9 ms·

There is no real information in this article. Roger Penrose has, as he himself puts it, a crazy theory that a universe existed before the big bang, and that the

There is no real information in this article. Roger Penrose has, as he himself puts it, a crazy theory that a universe existed before the big bang, and that the heat death of the universe starts a new big bang. That's the kind of chat you have over a few pints on the weekend, because there is nothing worth "media"ing about.

jnurmine 6y ago
If I were having a pint with Penrose, I'd take it a step crazier: what if the earlier universe is actually this one? And our universe ends up in a Big Bang, which begets a new universe, which is the one we are now in.
- mettamage 6y ago
  If that's the case, then wouldn't we have some kind of special background radiation? Penrose stated that some things must be visible through background radiation right? (something with black holes of the preveious aeon) If that's the case, then we might be able to observe that state and try to workout, whether we get to that same state.
- simonh 6y ago
  That would require that quantum states are not random, but repeat in a deterministic way.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    It could be that the determinism exists outside where we're observing. Also it might not be a given that events unfold in the same order, in each iteration.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  I was wondering the same thing. Perhaps time isn't a paint smear but a shockwave in a sphere.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tiborsaas 6y ago
  According to CCC and to my understanding, it is sort of the case. The universe has undergone a "scale change" which marks the beginning of a new Epoch. It's explained in this PBS Space Time episode much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC2JOQ7z5L0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC2JOQ7z5L0
bryan0 6y ago
> a crazy theory that a universe existed before the big bang, and that the heat death of the universe starts a new big bang. I realize this isn't what Penrose is saying, but is it really that crazy that random fluctuations will create the conditions for a new big bang in a universe at thermal equilibrium?
- warmfuzzykitten 6y ago
  It's not useful to speculate about things that are unfalsifiable. That's why Penrose wants these things to be observable traces from before the big bang.
  - nwienert 6y ago
    It seems not only has he made multiple predictions based on this theory, but he also is actively publishing research showing it may be true. Where do you get unfalsifiable from? There’s literally falsifiable claims being made.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    There are a lot more books sold on speculative fiction than real astronomical insights. Clearly, such speculation serves a purpose and must therefore be considered useful.
  - dumpsterdiver 6y ago
    > It's not useful to speculate about things that are unfalsifiable. I disagree. While such speculation obviously won't produce immediately useful data, where would we be today if noone had ever speculated about something which at the time could not be falsified? Case in point: the initial speculation on the existence of germs, which at the time was unfalsifiable. (Edit: adding refs) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease From the arcticle: "By the early nineteenth century, smallpox vaccination was commonplace in Europe, though doctors were unaware of how it worked or how to extend the principle to other diseases." So doctors were saving lives even though they had no idea exactly how or why it worked. They could neither prove nor disprove why it seemed to work, it simply did. The fact that it was unfalsifiable had nothing to do with the truth of the matter - it still saved lives.
