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Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoNobel Prize winners are not immune to crank thinking, usually outside of their area of speciality. There is Linus Pauling and vitamin C, and Penrose also writing about consciousness having quantum mechanisms.
- melling 4y agoIt’s a little unclear why his theory about the universe being reborn can’t be a possibility. It all just started 13.5 billion years ago? We simply don’t know.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago> It’s a little unclear why his theory about the universe being reborn can’t be a possibility. Occam's Razor: what problem with simpler theories does this "possibility" solve?
- m3kw9 4y agoIt satisfies our believe there is nothing else but this universe, but if you think there is more than just our own universe, our universe could have been triggered by something else. It could wobble like that none the less because gravity eventually wins and everything pulls back to the center
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago> It satisfies our belief What do you mean "our belief" ? Yours maybe, but it doesn't satisfy my belief, my belief is different. Or maybe, a whimsical "belief" is not enough, in itself, for theories to aspire to meet. Feelings aren't facts about the nature of the universe.
- rightbyte 4y ago> It satisfies our believe there is nothing else but this universe Belief? Isn't the universe everything, by definition?
- jjgreen 4y agoNo issue with considering this possibility, but unless it becomes clear that we can possibly squeeze some truth out of it on a human timescale, not really physics.
- markhahn 4y agoif it's actually "reborn", we can't know, so the question is invalid. Penrose seems to be claiming that there is falsifiable evidence that this "incarnation" is not the only one. that's totally fringe (speculative).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shagymoe 4y agoMaybe the universe is powering a piston.
- GalenErso 4y agoI know HN hates religion, but after being an atheist all my life, and graduating with a STEM degree (the 'S' part) from a top tier institution, I've started in the last year or so to turn to the church (Roman Catholic) and theism, both to find answers to some of life's mysteries, such as the origin of the Universe, and for personal reasons (I plan to start my initiation, starting with a baptism, within the next year or so) I have no evidence that God is real, yet I have faith in him. The idea that God created the universe is more satisfying to me than any scientific theory, and it isn't incompatible with the simulation hypothesis, or the idea that the Universe was created by a higher-level construct. Edit: To reply to a commenter below, since I'm "posting too fast" according to HN. > However, I fail to see how you settled on Catholicism to give you the answers you're looking for. [...] And if not, why pick Catholicism over any other major religion? Fair question. I come from a Roman Catholic cultural background, even though I wasn't raised in a religious household, so the church is where I feel most at home. > Do you really believe all the stories in the bible actually happened? No, I don't. I regard the Bible more as a work of literature and a source of spiritual and personal inspiration than a history of events. > And if this God does exist and wants us to worship him, why doesn't he make that more obvious, and why does he allow children to be raped and worshippers to be gunned down in his own Church? My view is that God does not want us to worship him. God loves all his children regardless. Evil exists in the world. It shouldn't, and we should do our best to rid ourselves of it. I'll have more answers when I go through my initiation.
- oefnak 4y agoMost of the other teachings of the church, however, are.
- pibechorro 4y agoThis. While there are benefits to most religions (community being the biggest) it comes along with insane and very often deadly noise, be it ignorant, purposely wrong or errors in translations or lost information through time, editors, gatekeepers. The closest path to god is reality, from personal observation ad questions.
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- Ralfp 4y agoNobel disease or Nobelitis is the embracing of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
- lokimedes 4y agoTo be fair, Penrose has always been an imaginative character, and the cyclic universe idea stems from long before he was awarded the Nobel.
- est31 4y agoYes, this suggestion is practically impossible to prove (or disprove), and quite fringe, but the listed examples in that article are usually of things people suggested outside of their field after they got the Nobel prize, and often things that were quite easily disproved at the time of suggestion. Meanwhile Penrose suggested CCC (2006) way before he received the Nobel prize (2020). Also, cosmology is Penrose's research area.
- markhahn 4y agowhat happened before this universe is not cosmology, but religion, and that's not Penrose's field. neither is neuroscience, where he's giving air to similarly unsupported ideas.
- RhodesianHunter 4y ago>what happened before this universe is not cosmology, but religion Absolute nonsense
- 2022-11-07 4y agoA lot of our well-evidenced scientific ideas today would've been practically impossible to prove at some point in history. I think people forget that all hypotheses are nothing more than thoughtful just-so stories when they're first stated.
- coding123 4y ago> a claim that is not widely accepted within the cosmology community. I'd rather hear the top 5 theories rather than the officially "accepted" ones from any given "community". Want to break the speed of light? Why yes tell me and don't let them filter you.
