Science

Before the Big Bang & Conformal Cyclic Cosmology

What was there before the Big Bang?  This is one of the most perplexing contemplations in physics and astronomy.  There are number of theories to glimpse this distant past, however data is likely very scant, but maybe them is evidence of a prior universe in clear sight.

Here is a series of quite remarkable videos to help you contemplate what went before, before the oldest observable photons, 13.5 GA.

While I strongly recommend that you simply watch these videos in series, the last in the series is likely the most remarkable and my opening comments alluded to this.

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology(CCC) is a scheme whereby the universe is seen to be cyclic even though it never recollapse and bounces back out. Instead it undergoes whats called a conformal rescaling. What’s that ? Watch the film, all will be explained. CCC promises to solve many deep mysteries in cosmology such as why was the entropy of the big bang so low? What happened before the big bang? Where does the dark matter in our universe come from? This film addresses both the theory of CCC and the possibility of experimental verification.

Below you will recognise the image of the Cosmic Background Radiation gathered from the COBE Satellite over a  9 year period.

NINE YEAR MICROWAVE SKY http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/media/121238/index.html Nine Year Microwave Sky The detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe created from nine years of WMAP data. The image reveals 13.77 billion year old temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) that correspond to the seeds that grew to become the galaxies. The signal from our galaxy was subtracted using the multi-frequency data. This image shows a temperature range of ± 200 microKelvin. Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team WMAP # 121238 Image Caption 9 year WMAP image of background cosmic radiation (2012)

While much was made of the homogeneity of the data and the implications of this there are obvious patters in the data and various researchers have found concentric low variance circles in the CMB as can be seen in the image below.

Concentric low variance circles in the CMB data, Adam DeAbreua et al, Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics

Penrose and Meisner suggest that Conformal Cyclic Cosmology implies that these structures are the product of the collision of supermassive black holes which occurred towards the end (or indeed the infinity) of an earlier universe.  This is a most remarkable suggestion.  In a future universe a similar pattern may be all that is residual from our universe. Conformal Rescaling of gravity at the scale of the singularity could reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics.

Enjoy, I most certainly have.