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Roger Penrose is physicist, mathematician, and philosopher at University of Oxford. He has made fundamental contributions in many disciplines from the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology to the limitations of a computational view of consciousness.

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But where does the conformal cyclic cosmology of starting to talk about something before that singularity?

Well I began, I was just thinking to myself, how boring this universe is going to be.

This was discovered early in the 21st century.

People discovered that these supernova exploding stars showed that the universe is actually undergoing this exponential expansion.

And it seems to be a feature of this term that Einstein introduced into his cosmology for the wrong reason.

He put this new term into his cosmology to make it make sense.

And then when he got convinced that the universe had a big bang, he retracted it, complaining that this was his greatest blunder.

The trouble is it wasn't a blunder, it was actually right.

And so the universe seems to be behaving with this cosmological constant.

Okay, so this universe is expanding and expanding.

Well, it gets more and more boring for a while.

What's the most interesting thing in the universe?

The black holes more or less gulp down entire clusters of galaxies.

We will run into our Andromeda galaxy's black hole.

They'll get bigger and bigger and they'll basically swallow up the whole cluster of galaxies, gulp it all down.

Pretty well all, most of it, maybe not all, most of it.

Okay, then that'll happen to, there'll be just these black holes around, pretty boring, but still not as boring as it's going to get.

It's going to get more boring because these black holes, you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait an unbelievable length of time, and Hawking's black hole evaporation starts to come in.

And the black holes, It's incredibly tedious.

Each 1 goes away, disappears with a pop at the end.

Universe gets colder and colder and colder and colder.

And I thought, this is very, very boring.

So I thought, who's going to be bored by this universe?

And what the photons do, they don't get bored because it's part of relativity, you see.

It's not really that they don't experience anything, that's not the point.

Photons get right out to infinity without experience any time.

And this was part of what I used to do in my old days when I was looking at gravitational radiation and how things behaved in infinity.

As long as you don't have any mass in the world, infinity is just another place.

The photons get there, the gravitons get there.

They say, well, now I'm here, what do I...

There's something on the other side, is there?

In the usual view, it's just a mathematical notion.

There's nothing on the other side, that's just the boundary of it.

A nice example is this beautiful series of pictures by the Dutch artist M.C.

They're a very famous 1 with the angels and the devils, and you can see them crowding and crowding and crowding up to the edge.

Now the kind of geometry that these angels and devils inhabit, that's their infinity.

But from our perspective, infinity is just a place.

I'm sorry, can you just take a brief pause?

In just the words you're saying, infinity is just a place.

So for the most part, infinity, sort of even just going back, infinity is a mathematical concept.

You think there's an actual physical manifestation, in which way does infinity ever manifest itself in our physical universe?

You see, it's a thing that if you're not a mathematician, you think, oh, infinity, I can't think about that.

Mathematicians think about infinity all the time.

They get used to the idea and they just play around with different kinds of infinities and it becomes no problem.

But you just have to take my word for it.

Now 1 of the things is you see, you take a Euclidean geometry.

Well, it just keeps on keeps on going and it goes out to infinity.

Now there's other kinds of geometry and this is a what's called hyperbolic geometry.

It's a bit like Euclidean geometry, it's a little bit different.

It's like what Escher was trying to describe in his Angels and Devils.

And he learned about this from Coxeter, and he thinks that's a very nice thing, let's try and represent this infinity to this kind of geometry.

So it's not quite Euclidean geometry, it's a bit like it, that the angels and the devils inhabit.

And their infinity, by this nice transformation, You squash their infinity down so you can draw it as this nice circle boundary to their universe.

Now from our outside perspective, we can see their infinity as this boundary.

Now what I'm saying is that it's very like that.

The infinity that we might experience like those angels and devils in their world can be thought of as a boundary.

Now I found this a very useful way of talking about radiation, gravitational radiation, and things like that.

So now what I'm saying is that that mathematical trick becomes real.

That somehow the photons, they need to go somewhere because from their perspective, infinity is just another place.

Now this is a difficult idea to get your mind around.

So That's 1 of the reasons cosmologists are finding a lot of trouble taking me seriously.

But to me, it's not been such a wild idea.

What's on the other side of that infinity?

You have to think, why am I allowed to think of this?

And we in physics have beautiful ways of measuring time.

There are incredibly precise clocks, atomic and nuclear clocks, unbelievably precise.