- bawolff 4y agoAccepted just more or less means there is enough evidence that most people agree its a convincing explanation. Nobody is filtering anybody. Acceptance is just the end of the process not the beginning. It is expected most hypotheses do not start as accepted and most won't make it that far. To give a start up analogy: an accepted theory is like a company that is profitable. Most start ups aren't profitable. Some might become so, most won't and will eventually fail. There is nothing wrong with not being profitable, everything starts somewhere, but its still important to describe the stage the company is at accurately.
- markhahn 4y agoyou might be disappointed if there are no valid (falsifiable) theories. lots of people seem to think there should be an answer to every question, but what if "just because" is good enough? that answer is more about the question.
- truculent 4y agoIANAP - why are these ideas so controversial? The article seems to suggest he has some (potentially) supporting evidence, and I don't have an intuition for how damning the counter-argument is ("This would necessitate making all particles lose mass as the universe gets old." Again, IANAP and physics can get weird).
- Ralfp 4y agoThose are controversial because in science you show the proof of something occruring, an primary proof being shown here mostly anounts to „trust me bro, the guy saying this got a nobel award in physics”. But the fault here is on media reporting, not Penrose himself.
- markhahn 4y agoit's fringe because it's almost certainly nonfalsifiable
- pieter_mj 4y agoI'm pretty sure Penrose won't accept his own theory if it's only nonfalsifiable. At the moment, it's only an idea but if it is unprovable he'll abandon it or be very clear about its non-scientific status. He's not a second Josephson.
- wafer_thin 4y agoI've watched enough interviews with Penrose to know you're correct. He likes all sorts of ideas, but he only really gets excited about the ones where he can see an experimental route to confirmation.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> it's fringe because it's almost certainly nonfalsifiable That can't be true; those are two completely unrelated concepts. Compare "we're living in a simulation", which became mainstream despite the fact that (1) it is even more unfalsifiable than this is; and (2) it is identical in every way to the old, no-longer-interesting concept of "you are a brain in a jar".
- mr_mitm 4y ago> What proof does the physicist have for this theory he dubbed “conformal cyclic cosmology” (CCC) that goes against the current Big Bang dogma? It doesn't go against the current "dogma", as the Big Bang theory only covers history up until a fraction of a second after the big bang. Anything before that is basically fair game, even though some ideas are further out there than others. Penrose admits it's a "crazy idea of his", and that's fine. He's looking for evidence and not just speculating. It's much less out there than Hossenfelder's thoughts about FTL travel in her video from yesterday. And not even remotely comparable to Linus Paulings musings about vitamins.
- JoelMcCracken 4y agoWhat are you referring to re Linus Paulings?
- Arnavion 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research_and_vitamin_C_advocacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_resear...
- mr_mitm 4y agoAnother user in this thread mentioned it and it's described in the wikipedia article about crazy nobel laureates linked elsewhere here. Basically, Pauling believed high doses of vitamin C could prolong the lives of cancer patients and cure schizophrenia, despite being out of his field of expertise and lack of evidence.
- elashri 4y agoBut Penrose's field of expertise is Cosmology. So I don't think I get the analogy? I understand that this is a speculation because it is very hard to collect evidence for that claim but it is still within the wide umbrella of what Penrose devoted his career.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
- m3kw9 4y agoThen how did the first one came about? What was there before it, pls don’t tell me nothing because it was nothing for a long time and then something must have triggered the first one. Or was there no first one because of infinity?
- rubicon33 4y agoI think this question can never actually be answered using our concept of language and time. If I tell you A happened before B, you can always ask what happened before A.
- Zolomon 4y agoI guess an easy idea to escape this is that it's a cycle of events that repeat forever. For example, imagine the sequence of events `A, B, C`. After `C`, imagine that the cycle repeats with the beginning of `A` again, ad infinitum.
- jliptzin 4y agoBut what got the cycle going in the first place?
- laichzeit0 4y agoNegation. The negation of nothing is something.
- b4ke 4y agoprecisely, there has to be nothing for there to be something. also above someone mentioned our conceptual framework for modeling such an understanding as lacking, but it works well enough, it’s more difficult to accept that the entirety is a comics soup and this is what our limited sensory capacity can contrive of it. time is an excuse for this reality.
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- hemantv 4y agoVery similar to Hinduism. Hinduism also describe multi verse, number of species on planet. A lot of theory in science is around advance Civilization that existed before modern day human (they are usually referred to as Giants). Hinduism talk about how earlier human were larger in height and have been reducing since the beginning.
