It is agreed among scientists that the creation of the universe emanated from the explosion of a blazing hot and extremely condensed ball of energy, referred to as the Big Bang. For many, there is nothing before that first moment; there is no thinking about a time before the beginning of time itself. Unlike many, Roger Penrose, a physicist at the University of Oxford, has been questioning the staple that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe. He’s arguing that it is merely a single stage in an eternal cycle of creation and recreation.
Penrose and two partners have reported strange hotspots of energy located at the edge of the observable universe in the sky. Although standard cosmology does not predict these features, Cyclic cosmology does. If Penrose is correct, the cosmic hotspots are remnants of a universe that existed prior to our own. This concept would change the way we think about the universe and our perceptions of origin, time and fate. Penrose told NBC news, “In cyclic cosmology, there is no beginning, and nothing is lost.”
According to Penrose’s cyclic cosmology model, the universe will continue to expand at an accelerated pace for billions of years, expanding so far and wide that space will nearly cease to contain matter. At this point, “mass” as a property of matter, will disappear. The universe will then have no recognizable structure. Once this happens, scale also disappears. The infinitely large universe becomes physically identical to an extremely condensed one, which is then reborn in a new Big Bang where all the material of the old universe meshed together into a tiny space.
This new universe would possess all the same types of matter and physical laws, thus leading to the creation of a new set of stars, planets and galaxies. “The next universe will be just like ours — but only in overall appearance, not in detail, of course,” Penrose says.
Penrose describes this renaissance as a “crossing over,” but it’s impossible to cross over from one universe to the next. Penrose tells NBC news, “Suppose you were an astronaut in a space capsule that could keep you alive for some ridiculous period of time. After a while, the mass fadeout would start to come in. Your spaceship would start to disintegrate, you would start to disintegrate, and in the limit, you would become massless things. The changeover to the next eon is not something you can experience.” While it is impossible for objects and people to cross over, energy can. That is how Penrose thinks he can see signs of what has come before.
In Penrose’s new paper, co-authored with physicists Daniel An and Krzysztof A. Meissner, they discuss the signs of what may have existed before by investigating pockets of energy that may have developed from black holes. When remnants of an old universe cross over into a new one, these pockets of energy are squeezed and create pockets of concentrated energy, the “hotspots.”
In accordance to cyclic cosmology, these points should be detectable as bright spots in the cosmic microwave background – an extending glow created when space was still red-hot from the Big Bang. When Penrose and his team discovered various of these points, to him, it may just be the evidence of a universe before us.
Courtesy: Planck space probe