Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/black-holes-prove-the-universe-keeps-exploding-claims-physicist/

by indigodaddy • 3 years ago

143 235 3 years ago

Nobel Prize winners are not immune to crank thinking, usually outside of their area of speciality. There is Linus Pauling and vitamin C, and Penrose also writing about consciousness having quantum mechanisms.

melling• 3 years ago

It’s a little unclear why his theory about the universe being reborn can’t be a possibility.

It all just started 13.5 billion years ago?

We simply don’t know.

SideburnsOfDoom3• 3 years ago

It’s a little unclear why his theory about the universe being reborn can’t be a possibility.

Occam's Razor: what problem with simpler theories does this "possibility" solve?

jjgreen• 3 years ago

No issue with considering this possibility, but unless it becomes clear that we can possibly squeeze some truth out of it on a human timescale, not really physics.

markhahn5• 3 years ago

if it's actually "reborn", we can't know, so the question is invalid.

Penrose seems to be claiming that there is falsifiable evidence that this "incarnation" is not the only one. that's totally fringe (speculative).

shagymoe• 3 years ago

Maybe the universe is powering a piston.

bronson• 3 years ago

Our universe is but a half cycle of the great steam engine in the sky.

RhysU• 3 years ago

I vote for 2-stroke. We certainly burn oil.

klyrs• 3 years ago

The creator is a reactor operator... I do hope for its sake that the Big Bang is a source of clean energy...

GalenErso5• 3 years ago

I know HN hates religion, but after being an atheist all my life, and graduating with a STEM degree (the 'S' part) from a top tier institution, I've started in the last year or so to turn to the church (Roman Catholic) and theism, both to find answers to some of life's mysteries, such as the origin of the Universe, and for personal reasons (I plan to start my initiation, starting with a baptism, within the next year or so) I have no evidence that God is real, yet I have faith in him. The idea that God created the universe is more satisfying to me than any scientific theory, and it isn't incompatible with the simulation hypothesis, or the idea that the Universe was created by a higher-level construct.

Edit: To reply to a commenter below, since I'm "posting too fast" according to HN.

However, I fail to see how you settled on Catholicism to give you the answers you're looking for. [...] And if not, why pick Catholicism over any other major religion?

Fair question. I come from a Roman Catholic cultural background, even though I wasn't raised in a religious household, so the church is where I feel most at home.

Do you really believe all the stories in the bible actually happened?

No, I don't. I regard the Bible more as a work of literature and a source of spiritual and personal inspiration than a history of events.

And if this God does exist and wants us to worship him, why doesn't he make that more obvious, and why does he allow children to be raped and worshippers to be gunned down in his own Church?

My view is that God does not want us to worship him. God loves all his children regardless.

Evil exists in the world. It shouldn't, and we should do our best to rid ourselves of it. I'll have more answers when I go through my initiation.

oefnak• 3 years ago

Most of the other teachings of the church, however, are.

pibechorro• 3 years ago

This. While there are benefits to most religions (community being the biggest) it comes along with insane and very often deadly noise, be it ignorant, purposely wrong or errors in translations or lost information through time, editors, gatekeepers.

The closest path to god is reality, from personal observation ad questions.

mr_mitm6• 3 years ago

Do you think satisfaction is a good measure of what we should believe to be true?

marginalia_nu• 3 years ago

Don't you think that question presupposes a materialist world view?

bawolff7• 3 years ago

As an atheist, what other measure should we use?

Like when it comes down to it we are all looking for answers that "satisfy" us. What else is there? Logic is just a complex way of verifying that the answers are convincing enough and thus satisfying.

throwaway2056• 3 years ago

I am sure a lot of HN do it in private. In modern world (>90s) to be non-religious due to stereotyping people.

_a_a_a_5• 3 years ago

I don't understand what you expect me to take from this by your sharing of it.

umvi3• 3 years ago

I myself am partial to the Latter-day Saint teaching that matter/energy has always existed (and forever will exist) and that the creation of the world involved "organizing" existing matter in an iterative process. That matches the pattern of creation I've experienced myself where I take something that already exists and iterate on it until it is in a refined state that I desire.

I find it hard to believe that the mindboggling complexity of protein machinery was purely accidental/probabilistic. I understand how evolution works, and it makes sense, but... to me at least, it seems more likely that there was a creative iterative process that "guided" matter towards the evolutionary system we have on earth vs lightning striking an ocean full of amino acids and DNA/cells/proteins coincidentally arranging in the right configuration to jump start evolution.

rubicon333• 3 years ago

Uh, what man?

That “guide” was natural selection over millions of years.

It’s literally random chance, and if a change is beneficial, it sticks. If we were really “designed” then there are so many failures and inefficiencies that deserve scrutiny.

Chief among them, childhood cancers. Fuck a designer that left that bug in the system and shipped it.

oldstrangers2• 3 years ago

How is an infinite universe that's been painstakingly engineered by an infinitely omnipotent being less mindboggling than evolutionary biology?

HybridCurve• 3 years ago

Conway's game of life is a good example of how complex behavior can evolve from systems with a simple set of rules. Molecular dynamics follow a more complex set of rules at a much more rapid rate. This combined with the fact those interactions have been happening for billions of years in parallel at such a massive scale does not make it surprising that persistent and self replicating patterns emerge. On a large enough scale, even improbable events become likely.

m3kw93• 3 years ago

And who created that higher level construct

GalenErso5• 3 years ago

God, as creator of time, is outside of time. Since therefore He has no beginning in time, He has always existed, so doesn't need a cause. I long wrestled with the idea that the Universe could have existed forever, as a way to solve the first cause paradox, but I was never comfortable with the idea. So I've made a leap of faith and applied the same mental framework to an immaterial construct (God), and for the sake of my sanity I don't try to go further than that :-]

I believe there are questions that aren't meant to be answered, and knowing the truth would break our collective minds.

jmull• 3 years ago

Back when they taught me catholicism, the doctrine on science vs. religion was “truth cannot contradict truth”. They’d still say God created everything, but that science was a good way to understand God’s creation, from a certain perspective. (Things like Genesis were not considered literal.)

