An earlier universe can still be observed today, says Roger Penrose
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If that's the case, then we might be able to observe that state and try to workout, whether we get to that same state.
Also it might not be a given that events unfold in the same order, in each iteration.
It's explained in this PBS Space Time episode much better:
I realize this isn't what Penrose is saying, but is it really that crazy that random fluctuations will create the conditions for a new big bang in a universe at thermal equilibrium?
I disagree. While such speculation obviously won't produce immediately useful data, where would we be today if noone had ever speculated about something which at the time could not be falsified? Case in point: the initial speculation on the existence of germs, which at the time was unfalsifiable.
(Edit: adding refs)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease
From the arcticle: "By the early nineteenth century, smallpox vaccination was commonplace in Europe, though doctors were unaware of how it worked or how to extend the principle to other diseases."
So doctors were saving lives even though they had no idea exactly how or why it worked. They could neither prove nor disprove why it seemed to work, it simply did. The fact that it was unfalsifiable had nothing to do with the truth of the matter - it still saved lives.
(I could define myself as an atheist anyway so this is really a non issue for me)
If you've not yet experienced H2G2 I suggest tracking down the original radio version before the books, TV, or more modern film - it is widely available to buy in various formats. It is justly recognized as a classic.
> "A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"
> "Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle--but no dragon.
> "Where's the dragon?" you ask.
> "Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."
> You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.
> "Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."
> Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.
> "Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."
> You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.
> "Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."
> And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.
> Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?
> If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?
> Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.
> Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.
Currently we don't really understand qualia, but one mainstream theory is that qualia are a different kind of thing to anything else we know about (i.e. are non-physical).
Let's say this theory is true, and, further, that a method for detecting this different kind of thing is detected. That the dragon is invisible, floats, is heatless, is incorporeal, doesn't matter.
The theory that there is a dragon in the garage is falsifiable by the observation that a scan for qualia results negative.
You could say "ah, but this dragon is the dragon of any-test-you-can-come-up-with-doesn't-work, therefore you can't come up with any test which would work". But that would be begging the question.
[1]That is, all animals have qualia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#...
There is some number of dimensions that exist in total, which is a number higher than just the four dimensions that we are readily able to observe. Our universe exists within this higher dimension, alongside other universes.
Also, what we perceive as linear time within our universe might not be just a single dimension either. But even if it's not we can still treat it as though it was.
The laws that apply within each of these four dimensional universes as we might see them might or might not all be the same laws. I.e. all other universes might have the same laws as does ours, or some might be different, or all might be different. We can't know.
But the idea that I like to entertain is that these universes could serve some function within the higher dimensions.
For example, a set of many many parallel universes might each function analogously within the higher dimensions as to how cells function in our universe, and that analogously these parallel universes form a greater whole together as some sort of being that is made up of all of these.
Or another possibility might be that a universe could be able to develop within itself life that is able to sense the higher dimensions, and to break free of the universe within which it was created and to then continue existing in the higher dimensions beyond the end of the universe that created it. I imagine this not as human with more senses, but something very different. For example, the way it might come into existence in our universe could be through machinery that we create, with mechanical sensors that are able to pick up the other dimension(s), and with increased computational power the machines we create could in turn process all of the information available to it in order to construct something that somehow (yes, very vague sorry) is not limited by the reality of our universe itself.
But yeah, there is no scientific basis for said ideas. It's just something that I like to imagine.
Part of the problem with dark energy is that so much of it is unfalsifiable in ways similar to these theories. Of course, the key difference is that we can measure the effect dark matter has on the universe, whereas thus far no more than 4 dimensions have ever been observed.
Sure makes drinking fun though. Take a sip and say a hypothesis. Like apples to apples but for physicists.
> 10^10^10^56: Time for quantum effects to generate a new Big Bang, resulting in a new universe.
That said, as far as I know it falls into the body of theories that struggle to make falsifiable predictions, and of the limited such predictions it has made nobody has found data that validates them in a statistically significant way yet.
