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| quote: | Originally posted by Acton
There are multiple pre Big Bang theories, Conformal Cyclic Cosmology is merely one of them, so you're inevitably going to get many Physicists arguing against it.
Same with most theories, really. |
Yeah but the trouble is that the current model explains the data so well that a competing theory (especially one like this that would turn our understanding of cosmology on its head) is going to have to have a lot of strong evidence in its favour to be taken seriously. From the second article I posted it seems like Penrose is basing his conclusions on a single set of anomolous data from the CMBR (that cosmologists were already familiar with) and some pretty creative inferences. Physicists aren't just arguing against it because they want to protect their own idiosyncratic cosmological theories, they're arguing against it because it represents a serious departure from an established model that has a staggering weight of evidence in its favour and which would require a much stronger case than the one Penrose is presenting to see it overturned.
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
always good to have you aboard renegade!
i was gonna ask (with my numpty cosmology hat on) how there would be tell-tale signs of a previous universe's existence, given that everything in it was sucked back into something akin to a big crunch? wouldn't radiation be subject to the same gravitational pull that has contracted the entire universe to a single point of infinite density, therefore leaving no such evidence behind?
of course i haven't done science since 1994  |
Well I don't claim to understand it either, but I think he's trying to say that the geometry of the CMBR is more consistent with the idea that our universe was caused by a series of massive events in some previous universe (namely the collision of supermassive black-holes) than the idea that our universe emerged from one, single event that perhaps had no precursor. Obviously I'm not even remotely qualified to enter into this debate, but Penrose's quirkiness and the fact that this paper was submitted without peer-review leads me to be quietly skeptical.
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http://eschatonnow.blogspot.com/
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I mean, doesn't Hawkings refer to the collapse of the universe as 'the big crunch' or something like that? So, I heard somehting about the universe being like a heart-beat, starting (big bang) growing & then collapsing (the big crunch) all over again...