- hemantv 4y agohttps://youtube.com/shorts/x-ZomoV6xhs?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/x-ZomoV6xhs?feature=share
- rramadass 4y agoDude, stop posting comments like this which is just ignorant and gives a bad name to Hinduism where the subject of "Cyclic Creation and Absorption of Universe" is well detailed. People interested in the subject should start at the "Time" section of Hindu Cosmology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology
- pyrolistical 4y agoI don’t see what is the alternative. If it’s not cyclic how can there be something from nothing? The only solution is every thing has always existed and there is no such thing as nothing
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoThere are alternative hypotheses like Eternal Inflation, and Blackhole Cosmology. Mathematical Universe hypothesis would have our existence merely be one expression of consistent mathematical laws, all possible variations of which exist in a level 4 multiverse. Or we could just be a Boltzmann Brain that only imagines it is a universe that started with a big bang and real physics are markedly different. It is worth keeping in mind that reality is under no obligation to make any kind of sense to us.
- bumby 4y ago>It is worth keeping in mind that reality is under no obligation to make any kind of sense to us. I like this. It's reminds one to keep in mind that we have evolved to procreate, not necessarily understand reality accurately. Even wrong models can be useful in terms of passing along our genes.
- rad88 4y agoNatural phenomena do tend to make sense when investigated scientifically. It seems rather that not all cosmologists and mathematicians have an obligation to develop scientific theories: - Blackhole Cosmology, Eternal Inflation: unscientific, dismiss reality - Mathematical Universe: unscientific, no reality The actual sciences brought to bear on cosmology (thermo and statistical mechanics) can make enough sense of our observations, without the psychedelics, but do nothing for cosmology as the search for meaning which is what it really is. Most of these concepts, in all their variety, share the same metaphysical premise that our observed universe was inevitable. To the extent that it appears very distinct, we simply cannot see the overall structure in which it was actually a certainty. The Boltzmann Brain at least gets closer to facing the issue objectively. The basic reality that we experience today -- in which there's some amount of matter and charge, spacetime, in which eggs only scramble, etc. -- just happens to be so. From our point of view, something highly "improbable" happened in the distant past.
- webwielder2 4y agoI've always liked the theory that every black hole has a white hole on the other "side" that spews out a universe from the information it collects. And the original black/white hole? Well, something something quantum fluctuation something out of nothing.
- brnaftr361 4y agoI like to think they're dumping it all into some central locus which will eventually cause a big squeeze. Totally unscientific, but there's something romantic to me about periodic sucking and banging. But that's my own imagination
- AmericanChopper 4y agoThat’s almost the basis of the concept of Cosmological Natural Selection, which was taken seriously by many credible physicists. It’s fallen out of favor due to the consensus on the Black Hole Information Paradox veering towards information preservation. But it’s still an interesting idea.
- computerfriend 4y agoPenrose was the one to propose the "cosmic censorship conjecture", that you can't have a naked singularity, to justify why we don't see white holes.
- karaterobot 4y agoI think the tone of the article is a bit too judgmental. He himself called it a 'crazy theory'. I took it to be a pet theory he thinks is interesting, personally would like to believe in, but knows he can't prove. We've all got some of those, there's room to talk about them without being called a crank.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> he himself called it a 'crazy theory' Correct. The press is adding unwarranted gravitas. I'd file CCC next to the one-electron universe.
- tcmart14 4y agoYea, that is my understanding. He does call it a crazy theory, but its a whole different kind of crazy that most people think of. I've listened to him talk about it and yea, when you actually listen to him you get the vibe of, "its an interesting idea that the math can't really prove or disprove, it may not be right, but it is an interesting thought experiment." I would say it is a step below Fred Hoyle. For those who don't know. Fred Hoyle held a rather unconventional idea or controversial idea of the steady state model, however he admitted he did it mostly to provoke conversation and knew that the more popular model held more water, so to say. An interesting side effect is, Fred Hoyle was able to help figure out how the heavier elements were made in the universe by entertaining his devil's advocate opposition.
- sitkack 4y agoShould we entertain unfalsifiable theories?
- bboygravity 4y ago"The Earth is round" was once an unsatisfiable theory for quite a while.
- namaria 4y ago
- dguest 4y agoLink to paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.01740 https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.01740
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- neotrope 4y agoEither we're in a simulation or the universe is infinite and has always existed. Eventually the science will catch up. Eternal Inflation is a similar idea, but suggests greater spacing between universes allowing for independent physics to develop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_inflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_inflation
- DangitBobby 4y agoHow does "a simulation" get you out of the universe always existing?
- _448 4y agoHere is Dr. Carl Sagan describing this in his Cosmos series (Episode 10, start at 36mins 30secs into the episode): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcpJj4g8IxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcpJj4g8IxM
- neom 4y agoFYI: I needed to VPN over to Mexico to watch this. Worth it though, super interesting/terrifying. Thanks for sharing!