We call them crazy to keep our selves from going off the deep end and talking about ufos, the foundations of mathematics or the genetic differences between races.
With infinite time will order spontaneously emerge from heat death?
Was Epicurus right?
Feynman put it way better than me though. It was in the Messenger Lectures series if you’re curious. 6 wonderful and accessible videos; his audience was primarily laypeople, not scientists. Quite enjoyable.
While the theorem itself is well proven, I can't find a physicist who can say one way or another whether this applies to our universe.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/200722/poincaré-...
(Obviously IANAPhysicist.)
I don't understand all the properties a system must have so the Poincaré recurrence theorem applies, but as long as we don't know whether the (entire) universe is finite, that's sufficient to show that Poincaré recurrence may be impossible. In that situation, we can either find information that makes it impossible for sure, or otherwise we know that we don't know.
‘Nothing else can affect us‘ doesn't contradict that, because ‘us‘ would cease to exist at the Poincaré recurrence time (if not earlier).
N.B. I'm just pointing out some basic things, while having no clue how much merit the idea has in the first place, even if the universe has finite state space and infinite time. (I mean just the idea of trying to apply the Poincaré recurrence theorem to the whole universe, not Penrose's work.) AFAICT the proof only says that almost every state recurs infinitely often. So if you picked some state at random as your starting state, it's essentially guaranteed that it will recur, but when it comes to applying this to the universe, isn't it presumptuous to regard the big bang as such a state?
The answer may be yes or no in any particular axiomatization (model) of the physical laws, but depends strongly on the choice of model. Unlike a normal situation, when we talk about very-low-probability effects we are subject to any influence of "quantum gravity" and other "new/unknown physics" that may have a finger, however light, on the scale.
In the Standard Model I think the answer is yes, but we are already aware of some deficiencies (neutrino transitions).
Basically when all particles are moving at speed of light, time becomes meaningless and you can consider space to be infinitely small. I.e. identical conditions to Big Bang
Does this hold true for a 1/infinity chance event?
Or (not sure if this is analogous) if you choose infinitely many real numbers ~ unif(0, 1), is it guaranteed you will hit every number in that interval at least once? I'm not even sure the question is well-defined to be honest (at least not without making assumptions about infinities that we have no way to show hold true for this universe), but if it is, is the answer yes? It's not obvious to me.
For illustration, you are almost guaranteed to not win the lottery, but when you play again and again, then after something like 14 million times playing (for the German Lotto) you will win, and again after something like 28 million times playing, and so on, so you expect to often over long enough timescales, and you can start to impose additional constrains, for example winning with consecutive numbers, or the first few primes. And after a long enough timescale you start to win again with these additional constrains.
The theory is more that with "infinite" expansion, the universe becomes so spread out as to in spot become emptier than the vacuum energy, and a new universe spontaneously erupts in that low energy locale. In a very small nutshell.
The relevant part is at the end. Essentially, given enough time, quantum effects will result in an entire new universe spontaneously popping into existence. That time is ~10^(10^(10^56)).[0]
But, the number of ways that all particles in the universe can be arranged is only ~10^(10^115). That number is much smaller than the time to just go 'pop, new universe'. So, the much larger number also becomes about the time it takes to just have a new universe identical to our current one just go 'pop, new universe'.
The other entries in that article are just as joyously mind-bending. I really really love that page!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
[0] Side note: The time for a 'Boltzmann Brain' (a consciousness that just floats in the infinite void thinking away, somehow) to spontaneously appear is only ~10^(10^50).
EDIT: Changed Fat to Far
Also, I forgot to mention that all these timelines are in years.
But then I thought about it and about any human unit of time really doesn't change the numbers much at all. Heck, even measured as units of 'age-of-the-current-universe', the extra 0s just fade into the rounding errors very quickly.
To be clear here, that is stating that however you measure time pretty much has no meaning at these scales.