So I’m surprised to see the Catholicism presented as an alternative to science.

Maybe they’ve reverted since I was a follower?

mrguyorama• 3 years ago

Catholicism, despite their attempts, is not just one set of teachings. At the end of the day, each catholic only knows what their local church teaches. If your state's cardinal is aggressively homophobic, you can bet local teachings about the evils of homosexuality and pleadings to the flock to save their wandering fellows despite the literal Pope basically saying "maybe we should leave them alone a bit"

criloz2• 3 years ago

The universe, for me, without any doubt, is a simulation, I even believe that the the algorithms that would explain how the universe reached this level of complexity would be the same that explain intelligence, I think that we got all wrong believing that matter come before consciousness when, in reality, it is the other way around. And languages are a big part of all the equation, physics and space are all languages.

bazoom422• 3 years ago

Does the child abuse bother you?

GalenErso5• 3 years ago

Yes. It's not going to erode my faith, since I'm loyal to Christian values and principles more than any individuals, but the things some of these people in power have done are unacceptable, immoral, and fundamentally un-Christian, and they should be held accountable.

dctoedt3• 3 years ago

I hear you: I've got a STEM background as well, and for many years I was a Catholic-raised agnostic, having bailed from belief at age 12 (and having been skeptical starting at age 5). In later life I worked my way back around to sort of a general agnosto-monotheism, to coin a phrase, and am now at least nominally an Episcopalian (I married one).

I did a lot of thinking and writing on the subject and concluded that we're part of what could be called "The Great Project"; see https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/06/metanarratives_... and the other "Favorites" links in the right-hand column.

GalenErso5• 3 years ago

Thanks, I'll check it out.

dctoedt3• 3 years ago

Supplement to the above: "Why I Still Call Myself a Christian and an Episcopalian" — https://www.questioningchristian.com/2005/05/why_i_call_myse...

lastofus• 3 years ago

I've started in the last year or so to turn to the church (Roman Catholic) and theism, both to find answers to some of life's mysteries, such as the origin of the Universe...

Accepting God created the universe just moves the big questions one level of indirection upward: Why does God exist? Why does God exist with the characteristics that he does (e.g. why is God X instead of Y)?

It's unclear how this is more satisfying on an intellectual level. It's only more satisfying on an emotional level, as it usually comes with the belief of a personal God that loves and wants the best for you, not to mention an afterlife.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

Humans are fundamentally emotional, not intellectual.

skissane• 3 years ago

It's unclear how this is more satisfying on an intellectual level. It's only more satisfying on an emotional level, as it usually comes with the belief of a personal God that loves and wants the best for you, not to mention an afterlife.

This idea of treating intellect and emotions as a dichotomy rather than as two inseparable parts of a harmonious whole has a history – it goes back to the ancient Greeks. Maybe we should question that idea, rather than just assuming it must be true?

And, is an afterlife really that implausible? Putting "supernatural" accounts of it to one side, how sure can you be that the quantum immortality hypothesis is false? Or: in an infinite future, any event with non-zero probability, no matter how remote its chance, will almost certainly eventually happen. Since the probability of our spontaneous resurrection from the dead (through thermal and/or quantum fluctuations) is unimaginably tiny yet strictly speaking non-zero, in a spatiotemporally infinite universe (as in eternal inflation), almost surely it will eventually happen. If the universe is infinite, an afterlife is almost certain; we don't really know whether the universe is infinite, so let's say that's 50-50, which makes an afterlife 50-50 – even if just as a Boltzmann brain. Of course, you can argue against this if you make certain assumptions about the criterion of personal identity, but we really don't know if those assumptions are true – which brings the probability of an afterlife back to 50-50. And then, if the simulation hypothesis is true (another 50-50), it would be very easy for our simulators to give us an afterlife if they wanted, and they might even feel ethically obliged to do so.

If the probability of an afterlife is actually 50-50, why do some people insist its probability is close to zero? Emotional reasons, perhaps? If you don't accept the religious claim that an afterlife is going to be fundamentally just–eternity suddenly becomes terrifying. What if our eternal fate is to spend aeons as a Boltzmann brain perpetually slipping in and out of existence in the cold darkness of space, a mind whose experiences have the bare minimum of coherence to count as experiences of a mind? What if our simulators are mischievous rather than benevolent, and have designed for us an afterlife in which they have fun at our expense?

markhahn5• 3 years ago

the problem is epistemology, not aesthetics. why are you comfortable believing in things that are nonfalsifiable? that you find them comforting is not much of an argument.

GalenErso5• 3 years ago

Scientific theories about the origins of the Universe, such as the one that this post is about, are equally nonfalsifiable.

gensym• 3 years ago

- humans have value

- life is worth living

- doing the right thing matters

All are unfalsifiable. I am deeply skeptical of anyone who claims to not believe unfalsifiable things.

jliptzin2• 3 years ago

It's perfectly fine to believe in higher powers. For instance I think it's possible (or probable) we may be living in a simulated reality within a higher dimensional universe. If that's the case, a 4 dimensional (or higher) being would certainly satisfy the Judeo-Christian description of God, since it would be able to manipulate our world in any way it wants. We're basically sprites on a computer screen and God is the programmer.