jackfoxy 6y ago
I'm kind of shocked there's nothing on the front page about Penrose winning the Nobel prize for physics. The guy is really a polymath, even accounting for his outlandish and sometimes discredited theories.
- lucozade 6y ago
  If you mean the front page of HN, it was yesterday when he was awarded the Prize.
  - wrycoder 6y ago
    Except his name wasn't mentioned in the headline, just 'Nobel'.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- prox 6y ago
  Even so, his black hole theory also had a long time coming to acceptance. What he says might be hard to prove, but it doesn’t sound totally absurd, and probably also isn’t an uneducated guess by someone who knows the math.
nilkn 6y ago
It's really not a crazy idea at all, though. It's certainly less crazy than how much of established scientific canon would've appeared to the world when it was originally proposed. I would argue most of quantum field theory is much "crazier" than Penrose's CCC idea. That said, as far as I know it falls into the body of theories that struggle to make falsifiable predictions, and of the limited such predictions it has made nobody has found data that validates them in a statistically significant way yet.
- konjin 6y ago
  It really is. Every physicist has a dozen ideas like that they realize are stupid, have no evidence for and can't really be proven or disproven with current data. We call them crazy to keep our selves from going off the deep end and talking about ufos, the foundations of mathematics or the genetic differences between races.
- monkeycantype 6y ago
  Ok so a beer talk question to the physicists: By any measure of order, there are more disordered states than ordered states, and therefore any random change is likely to be a change to a more disordered state, leading to the inevitable heat death of the universe. But if this decent into chaos is only about probability, then given infinite time even the infinitesimal chance of spontaneous order will have it's moment. With infinite time will order spontaneously emerge from heat death? Was Epicurus right?
  - coddle-hark 6y ago
    The changes aren’t uniformly random though. This is akin to saying that given enough time a monkey throwing darts will eventually hit the moon.
    - monkeycantype 6y ago
      that's a beautiful sentence! I was so expecting Shakespeare at the end of it.
ffhhj 6y ago
Let's see how crazy the theory is first, where are those six ‘warm’ points in the sky (dubbed ‘Hawking Points’)?
muyuu 6y ago
you can have arbitrarily good convos over a few pints on the weekend... some of my best ideas were first written in the back of a napkin
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
What's your background in theoretical physics? I ask since I haven't studied past a college-level modern physics course and have no ability to judge this kind of conjecture. What is the experimental evidence for and against Penrose's model vs that of the string theorists (or other competing models)?
xwolfi 6y ago
Yeah Penrose idea is logical but then very vague on the proof side. It obvious we re misrepresenting reality by saying it started with a big bang, and there must be a simple way out of infinite looping or creation from the void in higher dimensions. But I stopped dreaming with Penrose because it always just stop at "but this is all just me saying it" kind of.
Eremotherium 6y ago
There's BBC Horizon episode called "What happened before the Big Bang?" where Penrose stated that he used t to kinda roll his eyes when people asked what happened before because the question didn't make sense. The whole episode is a wild ride including people from the Perimeter Institute proving soon to me how bizarre theoretical physics is at its frontier. Highly recommended watch.
nxpnsv 6y ago
It is a bit more than a few pints, more like a 300 page book...