As the Wikipedia page[0] puts it:
> Although listed in years for convenience, the numbers beyond this point are so vast that their digits would remain unchanged regardless of which conventional units they were listed in, be they nanoseconds or star lifespans.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#cit...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593171721/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_bt...
For example a complete brain capable of imagining it’s in a universe could spontaneously occur... (Boltzmann brain) but the catch is that there needs to be enough usable energy for it to function. So even if order suddenly occurs, heat death means an eventual limit to complexity.
Ultimately something needs to happen to cause a sudden reverse into very low entropy, ie another Big Bang or something of the like.
We’re talking like 10^50 years here before heat death ends thought so... the universe has some time still.
When someone comments on the craziness of theories about before the big bang (and therefore the cause to which it was an effect), it is always worth remembering that the big bang itself was considered crazy by many initially.
The name even came from a dismissive description (with massive vocal air-quotes around "big bang") that just stuck as it is actually a good description (at least by dint of being catchy).
Crazy does not necessarily mean something is incorrect.
I ask since I haven't studied past a college-level modern physics course and have no ability to judge this kind of conjecture.
What is the experimental evidence for and against Penrose's model vs that of the string theorists (or other competing models)?
It obvious we re misrepresenting reality by saying it started with a big bang, and there must be a simple way out of infinite looping or creation from the void in higher dimensions.
But I stopped dreaming with Penrose because it always just stop at "but this is all just me saying it" kind of.
Not all require literal repetition, either, and the recurrence is purely semantic.
Literal exact recurrence is certainly a poetic subset, though! It would fit right into "Einstein's Dreams".
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return#Friedrich_Nietz...
Pretty nice fan manga adaptation, btw: http://fanfox.net/manga/the_last_question/c000/1.html
Then again, I'm apparently in the minority in my belief that the Foundation series isn't that good either and The God's Themselves is clearly his best work, so YMMV.
IIRC Heinlein's 1940 "The Roads Must Roll" for example invents the Segway (a self-balancing single-wheeled vehicle used by engineers maintaining ultra-high-speed moving walkways that everyone commutes on).
I just read Asimov's "Breeds There a Man...?" (1951) and couldn't shake the feeling that it was echoing Thomas Kuhn's 1962 theory of scientific development.
Both of them are my favorite popular-science authors. My apetite was whetted with Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", which led me to Sir Roger's "The Emperor's New Mind". Although relatively denser, with much focus I was able to understand the topics he covered (which were fascinating, and I still think about them) but I could never explain it back to you if needed!
Now, I've no-doubt I'm doing the great man a disservice, but it felt like a very thin conclusion for such a fat book.
It's a pity, because that was those books were my first and only experience of Penrose for many years, and it was only much later that I learned of his much more interesting work in geometry and mathematics, and their use in physics, the study of crystals, etc.
I understand that for someone who appreciates science, but not philosophy, the book turning out as straddling those two fields might be a letdown. But that's not the authors fault since those books are not presented as academic research, but only informed by it.
Infuriating for me are philosophical discussions which don't draw substantially on science.
My dismissal of his work on consciousness was based on those grounds. I think my "caricature" was fairly accurate, but if you think different that's fine, if you can elaborate.
The part I forgot above was that I also dismissed it on the basis of math, which is surprising given that Penrose is a greater mathematician than I'll ever be, but his whole reason to evoke "quantum" was that a Newtonian-based brain could not know that a "Gödel sentence" was true, so our brains must be non-Newtonian. It was absurd on the face of it (our brain's belief about statements don't constitute a formal logic), and was also well-criticized by other mathematicians, whose names I'd have to dredge out of my 20-year old essays.
Can you give us at least an idea of what bits we might be missing?
Because free time is finite. If they read it three times and still decided it verbosely failed to make its case, why not read it two or three times more?
Can you cite a point or two where you think Penrose makes a strong case above and beyond "consciousness and quantum theory are both mysterious and are therefore probably connected?"