However, I fail to see how you settled on Catholicism to give you the answers you're looking for. Do you really believe all the stories in the bible actually happened? And if not, why pick Catholicism over any other major religion? And if this God does exist and wants us to worship him, why doesn't he make that more obvious, and why does he allow children to be raped and worshippers to be gunned down in his own Church?

rdtsc• 3 years ago

Just wanted to commend you for sharing your experience. It's not something that's popular on HN and, as expected, was immediately followed with "you probably have a brain tumor for doing it" comments. So wanted to counter-balance that and let you know that not everyone is as hostile and mean-spirited.

_a_a_a_5• 3 years ago

I'd say this kind of thing is not popular on HN because it had very little useful information content, and if he knew it was not going to be popular here because of religion, well he posted it anyway didn't he…

was immediately followed with "you probably have a brain tumor for doing it" comments

Actually most comments weren't of this nature, but you climbed over those to find the one you could plant your flag of martyrdom on.

oldstrangers2• 3 years ago

I think religion is great for a large majority of people that don't want to put in the painful existential work necessary to arrive at some more profound understanding of life. It feels like a shortcut, and you can certainly find your own spiritual beliefs without the aid of the Catholic Church.

q845712• 3 years ago

hey - thanks for this; it takes some bravery to say this stuff in public.

I'll share that I've been slowly turning into a buddhist, which is not the religion I was born into. I think there's a few things in common, including a sort of universal love and a perspective that could be phrased "it's not about me", but that there's something bigger/higher/more-powerful going on and my specific life experience isn't the most important thing in the universe. Those two things - love, and humility (maybe that's the best single word?) go a long way towards reducing inter-personal frictions large and small.

mlmonge• 3 years ago

Hate seems to be such a strong word. I mean, as a man of faith myself, I have encountered HN posts that are compel me to consider "how can anyone, God-fearing or not, not see the disappointing hubris in this claim (that summarily and dogmatically counters the mystery of God)?" For one to express the pursuit and fruits of a relationship with the Creator, on the other hand, is quite the opposite and most admirable and NOT delusional, IMHO. @GallenErso: I celebrate your positive (sans skepticism, that is) investment in the mystery of Life! In the final analysis, I trust that you'll find more than just satisfaction in this supernatural pursuit--myself, I have found an alarming and disarming hope, beauty & suffering in charity and meaning & purpose in every single endeavor. Lasty... I'd encourage you to check out the Magis Center. God bless!

pieter_mj2• 3 years ago

The idea of a Christian god is self contradictory and logically impossible. If you want a god it can't be an Abramistic one.

Apofis• 3 years ago

Keep working through the process. Talent is wasted without knowledge. HN doesn't hate religion, it's simply ignorant of it.

sorokod• 3 years ago

If it is more satisfying to you so be it, it is a personal choice to believe in this and that.

As long as these are non overlapping magisteria.

Not sure what your stem credentials have to do with anything here.

ddgflorida• 3 years ago

Intelligent design makes sense to me.

quags• 3 years ago

I went to a catholic high school pre 2000s and have nothing but respect for their teachings which was entirely opened to science, questioning religion itself, learning of other religions and using a metaphor interpretation of the bible. That was a change from young earth creationism that I was brought up in.

lazyant• 3 years ago

As an atheist, I have no problem with "God created the universe", as in "something/somebody" that has no interactions with us. It would have no effect on me (Epicureanism).

The big jump is between "god created the universe" and "that god is the <human religion> one". And I'm not talking about all the contradictions and terrible things in <sacred book> or the absurdity of things like "the son of god saved humankind from offending god (sin)" but there's no (good) answer to a simple fact: "children's cancer", since the official religious answer is "we cannot understand (god's plan)".

yadingus3• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity, what would you say to a person who shared the same story as you, but instead of Catholicism they turned to Scientology?

Ralfp2• 3 years ago

    Nobel disease or Nobelitis is the embracing of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

lokimedes• 3 years ago

To be fair, Penrose has always been an imaginative character, and the cyclic universe idea stems from long before he was awarded the Nobel.

est31• 3 years ago

Yes, this suggestion is practically impossible to prove (or disprove), and quite fringe, but the listed examples in that article are usually of things people suggested outside of their field after they got the Nobel prize, and often things that were quite easily disproved at the time of suggestion. Meanwhile Penrose suggested CCC (2006) way before he received the Nobel prize (2020). Also, cosmology is Penrose's research area.

markhahn5• 3 years ago

what happened before this universe is not cosmology, but religion, and that's not Penrose's field. neither is neuroscience, where he's giving air to similarly unsupported ideas.

2022-11-07• 3 years ago

A lot of our well-evidenced scientific ideas today would've been practically impossible to prove at some point in history. I think people forget that all hypotheses are nothing more than thoughtful just-so stories when they're first stated.

JieJie• 3 years ago

Clearly, their creativity setting is too high and they're hallucinating answers to questions they weren't even asked.

gilmore606• 3 years ago

"People far smarter than me often have ideas I can't understand. They must be fucked up somehow. I can't see any other explanation for it."

coding123• 3 years ago

a claim that is not widely accepted within the cosmology community.

I'd rather hear the top 5 theories rather than the officially "accepted" ones from any given "community".

Want to break the speed of light? Why yes tell me and don't let them filter you.

bawolff7• 3 years ago

Accepted just more or less means there is enough evidence that most people agree its a convincing explanation.

Nobody is filtering anybody. Acceptance is just the end of the process not the beginning. It is expected most hypotheses do not start as accepted and most won't make it that far.

