“Signals from an earlier universe?” (Weekend function)

“I believe we exist in a multiverse of universes,” says theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, “highlighting the intriguing debate over the past decade between some of the greatest cosmologists and physicists on the planet, including the award winner Nobel 2020, Roger Penrose, on the signs that an earlier universe may exist in the old afterglow of the Big Bang.

“Modern thought, says Kaku, “It’s because time did not start with the big bang, and that there was a multiverse even before the big bang. In inflation theory and in string theory, there were universes before our big bang. “

Staggering implications of infinity

“If space is really infinite,” observes Dan Hooper, head of the theoretical astrophysics group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in At the edge of time, developing the theory of the multiverse, “the implications are staggering. In an infinite expanse of space, it would be difficult to see any reason why there wouldn’t be an infinite number of galaxies, stars and planets, and even an infinite number of intelligent or conscious beings, scattered around. in this unlimited volume. This is the infinity problem: it takes things that are otherwise highly improbable and makes them all inevitable.

“Staggering” – The implications of infinite space

The LIGO scientific collaboration and the Virgo collaboration revealed that scientists detected 39 new gravitational wave discoveries on October 29, 2020 – more than three times as many gravitational waves, as their first two races combined. Gravitational waves were first detected in 2015 and are ripples in time and space produced by the fusion of black holes and / or neutron stars.

“Gravitational wave noise” – Signs of an earlier universe?

The big question Penrose asks based on the recent detection of gravitational waves by LIGO is, “Is cyclic cosmology hiding in LIGO noise?” The provocative idea that concentric rings of uniform temperature in the cosmic microwave background – the radiation left behind by the Big Bang – could, in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in an “ aeon ” previous cosmic that existed before our Universe, written Edwin Catlidge for nature in “No evidence of time before the Big Bang”, was postulated by Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Institute of Physics in Armenia and theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford in 2010. They have argued, Catlidge reports, “that collisions between supermassive blacks in pre-Big Bang holes would generate spherically propagating gravitational waves which, in turn, would leave characteristic circles in the cosmic microwave background.

Is a “ghost universe” hidden in the cosmic background of microwaves?

“Roger Penrose has always been willing – if not happy – to have opinions that lie well outside mainstream science,” observes Dan Hooper, in an email to the Daily Galaxy. “He did this in the 1960s when he – and rightly so – argued that massive stars would eventually become black holes. More recently, he expressed his skepticism about the conventional view that our very first universe went through an era of cosmic inflation, in which space grew exponentially. Instead, he assumes that the Big Bang may not have been the start of our universe at all.

Big bang not the beginning of time

Penrose argued that there are extinct universes filled with phantom black holes which are hidden, embedded in the Cosmic Microwave background map – a phantom universe – and may have housed alien civilizations from an era before the Big Bang, when our universe began to expand rapidly and will continue to expand until all of its matter finally decays. This process restores uniformity and sets the stage for the next Big Bang and a new universe will emerge.

Proof of his idea is what Penrose calls Hawking Points: the pre-Big Bang black hole corpses that survived their own universe but are now at the end of their lives, leaking radiation as they vanish in nothing, reports The Penrose Institute.

Hawking Points – Black hole corpses from an earlier world

“So our Big Bang started with something that was the distant future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes that would evaporate, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these dots in the sky. , which I call Hawking Points, “Penrose added about his hypothesis, he invented” conformal cyclic cosmology “(CCC).

The coming years Googol

According to Penrose’s hypothesis, “Our universe is expanding and as it cools over the next several years (10,100) black holes will begin to glow in the night sky. While this “ glow ” is extremely faint – a temperature well below a ten-millionth of a degree above absolute zero – it may last for a year googol, and seen from the next eon, those shiny black holes – Hawking Points – will be among the largest sources of continuous power in the CMB night sky. The reason we don’t see these dots without computer analysis is that they are very faint and the early universe scattered them over a large area. What was once a point is now a disk about five times the diameter of our moon.

“A careful analysis of the night sky,” observes Penrose, “found about 30 of these points on the microwave cosmic background map. Five of these points coincide with concentric circles previously discovered in the CMB sky. Interestingly, one of the points coincides with the observation window of the BICEP 2 observatory, opening up the possibility of examining the coincidences with the magnetic field patterns that CCC would also predict at Hawking Points.

Strange Implications of Hawking Points – “Black Hole Corpses Before the Big Bang”

New evidence for a cyclical universee

In 2018, Physics World reports in “New Evidence for a Cyclic Universe,” Penrose published new evidence in support of CCC: “Rather than rings of almost uniform temperature, he instead identified patches in the micro cosmic background. -waves (CMB) which are much hotter than the surrounding area. The idea is that these hot spots could be due to radiation (mostly electromagnetic) emitted during the Hawking evaporation of supermassive black holes in the previous eon.

CMB sky image with Hawking points (Daniel An, Krzysztof A. Meissner and Roger Penrose, collaboration BICEP2, VG ​​Gurzadyan)

The Challengers

The view that the Early Universe could be filled with mysterious circles does not mean that we are seeing evidence of events that took place before the Big Bang, as one would expect, called into question by several independent studies. .

To verify their earlier claim from 2010, Gurzadyan looked at seven years of data from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, calculating the change in temperature variance in increasingly large rings around more than 10,000 points in microwave heaven. And indeed, Nature reports, it identified a number of rings in the WMAP data that had a significantly lower temperature variance than the surrounding sky.

“Dark and unfathomable creations of the universe” – Sir Roger Penrose, the man who proved their existence

The three groups challenging the Penrose conjecture reproduced Gurzadyan’s analysis of the WMAP data, and “all agree that the data contains circles of low variance. Where they separate from previous work is in the meaning they attribute to the primordial circles.

“The result obtained by Gurzadyan and Penrose does not provide any proof of the Penrose cyclic model of the Universe on standard inflation,” says James Zibin of the University of British Columbia.

“Absolutely trivial”

Gurzadyan, reports Nature, dismisses critical analyzes as “absolutely trivial”, arguing that there is necessarily agreement between the standard cosmological model and the WMAP data “at some level of confidence” but that a different model, such as that of Penrose, might fit the “even better” data.

“We found signatures that carry properties predicted by the model,” concludes Gurzadyan.

Massive black holes at the Big Bang – “Extraterrestrial universes may harbor different physical laws”

Mirroring Penrose’s model of phantom black holes in an extinct universe, Alexander Vilenkin, professor of physics and director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University and author of Many worlds in one: the search for other universes. “If our universe were only one universe among an infinite number, “says Vilenkin,” once the inflation stopped in ours, the pockets that had swelled would then have collapsed into black holes. The more each pocket is inflated, the more massive the black hole.

Many of these universes collapsed and formed black holes. If black holes are large enough, they can have swelling universes inside of them, and these expanding universes would be connected to the visible universe through wormholes. Infinite “bubble universes”, filled with alternate versions of ourselves or nothing at all, could exist alongside ours, according to Vilenkin, who introduced the idea of ​​quantum creation of the universe from a quantum vacuum in 2015. Universes that can be governed by different laws of physics.

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via Nature, Penrose Institute and Physics World – New Evidence for a Cyclic Universe by Roger Penrose

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