jnurmine 6y ago

If I were having a pint with Penrose, I'd take it a step crazier: what if the earlier universe is actually this one? And our universe ends up in a Big Bang, which begets a new universe, which is the one we are now in.

mettamage 6y ago
If that's the case, then wouldn't we have some kind of special background radiation? Penrose stated that some things must be visible through background radiation right? (something with black holes of the preveious aeon) If that's the case, then we might be able to observe that state and try to workout, whether we get to that same state.
simonh 6y ago
That would require that quantum states are not random, but repeat in a deterministic way.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  It could be that the determinism exists outside where we're observing. Also it might not be a given that events unfold in the same order, in each iteration.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
I was wondering the same thing. Perhaps time isn't a paint smear but a shockwave in a sphere.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tiborsaas 6y ago
According to CCC and to my understanding, it is sort of the case. The universe has undergone a "scale change" which marks the beginning of a new Epoch. It's explained in this PBS Space Time episode much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC2JOQ7z5L0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC2JOQ7z5L0

bryan0 6y ago

> a crazy theory that a universe existed before the big bang, and that the heat death of the universe starts a new big bang. I realize this isn't what Penrose is saying, but is it really that crazy that random fluctuations will create the conditions for a new big bang in a universe at thermal equilibrium?

warmfuzzykitten 6y ago
It's not useful to speculate about things that are unfalsifiable. That's why Penrose wants these things to be observable traces from before the big bang.
- nwienert 6y ago
  It seems not only has he made multiple predictions based on this theory, but he also is actively publishing research showing it may be true. Where do you get unfalsifiable from? There’s literally falsifiable claims being made.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  There are a lot more books sold on speculative fiction than real astronomical insights. Clearly, such speculation serves a purpose and must therefore be considered useful.
- dumpsterdiver 6y ago
  > It's not useful to speculate about things that are unfalsifiable. I disagree. While such speculation obviously won't produce immediately useful data, where would we be today if noone had ever speculated about something which at the time could not be falsified? Case in point: the initial speculation on the existence of germs, which at the time was unfalsifiable. (Edit: adding refs) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease From the arcticle: "By the early nineteenth century, smallpox vaccination was commonplace in Europe, though doctors were unaware of how it worked or how to extend the principle to other diseases." So doctors were saving lives even though they had no idea exactly how or why it worked. They could neither prove nor disprove why it seemed to work, it simply did. The fact that it was unfalsifiable had nothing to do with the truth of the matter - it still saved lives.

jackfoxy 6y ago

I'm kind of shocked there's nothing on the front page about Penrose winning the Nobel prize for physics. The guy is really a polymath, even accounting for his outlandish and sometimes discredited theories.

lucozade 6y ago
If you mean the front page of HN, it was yesterday when he was awarded the Prize.
- wrycoder 6y ago
  Except his name wasn't mentioned in the headline, just 'Nobel'.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
prox 6y ago
Even so, his black hole theory also had a long time coming to acceptance. What he says might be hard to prove, but it doesn’t sound totally absurd, and probably also isn’t an uneducated guess by someone who knows the math.

nilkn 6y ago

It's really not a crazy idea at all, though. It's certainly less crazy than how much of established scientific canon would've appeared to the world when it was originally proposed. I would argue most of quantum field theory is much "crazier" than Penrose's CCC idea. That said, as far as I know it falls into the body of theories that struggle to make falsifiable predictions, and of the limited such predictions it has made nobody has found data that validates them in a statistically significant way yet.

konjin 6y ago
It really is. Every physicist has a dozen ideas like that they realize are stupid, have no evidence for and can't really be proven or disproven with current data. We call them crazy to keep our selves from going off the deep end and talking about ufos, the foundations of mathematics or the genetic differences between races.
monkeycantype 6y ago
Ok so a beer talk question to the physicists: By any measure of order, there are more disordered states than ordered states, and therefore any random change is likely to be a change to a more disordered state, leading to the inevitable heat death of the universe. But if this decent into chaos is only about probability, then given infinite time even the infinitesimal chance of spontaneous order will have it's moment. With infinite time will order spontaneously emerge from heat death? Was Epicurus right?
- coddle-hark 6y ago
  The changes aren’t uniformly random though. This is akin to saying that given enough time a monkey throwing darts will eventually hit the moon.
  - monkeycantype 6y ago
    that's a beautiful sentence! I was so expecting Shakespeare at the end of it.

ffhhj 6y ago

Let's see how crazy the theory is first, where are those six ‘warm’ points in the sky (dubbed ‘Hawking Points’)?

muyuu 6y ago

you can have arbitrarily good convos over a few pints on the weekend... some of my best ideas were first written in the back of a napkin

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

What's your background in theoretical physics? I ask since I haven't studied past a college-level modern physics course and have no ability to judge this kind of conjecture. What is the experimental evidence for and against Penrose's model vs that of the string theorists (or other competing models)?

xwolfi 6y ago

Yeah Penrose idea is logical but then very vague on the proof side. It obvious we re misrepresenting reality by saying it started with a big bang, and there must be a simple way out of infinite looping or creation from the void in higher dimensions. But I stopped dreaming with Penrose because it always just stop at "but this is all just me saying it" kind of.

Eremotherium 6y ago

There's BBC Horizon episode called "What happened before the Big Bang?" where Penrose stated that he used t to kinda roll his eyes when people asked what happened before because the question didn't make sense. The whole episode is a wild ride including people from the Perimeter Institute proving soon to me how bizarre theoretical physics is at its frontier. Highly recommended watch.

nxpnsv 6y ago

It is a bit more than a few pints, more like a 300 page book...