- knob 4y agoHow did that quote go? >Artificial constrains on technologies of abundance.
- what-no-tests 4y agoEnjoy that now, before the "RESTRICT" Act gets passed!
- slenk 4y agoVPNs are illegal in China, but that doesn't stop a lot of them
- defgeneric 4y agoInteresting to note that the idea of the "Big Bounce" has been around a long time. Penrose's claim seems to be that there may be evidence of it in cosmic background radiation hotspots. This was Nietzsche in 1885, musing on how developments in thermodynamics had complicated the mechanistic picture of the universe: > And do you know what "the world" is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by "nothingness" as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be "empty" here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my "beyond good and evil," without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself-do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?- This world is the will to power-and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power-and nothing besides!
- gizmo686 4y agoPenrose's theory of conformal cyclic cosmology is distinct from the big bounce theory. In the big bounce theory, the universe reaches a point where expansion slows down and eventually reverses into contraction. Then, eventually the universe reaches a high enough density where something happens and it begins expanding again in a new big bang. In conformal cyclic cosmology, the expansion never reverses. Instead, there is a bit of a mathematical trick. If you assume that all massive particles eventually decay, then at some point the universe will contain only massless particles which travel at the speed of light. In such a universe, scale becomes meaningless. That is to say, if you take a region of space that is 1 light year across and watch it evolve for 1 year; that is indistinguishable from a region that is 1 light second across evolving for 1 second. Taking this to the extreme, such a universe that is infinitely sparse is indistinguishable from one that is infinitely dense. In other words the state of our universe after infinite time is mathematically indistinguishable from the universe at the big bang. Of course, after applying that transformation, you would again see a universe with an infinite future that is also equivalent to the big bang, so you can apply the same transformation again.
- bogdan0s 4y ago"The last question" vibes over there
- some_other_time 4y agoThis reminds me of something I read some time back. It was about hypervelocity stars, stars with escape velocity. These are stars that are moving fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of their galaxy. If they are escaping their galaxy and moving away from the galactic center, they may also be beyond the pull of any retraction. This, in turn, would mean the subsequent post-retraction Big Bang contains less matter than the prior one. Over an infinity of time and thus an infinity of these cycles, there would eventually be too little matter to go bang at all. So, after that happens, we're back to the originating questions. From where did sufficient matter originate to go bang? And, how did that bang not violate the laws of motion? To throw a match on this pile: To me, this seems to be science asserting the existence of God. ;)
- ivan_gammel 4y agoEscaped matter is somewhere else: it would do the Bang and expand into the less populated area. All you need is to assume that on a bigger scale the universe is uniform and all the Bangs are just the ripples in it.
- zamalek 4y agoSpacetime itself is not limited to slower than light speeds, and the big crunch has nothing to do with gravity. Rogue stars wouldn't escape it. The universe is not finitely/countably infinite. From the perspective of everything inside it, it is truly infinite. You can't escape something that goes on forever.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago> The universe is not finitely/countably infinite If you're saying the universe is infinite in any way, I'm going to need some proof.
- troops_h8r 4y agoAh but then you'd have to explain how God started, and the problem is that whatever explanation you concoct here might as well be used to explain the very thing you invoked God to explain in the first place
- TechBro8615 4y agoSubmission title is missing (2020)
- johnea 4y agoThat's nice and everything, but really, What difference does it make?
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago[dead]
- mwbajor 4y agoDoes this not invalidate everything we know about thermodynamics? Shouldn't the real question be " if we can reverse entropy somehow, shouldn't it be testable and what would that test look like?"
- tigerlily 4y agoWhat is special about the big bang singularity that makes it different from the conventional black holes we have theorised? Are we inside a black hole, but with time inverted?
- sidcool 4y agoThe concept of infinity seems impossible to me in physical world. It's a great mathematical concept to model our understanding. Just like imaginary numbers. I cannot imagine anything being infinite in the physical world. I find the simulation hypothesis more probable than Universe being infinite. Space and Time is not infinite. It may be Gazillions of centuries old, but not infinity. It can't be.
- jstanley 4y agoIf you're happy for mathematical structures to be infinite, why can't our universe (including ourselves) just be one infinite mathematical structure? Yes, it's very complex, but there's plenty of room in infinity. It doesn't need to have a "real" physical instantiation anywhere. It's like the simulation hypothesis, except you don't need the simulation. We're just the inside of an infinite self-experiencing mathematical structure, with nothing on the outside.