Because of the 2 most famous equations of 20th century physics.

1 of them is Einstein's E equals mc squared.

The other 1 is even older than that, still 20th century, only just.

Nu is a frequency, h is a constant again like c, E is energy.

Put the 2 Together, energy and mass are equivalent, Einstein.

Energy and frequency are equivalent, blanks blank.

Put the 2 together, mass and frequency are equivalent.

If you have a massive entity, a massive particle, it is a clock with a very, very precise frequency.

It's not, you can't directly use it, you have to scale it down.

So your atomic and nuclear clocks, but that's the basic principle.

You scale it down to something you can actually perceive.

If you have mass, you have beautiful clocks.

But the other side of that coin is, if you don't have mass, you don't have clocks.

If you don't have clocks, you don't have rulers.

You don't have a measure of the scale of space and time.

You do have the structure, what's called the conformal structure.

You see, it's what the angels and devils have.

If you look at the eye of the devil, no matter how close to the boundary it is, it has the same shape, but it has a different size.

So you can scale up and you can scale down, but you mustn't change the shape.

So it's basically the same idea, but applied to space-time now.

In the very remote future you have things which don't measure the scale but the shape if you like is still there.

Now I'm going to go way back into the Big Bang.

Now as you get there, things get hotter and hotter, denser and denser.

Particles moving around almost with the speed of light.

When they get almost with the speed of light, okay, they begin to lose the mass too.

So for a completely opposite reason, they lose the sense of scale as well.

So my crazy idea is the Big Bang and a remote future, they seem completely different.

The other's very, very rarefied and very, very cold.

But if you squash 1 down by this conformal scaling, you get the other.

So although they look and feel very different, they're really almost the same.

The remote future on the other side, I'm claiming is that, where do the photons go?

You've got to get your mind around that crazy idea.

Taking a step on the other side of the place that is infinity.

So I'm saying the other side of our Big Bang, now I'm going back into the Big Bang.

There was the remote future of a previous eon.

And what I'm saying is that previous eon, there are signals coming through to us, which we can see and which we do see.

And these are both signals, the 2 main signals are to do with black holes.

1 of them is the collisions between black holes.

And as they spiral into each other, they release a lot of energy in the form of gravitational waves.

Those gravitational waves get through in a certain form into the next eon.

That's fascinating that there's some, I mean, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but that means that some information can travel from another eon.

I mean, I've seen somewhere described sort of the discussion of the Fermi paradox, you know, if there's intelligent life.

Being, you know, communication immediately takes you there.

a paper, my colleague Vaheguru Zazen, who I worked with on these ideas for a while.

Right, so if the universe is just cycling over and over and over, punctuated by the singularity of the Big Bang, and then intelligent, or any kind of intelligent systems can communicate through from eon to eon, why haven't we heard anything from our alien friends?

That's fundamentally the reason, is we...

I mean, the SETI program is a reasonable thing to do, but still speculation.

It's trying to say, okay, maybe not too far away was a civilization which got there first, before us, early enough that they could send us signals, but how far away would you need to go before...

We haven't seen any signals yet, but it's worth looking.

What I'm trying to say, here's another possible place where you might look.

Now you're not looking at civilizations which got there first.

You're looking at those civilizations which were so successful, probably a lot more successful than they were likely to be by the looks of things, which knew how to handle their own global warming or whatever it is, and to get through it all and to live to a ripe old age in the sense of a civilization, to the extent that they could harness signals that they could propagate through for some reason of their own desires, whatever we wouldn't know, to other civilizations which might be able to pick up the signals.


Speaker 0: But where does the conformal cyclic cosmology of starting to talk about something before that singularity?

Speaker 1: Well I began, I was just thinking to myself, how boring this universe is going to be. You've got this exponential expansion. This was discovered early in the 21st century. People discovered that these supernova exploding stars showed that the universe is actually undergoing this exponential expansion. So it's a self-similar expansion.

And it seems to be a feature of this term that Einstein introduced into his cosmology for the wrong reason. He wanted a universe that was static. He put this new term into his cosmology to make it make sense. It's called the cosmological constant. And then when he got convinced that the universe had a big bang, he retracted it, complaining that this was his greatest blunder.

The trouble is it wasn't a blunder, it was actually right. Very ironic. And so the universe seems to be behaving with this cosmological constant. Okay, so this universe is expanding and expanding. What's going to happen in the future?

