Sunday 7 October 2012

About the cyclic model of Prof. Penrose.

I have recently read about the cyclic model of Prof. Penrose. And to be honest I feel somewhat shaken and confused.


First of all as I am not very familiar with this model does a recycled universe imply eternal recurrence such as that everything reproduce exactly the same so that we get to live again exactly the same lives. Or is there a variation of some cosmological constants.

Secondly I think there is still active interest in that field as they claim that they will test the hypothesis by employing the Einstein telescope and gaze even further into the big bang trying to find evidence of a previous big crunch but I am not aware whether it can be proven true or not. However in the case it does, what implication would that have with respect to faith.


Response: Roger’s idea is that the eventual end state of an expanding universe, where everything is “smoothed out” into a heat death, can be identified mathematically with an initial singularity because both a uniform distribution of matter and a singularity can be considered to have zero entropy.


This is (of course, from Roger) mathematically ingenious but it is far from clear whether it even could have any physical meaning. It’s not the same as a “big crunch” because it now seems almost certain that the universe will expand forever.


Roger wrote a paper claiming to find echos of a previous universe in concentric circles of early stars, but the consensus seems to be that the statistics of this paper are not remotely convincing, and in any case there are many other possible reasons why there might be concentric circles of stars.


Highly speculative cosmology is very interesting but has no real implications for faith. From God’s perspective no doubt all of these ingenious guesses seem amusingly naïve.








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