Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology Roger Penrose, in collaboration with the Armenian physicist Vahe Gurzadyan, introduced an alternative to the inflationary cosmological model. According to his "conformal cyclic cosmology", the universe undergoes cycles of expansion ("aeons"), each starting with a big bang and continuing forever in accelerated expansion. There is no "big crunch" at the end of each universe but instead an "infinite scale change" that turns the infinite expansion of one universe into the big bang of the next one ("Before the Big Bang", 2006). The starting point of his thinking is the second law of thermodynamics. Since the entropy increases going forward in time, it must decrease if we travel back in time to the big bang. Therefore, the initial state of the universe must have the lowest possible entropy (i.e. must be the most "special" of all possible states), but the microwave background radiation (the remnant of the big bang) shows that the early universe had matter in thermal equilibrium, i.e. maximum entropy. In other words, it seems that the early universe at the big bang was very similar to the state to which our universe is heading in the distant future. Put it in terms of mass and energy, at the big bang the energy of the universe was largely due to the extremely fast speed of the particles (to their kinetic energy) rather than to their masses (negligible because fast moving particles are almost mass-less), and that's precisely where the universe is heading at the end of its accelerating expansion (discovered in 1998, credited to "dark matter"). Both at the beginning and at the end the universe will be dominated by light, not matter. The end of the universe looks a lot like the big bang. Hence Penrose's theory (that also pleases religious people both in the Christian West and in the Hindu and Buddhist East). Back to the beginning of the chapter "The New Physics" | Back to the index of all chapters