To give a start up analogy: an accepted theory is like a company that is profitable. Most start ups aren't profitable. Some might become so, most won't and will eventually fail. There is nothing wrong with not being profitable, everything starts somewhere, but its still important to describe the stage the company is at accurately.

markhahn5• 3 years ago

you might be disappointed if there are no valid (falsifiable) theories. lots of people seem to think there should be an answer to every question, but what if "just because" is good enough? that answer is more about the question.

truculent• 3 years ago

IANAP - why are these ideas so controversial? The article seems to suggest he has some (potentially) supporting evidence, and I don't have an intuition for how damning the counter-argument is ("This would necessitate making all particles lose mass as the universe gets old." Again, IANAP and physics can get weird).

Ralfp2• 3 years ago

Those are controversial because in science you show the proof of something occruring, an primary proof being shown here mostly anounts to „trust me bro, the guy saying this got a nobel award in physics”. But the fault here is on media reporting, not Penrose himself.

markhahn5• 3 years ago

it's fringe because it's almost certainly nonfalsifiable

pieter_mj2• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure Penrose won't accept his own theory if it's only nonfalsifiable. At the moment, it's only an idea but if it is unprovable he'll abandon it or be very clear about its non-scientific status.

He's not a second Josephson.

thaumasiotes• 3 years ago

it's fringe because it's almost certainly nonfalsifiable

That can't be true; those are two completely unrelated concepts. Compare "we're living in a simulation", which became mainstream despite the fact that (1) it is even more unfalsifiable than this is; and (2) it is identical in every way to the old, no-longer-interesting concept of "you are a brain in a jar".

threeseed2• 3 years ago

Based on a previous talk [1] there was a claim that you should be able to see events from previous aeons in the background microwave radiation.

In particular rings caused by the collision of black holes.

And from his talk he had reached out to colleagues from around the world to see if they did exist. So it seems like he does care about it being provable.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftjwnjR0apY

wswope• 3 years ago

Since I haven’t seen anyone else mention this bit of context elsewhere in the thread: Penrose gets a bit of side-eye in the physics community because of his metaphysical beliefs on consciousness. (Specifically, that quantum effects in tubule proteins of the brain produce special nondeterministic effects that constitute our conscious essence, and true consciousness is impossible without this nondeterministic fount of spiritual essence.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose#Consciousness

He’s clearly a smart guy… but also has some hot takes.

(Zero judgement intended; only bringing this up as background context.)

tanepiper• 3 years ago

This is what I always find weird about some areas of modern science is the completly inability to hold new ideas without an ability to abstract away the need for the direct evidence; if this encourages someone to find something that can be wholy described (rather than be called "spirital essence" as so many things previously were we now give names too).

Isn't this what most of science was built upon - Is he right or wrong? Sometimes a need for minds who can push ideas into scientific thinking.

If that wasn't the case, then we might not even have Quantum Physics as it is today...

Unlike medical cranks out there, Penrose has (far as I've seen) never said anything of this is definitive - only that there is the potential in his theory that Orch-OR is the likely seat of conciousness.

brnaftr3613• 3 years ago

Oh this is super cool, thanks for sharing. I have strong (admittedly mostly irrational) inclinations against determinism, seeing something like this is exciting. Definitely going to have to give it a read.

Sapolski's take on determinism was really a low blow for me, and I've since seen several other intellectuals I respect very highly espouse similar views, and there was a point where I would have agreed in my adolescence, but I've since then developed away from that course of thinking. I often wonder if it's a rationalization which is necessary for the framework of the theory of everything to be coherent.

arp242• 3 years ago

He’s clearly a smart guy… but also has some hot takes.

I'm good with that as Penrose is very clear where the uncontroversial science ends and the hot takes begin; he doesn't try to "peddle" anything. "Here is my hot take and this is the TRUTH" is something I have problems with, "here's my hot take a lot of people will disagree with, but I think it may be true because [...]" isn't; and is often even valuable even if the hot take turns out to be wrong, because it exposes shortcomings, omissions, or other things that are not yet entirely clear.

gizmo6863• 3 years ago

Mostly its controversial simply because the evidence for it is week. You need to perform a complicated analysis of the CMB, to find some statistical artifacts that are consistent with your theory, and not any other theory. This is incredibly difficult, because the CMB is very noisy, we don't have a full understanding of how the universe evolved post big bang, and even with our current understanding, a full simulation is computationally impossible. Penrose's analysis found the signature that shows CCC, however when others attempt to perform the analysis, they do not find it. As such, the accuracy of the only evidence remains controversial.

In addition to the empirical lack of convincing evidence, there is also a theoretical problem. In order for CCC to work, you need to assume that all massive particles decay. The is not inconceivable, but involves things like proton decay, which is speculative at best, and electron decay, for which (as far as I am aware) we do not even have a serious speculative mechanism.

mr_mitm6• 3 years ago

What proof does the physicist have for this theory he dubbed “conformal cyclic cosmology” (CCC) that goes against the current Big Bang dogma?

It doesn't go against the current "dogma", as the Big Bang theory only covers history up until a fraction of a second after the big bang. Anything before that is basically fair game, even though some ideas are further out there than others.

Penrose admits it's a "crazy idea of his", and that's fine. He's looking for evidence and not just speculating. It's much less out there than Hossenfelder's thoughts about FTL travel in her video from yesterday. And not even remotely comparable to Linus Paulings musings about vitamins.

JoelMcCracken• 3 years ago

What are you referring to re Linus Paulings?

mr_mitm6• 3 years ago

Another user in this thread mentioned it and it's described in the wikipedia article about crazy nobel laureates linked elsewhere here. Basically, Pauling believed high doses of vitamin C could prolong the lives of cancer patients and cure schizophrenia, despite being out of his field of expertise and lack of evidence.