- defrost 4y agoIt's an assumption that someone is happy with mathematical structures being infinite. There are mathematicians unhappy with the notion even while being well versed in the Cantor (and other) arguments. You can wander down that rabbit hole via (say) [1] as a starting point. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_mathematics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoBecause universe is a physical structure, not mathematical, e.g. you can't define things into existence.
- jbotz 4y agoIs it? Says who? This is an untirely unfalsifiable assumption. I personally don't share it. "It from bit"[0], I say, mathematics is fundamental, physical reality is just our perception of the underlying math. [0] Title of a paper by John Wheeler. Can't find it right now, but if you google "it from bit" you'll find a lot of commentary on it.
- tempodox 4y agoI posit that the big bang wasn't an event in historical past, but is an ongoing process. Stuff that falls into black holes is squirted over all of time and space in the universe. We measure that as background radiation.
- TheRealNGenius 4y ago[dead]
- reubenswartz 4y agoIntriguing, but I think if that were the case, you wouldn't see the relatively homogeneous and very cold background radiation we see.
- glitchc 4y agoThis isn't a new idea. It's been kicking around for some time (at least two decades), rather hard to prove/disprove since there's no currently known mechanism, even theoretical, for observing what might have happened befoee the big bang.
- gizmo686 4y agoThat isn't entirely true. As the article discusses, under the proposed conformal cyclic cosmology, gravitational waves would leave a lasting effect visible between aeons. This effect would be visible in the CMB, and some researchers (including Penrose) claim to have found such a signature in their analysis of the CMB. The validity of their analysis is still in dispute (because detecting such a signal from the noise of the CMB is a very hard problem), but in principle the signal would be there if CCC is correct.
- checkyoursudo 4y agoI have a really hard time understanding how gravity waves would survive the Big Crunches. Probably my failure to understand comes from how I think of space. If all matter is re-crunched into a "singularity," then no space remains? Right? Or time either? Where do these residual gravity waves exist? If the void of nothingness? That seems wrong. I guess based on the article that the theory proposes that not everything is re-crunched (dubious?) but that some stuff remains in the universe (dead black holes are somehow not re-crunched?), and therefore space and time do not cease to exist between Bangs and Crunches? I don't know. I just don't really understand, which is fine as I am a brain scientist not a physicist.
- moi2388 4y agoNo offence, but Sir Penrose has been claiming a lot of very unlikely things the last couple of years without any evidence. Which is fine, philosophy is important, but let’s not put his statements in the realm of actual science.
- timthorn 4y agoRoger Penrose gave last year's Thomas Gresham lecture on this theory. The recording is online here: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/thomas-gresham-22 https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/thomas-gresham-22
- ttctciyf 4y agoListening to Penrose deliver his Feb 2023 lecture "The second law of thermodynamics: from black-hole singularities to conformal cyclic cosmology"[1] at Surrey university just now, coincidentally. Penrose has a decent amount of lectures available on youtube that give an accessible but comprehensive introduction to his ideas on a cyclic cosmos, of which this is the most recent, afaik. I recommend it for anyone with a couple of hours who wants to understand where he's coming from. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLX4YwzuU20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLX4YwzuU20
- fullsend 4y agoDoes anyone know how fleshed out Einstein’s ideas were up until his first papers? It strikes me that there are all these modern minds - Witten with his M theory, Wolfram, Penrose, so many others, who seem to just be putting things out there. “Could be this!” Impossible to prove, or mathematically beautiful but practically useless, etc. just a very strange stage of affairs.
- hoseja 4y ago>...which showed how objects that become too dense undergo gravitational collapse into singularities – points of infinite mass. Infinite density, no?
- dave333 4y agoWondering how much if any common ground there is between what Penrose is suggesting and the cyclic universe Mills has proposed based on his classical theory https://brilliantlightpower.com/gutcp-review-completed-webb-shows-predicted-big-bang-bust/ https://brilliantlightpower.com/gutcp-review-completed-webb-...
- dave333 4y agoWatching his Gresham talk (link in someone else's post) he represents the multiple cycles of the universe as cylinders connected at the round ends with time going along the central axis. He also represents the Big Bang universe as an upsidedown bell shape starting from a tiny radius, undergoing inflation and then later accelerating expansion shown by the outward flare of the bell. Not quite sure how he gets from multiple consecutive bell shapes to the cylinder representation. Seems like it should be more like a string of sausages with a big crunch before the next big bang.
- dave333 4y agoOn second listening, he stretches the base of the bell (the big bang phase) out and compresses the flare of the bell down using some mathematical transforms and makes the argument that mass is irrelevant at both ends. In the far future it is mostly massless photons and in the big bang things are so hot and fast that all the energy is kinetic and rest mass can be ignored. I still don't understand how the next cycle big bang originates.