Well, it gets more and more boring for a while. What's the most interesting thing in the universe? Well, there's black holes. The black holes more or less gulp down entire clusters of galaxies. It'll swallow up most of our galaxy.

We will run into our Andromeda galaxy's black hole. That black hole will swallow our 1. They'll get bigger and bigger and they'll basically swallow up the whole cluster of galaxies, gulp it all down. Pretty well all, most of it, maybe not all, most of it. Okay, then that'll happen to, there'll be just these black holes around, pretty boring, but still not as boring as it's going to get.

It's going to get more boring because these black holes, you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait an unbelievable length of time, and Hawking's black hole evaporation starts to come in. And the black holes, It's incredibly tedious. Finally evaporate away. Each 1 goes away, disappears with a pop at the end. What could be more boring?

It was boring then. Now this is really boring. There's nothing, not even black holes. Universe gets colder and colder and colder and colder. And I thought, this is very, very boring.

Now that's not science, is it? But it's emotional. So I thought, who's going to be bored by this universe? Not us, we won't be around. It'll be mostly photons running around.

And what the photons do, they don't get bored because it's part of relativity, you see. It's not really that they don't experience anything, that's not the point. Photons get right out to infinity without experience any time. It's the way relativity works. And this was part of what I used to do in my old days when I was looking at gravitational radiation and how things behaved in infinity.

Infinity is just like another place. You can squash it down. As long as you don't have any mass in the world, infinity is just another place. The photons get there, the gravitons get there. What do they get?

They run to infinity. They say, well, now I'm here, what do I... There's something on the other side, is there? In the usual view, it's just a mathematical notion. There's nothing on the other side, that's just the boundary of it.

A nice example is this beautiful series of pictures by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher. You may know them. The ones called Circle Limits. They're a very famous 1 with the angels and the devils, and you can see them crowding and crowding and crowding up to the edge.

Now the kind of geometry that these angels and devils inhabit, that's their infinity. But from our perspective, infinity is just a place. Okay, there is-

Speaker 0: I'm sorry, can you just take a brief pause? Yes. In just the words you're saying, infinity is just a place. So for the most part, infinity, sort of even just going back, infinity is a mathematical concept. I

Speaker 1: think this is 1

Speaker 0: of the things. You think there's an actual physical manifestation, in which way does infinity ever manifest itself in our physical universe?

Speaker 1: Well, it does in various places. You see, it's a thing that if you're not a mathematician, you think, oh, infinity, I can't think about that. Mathematicians think about infinity all the time. They get used to the idea and they just play around with different kinds of infinities and it becomes no problem. But you just have to take my word for it.

Now 1 of the things is you see, you take a Euclidean geometry. Well, it just keeps on keeps on going and it goes out to infinity. Now there's other kinds of geometry and this is a what's called hyperbolic geometry. It's a bit like Euclidean geometry, it's a little bit different. It's like what Escher was trying to describe in his Angels and Devils.

And he learned about this from Coxeter, and he thinks that's a very nice thing, let's try and represent this infinity to this kind of geometry. So it's not quite Euclidean geometry, it's a bit like it, that the angels and the devils inhabit. And their infinity, by this nice transformation, You squash their infinity down so you can draw it as this nice circle boundary to their universe. Now from our outside perspective, we can see their infinity as this boundary. Now what I'm saying is that it's very like that.

The infinity that we might experience like those angels and devils in their world can be thought of as a boundary. Now I found this a very useful way of talking about radiation, gravitational radiation, and things like that. It was a trick, a mathematical trick. So now what I'm saying is that that mathematical trick becomes real. That somehow the photons, they need to go somewhere because from their perspective, infinity is just another place.

Now this is a difficult idea to get your mind around. So That's 1 of the reasons cosmologists are finding a lot of trouble taking me seriously. But to me, it's not been such a wild idea. What's on the other side of that infinity? You have to think, why am I allowed to think of this?

Because photons don't have any mass. And we in physics have beautiful ways of measuring time. There are incredibly precise clocks, atomic and nuclear clocks, unbelievably precise. Why are they so precise? Because of the 2 most famous equations of 20th century physics.

1 of them is Einstein's E equals mc squared. What's that tell us? Energy and mass are equivalent. The other 1 is even older than that, still 20th century, only just. Max Planck, E equals h nu.