Arnavion• 3 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_resear...

likeabbas5• 3 years ago

Hossenfelder's thoughts about FTL travel in her video from yesterday

I didn't watch said video, but we have theories rooted in GR and Quantum Mechanics that would allow for FTL travel already using negative energy/pressure. We know there exists mechanisms to create negative pressure, like the Casimir effect. We know the universe is non-local, as per the Nobel prize awarded last year. And we are beginning to see experiments violate local causality. Who's to say we might not be able to engineer FTL travel at some point?

throwaway2902• 3 years ago

What experiments violate causality?

simonh2• 3 years ago

Just to nitpick, the Casimir effect only produces negative pressures relative to the vacuum energy. They're not truly negative. Just in case anyone reading that misunderstands.

Also 'violates causality' is an awful lot to unpack, and is glossing over so much nuance that I don't think it's really a meaningful thing to say. For example violation of the Bell inequalities does not rule out superdeterminism, and that has a very solid account of causality. It's just not a conventional one.

LegitShady2• 3 years ago

I had a hard time understanding the leap she made near the end of her video yesterday about co moving frames. She summarized the time travel theory/paradox as it has been known until now, and then she made some kind of reference to an co moving inertial frame observer ("moving at the same rate as the average of all of the stuff in the universe" paraphrased) she claimed would exist under general relativity.

My understanding was that there was no such thing as inertial frame observers in GR, and that an observer in GR is actually something traveling on a world line in time with a future light cone and a post light cone. The observer portion in GR is literally the ability to observe with light, not a coordinate system as defined from within an inertial frame as in special relativity.

Thats because in GR, because of the curvature of space, you could not extend a coordinate system across all of existence because you knew that in some areas curvature would cause that to be not accurate. You can sort of declare space effectively flat within a local region but not across the entire universe.

It also wasn't clear what someone moving at an co-frame to the average of all the stuff in the universe has to do with faster than light travel - in a spacetime diagram a co-frame would be vertical with a horizontal constant offset, but faster than light travel would have to be in v > c zone not vertical. Maybe I'm too much of a layman to understand the logic she was using but none of it was very clear to me.

mr_mitm6• 3 years ago

No, I have a PhD in physics and you are completely right. I had the same issue with her leap. She implies the co-moving frame is a privileged frame in SR, which is basically equivalent to saying: "SR is wrong and thus FTL travel is possible without time travel". Needless to say this is an extraordinary claim that she glosses over in two sentences of a short Youtube video.

She's obviously a very smart and professional physicist, but this video that she published is bordering on crank territory and it makes me wonder if the social media fame has gotten to her somehow. It's truly baffling.

m3kw93• 3 years ago

Then how did the first one came about? What was there before it, pls don’t tell me nothing because it was nothing for a long time and then something must have triggered the first one. Or was there no first one because of infinity?

rubicon333• 3 years ago

I think this question can never actually be answered using our concept of language and time.

If I tell you A happened before B, you can always ask what happened before A.

Zolomon• 3 years ago

I guess an easy idea to escape this is that it's a cycle of events that repeat forever.

For example, imagine the sequence of events `A, B, C`. After `C`, imagine that the cycle repeats with the beginning of `A` again, ad infinitum.

Ekaros• 3 years ago

That is rather hard question. If we take that anything must have come from something. We might be for example simulation, but the place running the simulation then must have come from somewhere and so on...

Maybe cyclicality or just from nothing are only real answers. Illogical as they may seem, in the end something from absolutely nothing would probably solve the problem.

DangitBobby2• 3 years ago

Either something can come from nothing, or something has always been. Neither make sense from our understanding of causality, but one of them must be true.

pmoriarty• 3 years ago

It would be surprising if something as limited as the human mind could comprehend the entirety of the universe.

That it understands any part of it at all is already more than can be expected from mere matter.

And that something does not make sense to the human mind doesn't mean that it can not be.

downboots• 3 years ago

It'd be surprising if something as limited as an open interval was homeomorphic to the entirety of the real line. \j

computerfriend2• 3 years ago

Spacetime is a property of the universe. So is the idea of causality. "Before" or "outside" make no sense when talking about the universe.

GoblinSlayer11• 3 years ago

There's no time in nothing, so "nothing for a long time" is meaningless.

hemantv2• 3 years ago

Very similar to Hinduism. Hinduism also describe multi verse, number of species on planet.

A lot of theory in science is around advance Civilization that existed before modern day human (they are usually referred to as Giants). Hinduism talk about how earlier human were larger in height and have been reducing since the beginning.

hemantv2• 3 years ago

https://youtube.com/shorts/x-ZomoV6xhs?feature=share

rramadass3• 3 years ago

Dude, stop posting comments like this which is just ignorant and gives a bad name to Hinduism where the subject of "Cyclic Creation and Absorption of Universe" is well detailed.

People interested in the subject should start at the "Time" section of Hindu Cosmology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology

pyrolistical• 3 years ago

I don’t see what is the alternative. If it’s not cyclic how can there be something from nothing?

The only solution is every thing has always existed and there is no such thing as nothing

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 3 years ago

There are alternative hypotheses like Eternal Inflation, and Blackhole Cosmology. Mathematical Universe hypothesis would have our existence merely be one expression of consistent mathematical laws, all possible variations of which exist in a level 4 multiverse. Or we could just be a Boltzmann Brain that only imagines it is a universe that started with a big bang and real physics are markedly different.

It is worth keeping in mind that reality is under no obligation to make any kind of sense to us.

bumby• 3 years ago

It is worth keeping in mind that reality is under no obligation to make any kind of sense to us.

