Roger Penrose: Why The Big Bang Was Not The Beginning
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Why does Penrose claim the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning of the universe?
My idea's a crazy idea, and I admit it's a crazy idea. But you need something crazy because the conventional ideas don't work. And I think people just sort of go with the crowd. I dun I'm just not persuaded by going with the crowd, if it doesn't make sense. I don't believe a word of it. The Big Bang was not the beginning. The same as quantum mechanics. No, there's a huge thing missing.
It's extremely accurate, you could say it's incomplete. Schrödinger and Einstein were much more polite.
They said, well quantum mechanics is incomplete. Swather suggests oh there's a little detail, oh change the sign here. I don't mean that. It's a big thing that's missing.
Standard cosmology says the Big Bang was the beginning. Penrose says that's dead wrong. His conformal cyclic cosmology makes each Big Bang the conformal continuation of a previous eon's remote future. Why? Because mass becomes irrelevant. Twice, in fact, for different reasons. At the Big Bang, there's extreme temperature, and in the remote future, there's only massless photons and scaling of Dirac particles. No mass means no scale, so conformal geometry. This lets the remote future match a stretched-out Big Bang. And this explains why our origin is smooth while black holes are tumultuous. Penrose argues inflation doesn't explain this, but his model does. He further insists that quantum mechanics is wrong, not just incomplete.
On this channel, I interview researchers on theories of reality with rigor and depth, and I've been blessed to speak to Roger Penrose four times. Once for the Institute for Arts and Ideas, once in a two-hour podcast last year in Oxford's Math Institute. today for another two hour session that you're about to see and soon again on this channel in a couple weeks with his collaborator Professor Yvette Fuentes on a groundbreaking new unannounced experiment. So subscribe for that. Enjoy this episode with Sir Roger Penrose. Professor What is something that most physicists believe that you think is completely wrong? Well there are several
things of that nature. I think probably the most blatant one is the cosmology s model I have. You see Most people who believe who Normal cosmologists these days. Uh Believe that the universe began With the big bang. And there was an inf an early phase called inflation. And this phase was supposed to have smoothed the universe out. I never believed that.
How does Conformal Cyclic Cosmology explain a smooth Big Bang and a turbulent future?
It doesn't make sense. Because why does it work in one direction and not in the other direction? I mean you get crazy singularities in black holes which are not automatically smoothed out by Time reversed inflation. It doesn't it's it's Okay. Most most cosmologists believe in inflation. I don't believe a word of it. But the this is just part of the story. You see, the story which I have is that the Big Bang was not the beginning. That the the universe goes through cycles. The cycles start with each one starts with its own big bang. Terminates. With a remote future, you see, this is the thing you have to understand that Is that the scheme that At both ends, the The conformal structure of space time is the relevant thing.
conformal structure to get an idea it's useful to think of these Escher pictures with infinity see angels and devils and they crowd out along this circle boundary r which Represents infinity, and this is a conformal representation. Now the same thing. applies, I claim, to the universe as a whole. And our remote future was Is a situation Gee, I'm arguing that there are two times, if you like. When the Each at each of these times mass becomes irrelevant. One of them is at the Big Bang, huh? Mass becomes irrelevant because the temperature gets so high that that the particles move around so fast that the mass contribution becomes trivial. I mean the the main contribution is the kinetic motion and the actual rest mass of the particles.
becomes less and less important the closer you get to the Big Bangs you go earlier. So that's a situation in which mass becomes irrelevant at the beginning. And another place where mass becomes irrelevant for a quite different reason is in the very remote future.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why does Penrose claim the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning of the universe?
0:00–2:48
2
How does Conformal Cyclic Cosmology explain a smooth Big Bang and a turbulent future?
2:48–34:30
3
What is the proposed link between wave‑function collapse and consciousness?
34:30–57:03
4
What was the black‑hole area inequality that Penrose discussed with Stephen?
57:03–1:08:35
5
Why did Penrose argue that the cosmological constant must be positive and how did this relate to his conformal cyclic cosmology?
1:08:35–1:29:16
6
What anecdotes does Penrose share about meeting Feynman and other physicists at conferences?
1:29:16–1:51:28
7
How does Penrose describe the three worlds (platonic, physical, mental) and their mysteries at the end of the interview?
1:51:28–1:52:39
Speakers
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