On 8 August 2021—Sir Roger Penrose's 90th birthday—BMUCO co-hosted a two-hour lecture on space-time singularities and conformal cyclic cosmology with the Chern Institute at Nankai University.
A Nobel Laureate's Birthday Lecture
The session concluded with an extended Q&A with the Nobel laureate, offering students and researchers worldwide a rare opportunity to engage directly with one of physics' most visionary thinkers.
Conformal Cyclic Cosmology
"What we call the Big Bang may not be the absolute beginning, but rather a transition point in an eternal sequence."
Penrose presented his radical cosmological model in which the universe iterates through infinite cycles, or "aeons." In this framework, the infinitely distant future of one universe becomes the Big Bang of the next through mathematical transformations that preserve the geometry of space-time.
Challenging the Big Bang
This challenges conventional cosmology by proposing that:
- The Big Bang is not an absolute beginning
- Time extends infinitely in both directions through cycles
- Evidence of previous aeons might exist in today's cosmic microwave background
- Black holes play a crucial role in the transition between cycles
The Mathematics Behind the Vision
The lecture drew on advanced concepts from general relativity and conformal geometry to argue that evidence of previous cosmic cycles might be detectable in today's cosmic microwave background radiation.
Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) uses sophisticated mathematical transformations to show how the infinite future of a universe dominated by radiation can be mathematically identified with the Big Bang of a new cycle—a profound reimagining of cosmic time.
Watch the full lecture:
youtube.com/watch?v=B2rl3dCqzho