I like this. It's reminds one to keep in mind that we have evolved to procreate, not necessarily understand reality accurately. Even wrong models can be useful in terms of passing along our genes.

rad88• 3 years ago

Natural phenomena do tend to make sense when investigated scientifically. It seems rather that not all cosmologists and mathematicians have an obligation to develop scientific theories:

  - Blackhole Cosmology, Eternal Inflation: unscientific, dismiss reality
  - Mathematical Universe: unscientific, no reality

The actual sciences brought to bear on cosmology (thermo and statistical mechanics) can make enough sense of our observations, without the psychedelics, but do nothing for cosmology as the search for meaning which is what it really is.

Most of these concepts, in all their variety, share the same metaphysical premise that our observed universe was inevitable. To the extent that it appears very distinct, we simply cannot see the overall structure in which it was actually a certainty.

The Boltzmann Brain at least gets closer to facing the issue objectively. The basic reality that we experience today -- in which there's some amount of matter and charge, spacetime, in which eggs only scramble, etc. -- just happens to be so. From our point of view, something highly "improbable" happened in the distant past.

hoseja3• 3 years ago

I've been intuiting Blackhole Cosmology lately, combined with elementary particles being knots/twists in spacetime, I should really read up on it.

DannyBee• 3 years ago

Our perception is fairly limited. It's a very human notion to believe that everything must have had something come before it.

But keep in mind we are also the ones defining before and after based on our perception.

It happens that this matches our view of light propagation/etc, and our understanding of time. But that is today. Not during the big bang or "before" it.

In fact, we also know there were times where the current physical laws did not necessarily apply, shortly after the big bang for example. Currently we believe fundamental forces took time to separate. Heck, even subatomic particles took a very significant amount of time to form.

At a time when physical laws may not apply, things like "our view of the direction of time" would not have applied, either, for example, since most arrows of time boil down to the second law of thermodynamics, see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time. Which means even causality as we think about it breaks down somewhere in there.

This is hard to wrap your head around because it's so alien to how we currently perceive the universe. We want things to fit that perception.

Honestly, even before you get to "before the big the bang", we still can't explain why the universe inflated during the big bang (IE we have no idea what field did it, though we know some things about it, and just expect we will eventually discover it).

webwielder2• 3 years ago

I've always liked the theory that every black hole has a white hole on the other "side" that spews out a universe from the information it collects. And the original black/white hole? Well, something something quantum fluctuation something out of nothing.

brnaftr3613• 3 years ago

I like to think they're dumping it all into some central locus which will eventually cause a big squeeze. Totally unscientific, but there's something romantic to me about periodic sucking and banging.

But that's my own imagination

AmericanChopper• 3 years ago

That’s almost the basis of the concept of Cosmological Natural Selection, which was taken seriously by many credible physicists. It’s fallen out of favor due to the consensus on the Black Hole Information Paradox veering towards information preservation. But it’s still an interesting idea.

computerfriend2• 3 years ago

Penrose was the one to propose the "cosmic censorship conjecture", that you can't have a naked singularity, to justify why we don't see white holes.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I think the tone of the article is a bit too judgmental. He himself called it a 'crazy theory'. I took it to be a pet theory he thinks is interesting, personally would like to believe in, but knows he can't prove. We've all got some of those, there's room to talk about them without being called a crank.

JumpCrisscross• 3 years ago

he himself called it a 'crazy theory'

Correct. The press is adding unwarranted gravitas. I'd file CCC next to the one-electron universe.

tcmart143• 3 years ago

Yea, that is my understanding. He does call it a crazy theory, but its a whole different kind of crazy that most people think of. I've listened to him talk about it and yea, when you actually listen to him you get the vibe of, "its an interesting idea that the math can't really prove or disprove, it may not be right, but it is an interesting thought experiment." I would say it is a step below Fred Hoyle. For those who don't know. Fred Hoyle held a rather unconventional idea or controversial idea of the steady state model, however he admitted he did it mostly to provoke conversation and knew that the more popular model held more water, so to say. An interesting side effect is, Fred Hoyle was able to help figure out how the heavier elements were made in the universe by entertaining his devil's advocate opposition.

sitkack• 3 years ago

Should we entertain unfalsifiable theories?

dguest• 3 years ago

Link to paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.01740

neotrope• 3 years ago

Either we're in a simulation or the universe is infinite and has always existed. Eventually the science will catch up.

Eternal Inflation is a similar idea, but suggests greater spacing between universes allowing for independent physics to develop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_inflation

DangitBobby2• 3 years ago

How does "a simulation" get you out of the universe always existing?

_448• 3 years ago

Here is Dr. Carl Sagan describing this in his Cosmos series (Episode 10, start at 36mins 30secs into the episode): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcpJj4g8IxM

neom• 3 years ago

FYI: I needed to VPN over to Mexico to watch this. Worth it though, super interesting/terrifying. Thanks for sharing!

knob• 3 years ago

How did that quote go?

Artificial constrains on technologies of abundance.

what-no-tests• 3 years ago

Enjoy that now, before the "RESTRICT" Act gets passed!

defgeneric• 3 years ago

Interesting to note that the idea of the "Big Bounce" has been around a long time. Penrose's claim seems to be that there may be evidence of it in cosmic background radiation hotspots.

This was Nietzsche in 1885, musing on how developments in thermodynamics had complicated the mechanistic picture of the universe:

And do you know what "the world" is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by "nothingness" as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be "empty" here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my "beyond good and evil," without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself-do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?- This world is the will to power-and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power-and nothing besides!

gizmo6863• 3 years ago

Penrose's theory of conformal cyclic cosmology is distinct from the big bounce theory. In the big bounce theory, the universe reaches a point where expansion slows down and eventually reverses into contraction. Then, eventually the universe reaches a high enough density where something happens and it begins expanding again in a new big bang.