The other part is where he describes how quantum physics, logic and consciousness are weird. That's basically just science popularization, coming from a top mind in both math and physics. To me, that's already enough to justify the price of admission: the time and mental effort of going through the book at a pace that assures comprehension, which does take some patience.
* you need mass to have time. Massles particles don't experience time.
* black holes eventually evaporate due to due to Hawking radiation. 10^100 years or more.
* after particles with mass and black holes have decayed, universe continues to expand without event until infinity.
* signal left from black hole evaporation travels as massless particles to the infinity.
* New universe can start after infinity (aeon). Angles are preserved in conformal geometry but not the distances. New universe starts small.
* You might be able to see the signature of the black holes from the old universe in the cosmic microwave background.
This is the part I don't get. A new universe starts how? Is it just hand waving or is there some sort of explanation for how a new singularity forms?
There is conformal boundary at the infinity. Geometrically similar to these Esher paintings: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xHdzmQCSOdI/U7xIsVKISmI/AAAAAAABQr...
See also Penrose diagram, timelike, spacelike and lightlike infinities! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_diagram
(Honestly he could make all this up and none of us could tell the difference)
I agree that it's probably not THE ANSWER, though!
Massive caveat: I’m not a physicist, and I regularly misunderstand “merely” relativistic physics.
From the infinitely huge and empty universe is born a new universe, but it has some finite total mass. I wonder what describes the amount of mass the empty universe turns into when a new cycle starts.
What you more likely mean is the "absolute" total of both positive and negative energies in the form of light/matter versus gravity respectively. Reminiscent of absolute convergence from mathematics [1]
Amount of gravitational energy is proportional to light/matter, so in theory, we should only need to solve for one thing - the amount of light/matter or the amount of gravity. Since gravity is non-renormalizable (mass -> gravity -> mass -> ........ -> gravity), it's not clear whether gravity or light/matter is more fundamental. They are clearly coupled but one doesn't necessarily cause the other.
Yeah, paradoxical, I know.
But, since the universe started once, and we are not sure how it got started, there is a chance for something like it to start again.
We will never know, but we do know that universes do start somehow, and the potential ability to detect previous/past universes is very intriguing for sure.
It's not as though the new rectangle suddenly appeared: the new rectangle was always there as one face on what you now realise was a cuboid. However, from your original perspective you couldn't see that face.
This example is not exactly the same as what's described by CCC: I don't know if you could describe each universe as having "new dimensions", and instead of shrinking, each universe is stretching out to infinity, but the "change of perspective" part is a useful analogy I think: each universe only looks like it starts at a single point if you observe it from the the right frame of reference. If you could somehow observe our big-bang from the reference frame of the prior universe it would be indistinguishable from an infinitely spread-out empty universe.
According to CCC (AIUI), all of the infinitely many future universes have already started, but each universe will end before even an instant of time has elapsed for the next universe: that is, "time" as measured in one universe is on an entirely different scale from "time" in another universe.
This is superficially similar to the hyperreal numbers, where you can have a set of numbers up to infinity that is strictly less than another similar infinite set.
I suspect that physically, or even mathematically, it's impossible to draw a distinction between those two descriptions.
From what I (layperson) can tell, it's like the expand/crunch cyclic universe theory, but without the need to crunch back down again.
Sounds like you're asking "is it really getting bigger endlessly and we take a larger distance as the unit value each cycle" and if so, that feels like the wrong kind of question when talking about distance not existing, but I don't know anything deep about it I've only heard him talk about it in interviews.
I don't really get why you can't reason the other way and say if there are photons and light, then there must be frequency, distance and time, therefore energy, and therefore mass. Heck, maybe that is the same reasoning; there, at the place of infinity, is all the energy and mass which ever was in the universe, all in one place. And what do you get when the whole universe is all in one place? A big bang? Transforming from matter to light (via stars burning and eventually Hawking radiation from the last things remaining: black holes) carries all the energy in the universe off into the distance. Where does it go? Off into infinity. If you take infinity as a place that means it all goes to the same place? Then that process is the "collapse" which brings everything together into the same place ready to be turned into matter again? That's my pop-science understanding of his proposal.