Nu is a frequency, h is a constant again like c, E is energy. Energy and frequency are equivalent. Put the 2 Together, energy and mass are equivalent, Einstein. Energy and frequency are equivalent, blanks blank. Put the 2 together, mass and frequency are equivalent.

Absolutely basic physical principle. If you have a massive entity, a massive particle, it is a clock with a very, very precise frequency. It's not, you can't directly use it, you have to scale it down. So your atomic and nuclear clocks, but that's the basic principle. You scale it down to something you can actually perceive.

But it's the same principle. If you have mass, you have beautiful clocks. But the other side of that coin is, if you don't have mass, you don't have clocks. If you don't have clocks, you don't have rulers. You don't have scale.

Speaker 0: So you don't have space and time.

Speaker 1: You don't have a measure of the scale of space and time.

Speaker 0: Oh, scale

Speaker 1: of space and time. You do have the structure, what's called the conformal structure. You see, it's what the angels and devils have. If you look at the eye of the devil, no matter how close to the boundary it is, it has the same shape, but it has a different size. So you can scale up and you can scale down, but you mustn't change the shape.

So it's basically the same idea, but applied to space-time now. In the very remote future you have things which don't measure the scale but the shape if you like is still there. Now that's in the remote future. Now I'm going to do the exact opposite. Now I'm going to go way back into the Big Bang.

Now as you get there, things get hotter and hotter, denser and denser. What's the universe dominated by? Particles moving around almost with the speed of light. When they get almost with the speed of light, okay, they begin to lose the mass too. So for a completely opposite reason, they lose the sense of scale as well.

So my crazy idea is the Big Bang and a remote future, they seem completely different. 1 is extremely dense, extremely hot. The other's very, very rarefied and very, very cold. But if you squash 1 down by this conformal scaling, you get the other. So although they look and feel very different, they're really almost the same.

The remote future on the other side, I'm claiming is that, where do the photons go? They go into the next Big Bang. You've got to get your mind around that crazy idea.

Speaker 0: Taking a step on the other side of the place that is infinity. Okay, but.

Speaker 1: So I'm saying the other side of our Big Bang, now I'm going back into the Big Bang. Back, backwards. There was the remote future of a previous eon.

Speaker 0: Previous eon.

Speaker 1: And what I'm saying is that previous eon, there are signals coming through to us, which we can see and which we do see. And these are both signals, the 2 main signals are to do with black holes. 1 of them is the collisions between black holes. And as they spiral into each other, they release a lot of energy in the form of gravitational waves. Those gravitational waves get through in a certain form into the next eon.

Speaker 0: That's fascinating that there's some, I mean, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but that means that some information can travel from another eon.

Speaker 1: Exactly.

Speaker 0: That is fascinating. I mean, I've seen somewhere described sort of the discussion of the Fermi paradox, you know, if there's intelligent life. Yes. Being, you know, communication immediately takes you there. So

Speaker 1: do you think?

Speaker 0: We have

Speaker 1: a paper, my colleague Vaheguru Zazen, who I worked with on these ideas for a while. We have a crazy paper on that, yes. Looking at the Fermi paradox, yes.

Speaker 0: Right, so if the universe is just cycling over and over and over, punctuated by the singularity of the Big Bang, and then intelligent, or any kind of intelligent systems can communicate through from eon to eon, why haven't we heard anything from our alien friends?

Speaker 1: Because we don't know how to look.

Speaker 0: That's fundamentally the reason, is we...

Speaker 1: I don't know, you see, it's speculation. I mean, the SETI program is a reasonable thing to do, but still speculation. It's trying to say, okay, maybe not too far away was a civilization which got there first, before us, early enough that they could send us signals, but how far away would you need to go before... I mean, I don't know. We have so little knowledge about that.

We haven't seen any signals yet, but it's worth looking. It's worth looking. What I'm trying to say, here's another possible place where you might look. Now you're not looking at civilizations which got there first. You're looking at those civilizations which were so successful, probably a lot more successful than they were likely to be by the looks of things, which knew how to handle their own global warming or whatever it is, and to get through it all and to live to a ripe old age in the sense of a civilization, to the extent that they could harness signals that they could propagate through for some reason of their own desires, whatever we wouldn't know, to other civilizations which might be able to pick up the signals.

But what kind of signals would they be? I haven't the foggiest. You

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Roger Penrose: Infinite Cycles of the Universe Punctuated by Big Bang Singularities