In conformal cyclic cosmology, the expansion never reverses. Instead, there is a bit of a mathematical trick. If you assume that all massive particles eventually decay, then at some point the universe will contain only massless particles which travel at the speed of light. In such a universe, scale becomes meaningless. That is to say, if you take a region of space that is 1 light year across and watch it evolve for 1 year; that is indistinguishable from a region that is 1 light second across evolving for 1 second. Taking this to the extreme, such a universe that is infinitely sparse is indistinguishable from one that is infinitely dense. In other words the state of our universe after infinite time is mathematically indistinguishable from the universe at the big bang. Of course, after applying that transformation, you would again see a universe with an infinite future that is also equivalent to the big bang, so you can apply the same transformation again.

GlobalFrog• 3 years ago

In that case, the fact that black holes collisions/decay are visible in the ‘new’ universe means that they were breakîng this uniformity and scale invariance in the previous one, and therefore, the transformation does not happen everywhere and all at once from complete uniformity, leading to small variances that might give irregularities in matter distribution in the new universe. I’m no physicist, but is it close to the idea ? One other thing intrigues me: does this theory always lead to an inflation period in the new universe?

hoseja3• 3 years ago

Nietzsche's cyclicality is combinatorical, no? As in, given finite degrees of freedom, the entire universe will eventually go through all possible configurations and then start going through them again.

bogdan0s• 3 years ago

"The last question" vibes over there

some_other_time• 3 years ago

This reminds me of something I read some time back. It was about hypervelocity stars, stars with escape velocity. These are stars that are moving fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of their galaxy. If they are escaping their galaxy and moving away from the galactic center, they may also be beyond the pull of any retraction. This, in turn, would mean the subsequent post-retraction Big Bang contains less matter than the prior one. Over an infinity of time and thus an infinity of these cycles, there would eventually be too little matter to go bang at all.

So, after that happens, we're back to the originating questions. From where did sufficient matter originate to go bang? And, how did that bang not violate the laws of motion?

To throw a match on this pile: To me, this seems to be science asserting the existence of God. ;)

ivan_gammel• 3 years ago

Escaped matter is somewhere else: it would do the Bang and expand into the less populated area. All you need is to assume that on a bigger scale the universe is uniform and all the Bangs are just the ripples in it.

zamalek• 3 years ago

Spacetime itself is not limited to slower than light speeds, and the big crunch has nothing to do with gravity. Rogue stars wouldn't escape it.

The universe is not finitely/countably infinite. From the perspective of everything inside it, it is truly infinite. You can't escape something that goes on forever.

CuriouslyC2• 3 years ago

The universe is not finitely/countably infinite

If you're saying the universe is infinite in any way, I'm going to need some proof.

troops_h8r• 3 years ago

Ah but then you'd have to explain how God started, and the problem is that whatever explanation you concoct here might as well be used to explain the very thing you invoked God to explain in the first place

Chris2048• 3 years ago

hypervelocity stars only escape their galaxies. I'd assume to escape the big-bang they would need to escape the "universe" aka most of the matter in the universe.

TechBro8615• 3 years ago

Submission title is missing (2020)

johnea• 3 years ago

That's nice and everything, but really, What difference does it make?

mwbajor• 3 years ago

Does this not invalidate everything we know about thermodynamics?

Shouldn't the real question be " if we can reverse entropy somehow, shouldn't it be testable and what would that test look like?"

tigerlily• 3 years ago

What is special about the big bang singularity that makes it different from the conventional black holes we have theorised?

Are we inside a black hole, but with time inverted?

sidcool3• 3 years ago

The concept of infinity seems impossible to me in physical world. It's a great mathematical concept to model our understanding. Just like imaginary numbers.

I cannot imagine anything being infinite in the physical world. I find the simulation hypothesis more probable than Universe being infinite. Space and Time is not infinite. It may be Gazillions of centuries old, but not infinity. It can't be.

jstanley3• 3 years ago

If you're happy for mathematical structures to be infinite, why can't our universe (including ourselves) just be one infinite mathematical structure?

Yes, it's very complex, but there's plenty of room in infinity.

It doesn't need to have a "real" physical instantiation anywhere. It's like the simulation hypothesis, except you don't need the simulation. We're just the inside of an infinite self-experiencing mathematical structure, with nothing on the outside.

defrost• 3 years ago

It's an assumption that someone is happy with mathematical structures being infinite.

There are mathematicians unhappy with the notion even while being well versed in the Cantor (and other) arguments.

You can wander down that rabbit hole via (say) [1] as a starting point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...

GoblinSlayer11• 3 years ago

Because universe is a physical structure, not mathematical, e.g. you can't define things into existence.

CuriouslyC2• 3 years ago

Physical systems have finite information storage capacity. Our infinities are descriptions of recursive processes (either iteration or subdivision). The quantization we've observed in the universe is a strike against infinities of subdivision, and it's literally impossible to observe a macro-infinity, so from a scientific perspective physical infinity is unsupported and seems unlikely.

Space might appear "infinite" if you set up a word problem where you fire two photons off in opposite directions and track the distance between them over time, but without an observer the only place information exists is in those photons, and space is meaningless. Infinities of time are likewise artificial constructs of measurement, there is only the current moment.

chimprich• 3 years ago

The universe being finite in any way is even harder to grasp for me. How can existence itself have a beginning?

sidcool3• 3 years ago

That's a great point. I don't know (obviously). But I tend to think that there is actually a point in space beyond which it does not make sense to ask the question "What is beyond this". Just like when we are at North Pole, the question "Which way is North" does not make sense.

threeseed2• 3 years ago

Based on his talks Penrose doesn't either.

It's just that we are talking about googolplex timescales.

schiffern• 3 years ago

infinity seems impossible to me

"Me," in this case, is a microcontroller that evolved to move muscles on a primate body effectively.

