.

Hot spots in Planck CMB data. Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

In 2018, Penrose’s research found radiation hot spots in the CMB that were caused by black holes that were fading away. In a 2010 study, Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia found evidence for cyclic cosmology in the CMB’s rings of uniform temperature. At the time, scientists thought that the rings were made by gravitational waves from black holes that merged in a universe before ours.

Cosmologists don’t all agree on these ideas. Some say it would be hard to go from an infinitely large universe in one aeon to a very small one in the next. This would mean that as the universe gets older, all of its parts lose mass.

Penrose’s ideas about where consciousness starts at the quantum level are also interesting.