Seeing Through the Big Bang into Another World

When?

Thursday 16 February 2012, 18.00

Where?

School of Management Lecture Theatre

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Speaker:

Professor Sir Roger Penrose

Admission information:

SOLD OUT - Waiting list now full

According to currently standard cosmology, the universe started with a Big Bang, immediately followed by a fleeting moment of exponential expansion, called “inflation”. Following this it settled down to a more sedate expansion, but due to what is called “dark energy”, it is currently commencing a second period of exponential expansion which is expected to continue indefinitely.

In this talk I describe the recent ideas of “conformal cyclic cosmology” (CCC), which argues that this picture—but without the initial inflationary period—provides merely one aeon of a continual succession of such aeons. The aeons never collapse in CCC, but the remote future of each becomes, when infinitely scaled down, the big bang of the next, where the final exponential expansion of the earlier aeon plays the role that inflation would have served in the next. This scaling down is not noticed by the contents of the universe at the crossover stage between one aeon and the next because there are no massive particles left at crossover, and mass is needed to measure the scales of space and time.

Collisions between supermassive black holes in the aeon previous to ours would, according to CCC, provide disturbances that should be just about observable in the cosmic microwave background of our own aeon. In this talk I shall describe evidence indicating that these disturbances may actually be present, and possibly providing us with some hint of what the aeon prior to ours may actually have been like. The talk will be largely free of equations, depending mostly on pictures, but a brief summary of the equations needed for the theory will be provided at the end.