Do we have any reason to believe such a system should be capable of grasping the true nature of the universe? After all, it's far outside the design spec!

imbnwa• 3 years ago

"Me," in this case, is a microcontroller that evolved to move muscles on a primate body effectively.

Distinction between brain and body not really a thing though, yeah?

user85012• 3 years ago

But it can’t NOT be infinite! If space were three dimensionally finite, then there must be a boundary. But if there were a boundary, then there must be something beyond that boundary. And now we have a paradox that infinitely regresses. Same goes for time. Same goes for distance. How can there be both a finite distance, as well as an infinite number of points between two distinct points? To me, infinity seems to be everywhere I look

kaashif• 3 years ago

If space were three dimensionally finite, then there must be a boundary.

Not true, space might just repeat in all directions - a finite volume but with no boundaries. Maybe if you go far enough you always end up back where you came from.

rramadass3• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524131

twangist2• 3 years ago

That seems to be a personal problem. There's nothing inconsistent about either space or time being infinite.

sidcool3• 3 years ago

It's a personal outlook, not a problem. It's not a statement of fact. It's an opinion at best.

wafer_thin2• 3 years ago

I can't think about these things too hard... stresses me out. What's a quark made up of again? 'Tiny rubber bands' :)

rramadass3• 3 years ago

All "Infinities" are not the same, you are using the word in a colloquial sense (i.e. non-converging) while there actually are different definitions/interpretations.

See wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity "Cosmology" section; the key point being The question of being infinite is logically separate from the question of having boundaries.

tempodox• 3 years ago

I posit that the big bang wasn't an event in historical past, but is an ongoing process. Stuff that falls into black holes is squirted over all of time and space in the universe. We measure that as background radiation.

reubenswartz• 3 years ago

Intriguing, but I think if that were the case, you wouldn't see the relatively homogeneous and very cold background radiation we see.

glitchc• 3 years ago

This isn't a new idea. It's been kicking around for some time (at least two decades), rather hard to prove/disprove since there's no currently known mechanism, even theoretical, for observing what might have happened befoee the big bang.

gizmo6863• 3 years ago

That isn't entirely true. As the article discusses, under the proposed conformal cyclic cosmology, gravitational waves would leave a lasting effect visible between aeons. This effect would be visible in the CMB, and some researchers (including Penrose) claim to have found such a signature in their analysis of the CMB. The validity of their analysis is still in dispute (because detecting such a signal from the noise of the CMB is a very hard problem), but in principle the signal would be there if CCC is correct.

checkyoursudo• 3 years ago

I have a really hard time understanding how gravity waves would survive the Big Crunches. Probably my failure to understand comes from how I think of space.

If all matter is re-crunched into a "singularity," then no space remains? Right? Or time either?

Where do these residual gravity waves exist? If the void of nothingness? That seems wrong.

I guess based on the article that the theory proposes that not everything is re-crunched (dubious?) but that some stuff remains in the universe (dead black holes are somehow not re-crunched?), and therefore space and time do not cease to exist between Bangs and Crunches?

I don't know. I just don't really understand, which is fine as I am a brain scientist not a physicist.

moi2388• 3 years ago

No offence, but Sir Penrose has been claiming a lot of very unlikely things the last couple of years without any evidence. Which is fine, philosophy is important, but let’s not put his statements in the realm of actual science.

ignite• 3 years ago

A hypothesis is part of science. You have to have an idea to have something to test!

namaria4• 3 years ago

Theses are parts of science. Hypo thesis is bellow thesis, a candidate.

timthorn• 3 years ago

Roger Penrose gave last year's Thomas Gresham lecture on this theory. The recording is online here: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/thomas-gresham-22

ttctciyf• 3 years ago

Listening to Penrose deliver his Feb 2023 lecture "The second law of thermodynamics: from black-hole singularities to conformal cyclic cosmology"[1] at Surrey university just now, coincidentally.

Penrose has a decent amount of lectures available on youtube that give an accessible but comprehensive introduction to his ideas on a cyclic cosmos, of which this is the most recent, afaik. I recommend it for anyone with a couple of hours who wants to understand where he's coming from.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLX4YwzuU20

fullsend• 3 years ago

Does anyone know how fleshed out Einstein’s ideas were up until his first papers? It strikes me that there are all these modern minds - Witten with his M theory, Wolfram, Penrose, so many others, who seem to just be putting things out there. “Could be this!” Impossible to prove, or mathematically beautiful but practically useless, etc. just a very strange stage of affairs.

hoseja3• 3 years ago

...which showed how objects that become too dense undergo gravitational collapse into singularities – points of infinite mass.

Infinite density, no?

dave3333• 3 years ago

Wondering how much if any common ground there is between what Penrose is suggesting and the cyclic universe Mills has proposed based on his classical theory https://brilliantlightpower.com/gutcp-review-completed-webb-...

dave3333• 3 years ago

Watching his Gresham talk (link in someone else's post) he represents the multiple cycles of the universe as cylinders connected at the round ends with time going along the central axis. He also represents the Big Bang universe as an upsidedown bell shape starting from a tiny radius, undergoing inflation and then later accelerating expansion shown by the outward flare of the bell. Not quite sure how he gets from multiple consecutive bell shapes to the cylinder representation. Seems like it should be more like a string of sausages with a big crunch before the next big bang.

dave3333• 3 years ago

On second listening, he stretches the base of the bell (the big bang phase) out and compresses the flare of the bell down using some mathematical transforms and makes the argument that mass is irrelevant at both ends. In the far future it is mostly massless photons and in the big bang things are so hot and fast that all the energy is kinetic and rest mass can be ignored. I still don't understand how the next cycle big bang originates.

Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs

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