Like, the principle that massless particles cease experiencing time itself is fine, albeit kind of hard to think about (it is a negation of an idea; because they don't experience time they cannot “experience” anything, so I could tell you that “they also see the entire universe except for the thing that emitted them as one point/ray straight ahead of them” but I mean they don’t actually “see” anything so I am describing a limiting behavior here).
Whether you can stitch universes together like this is very very fringe but props to him for being a physicist and looking for some sort of observable consequence of a theory that could have otherwise just been a “yeah the math could go either way on this, think of it that way if you want to but there is no pressure.”
But whether it’s _exactly the same_, I think Penrose would say that they are _almost never_ the same. The question would be whether the Big Bang of this universe is perfectly mirrored in its final state and I think Penrose would say “well all the stuff that happened in the middle probably had some sort of effect on how the thing ended up.” So if we are seeing the black holes of some other universe’s death writ large on our cosmic microwave background, then I can’t imagine our black holes will eventually look exactly the same, will they? (Keep in mind, I’ve only met Penrose once and I embarrassed myself thoroughly at the time, so my guesses about what he would say are terribly terribly weak predictions.)
But maybe they will be the same. I talk a lot on HN about the impact of fixed-point theorems on US politics, but they would also apply here. If the universe has an infinite number of sequences one might expect that it starts to converge on a situation where the black-hole-patterns in are the same as the black-hole-patterns out. Now if that happened one might imagine that, if that fixed point supports life, then there is an infinite replay of nearly-identical life experiences across the many many eons of universe, and then if we treat our existence as “choose a conscious person across the eons to be” we would almost surely randomly choose someone in the oft-repeated universe. And so yes, we would be very likely to say that our universe's end would lead to another universe wherein the exact same people living out the exact same lives having the exact same discussion on Hacker News, haha.
I am a Christian and so these sorts of things are a sort of idle speculation, a joke to laugh at rather than something to inform today’s experience, a slacking-off between meetings rather than a contribution of deep value. But it’s certainly fun and funny to think about.
Edit: OOh I have an idea. What if the quantum effect is deterministic but appears random we experience are in fact ripple effects from the previous universes? Has anyone ever tried to measure quantum behavior in multiple simultaneous experiments in a kind of geometrical matrix system to see if there are shapes of correlation?
Apparently "fringe science" has two meanings.
1. Fringe as in the edge, something completely new very few others are pursuing: idea or viewpoint which differs from the accepted scholarship in its field.
2. synonym for pseudoscience.
CCC is fringe in the first sense. It's not my or other layman job to join discussion or have an opinion. We can just watch the discussion. It does not seem to make sense to other physicists. The observational parts are also questioned. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/12/07/penrose...
CCC requires these leaps to make it work.
The way it is stated, yes.
A correct statement of an innocuous truth of relativity is that the concept of "elapsed time" doesn't apply to massless particles at all. It only applies to particles that travel on timelike worldlines, and massless particles travel on null worldlines.
However, that correct statement does not imply either that massless particles don't experience time, or that you need mass to have time. Null worldlines in different directions can be used to define time.
2) let's say 50% fringe, at most.
3) 25% fringe. Most of the relevant science buys into this, and not just b/c it sounds nice.
4) Reasonable conclusion, if the stated theory was true. 25% fringe.
5) This is a multiplication of uncertain conclusions, so let's go with 75% fringe.
6) A conclusion of 5), which would be detectable. At most as much fringe points as 5), since it can be falsified.
There's always wikipedia to grasp basics, and then there's Ethan Siegwl with Starts with a Bang, and if you're still interested there's a lot more including astronomy and physics papers. astronomy.stackexchange.com, physics.stackexchange.com and even your local university.
Edit: Since this has been downvoted, I'm genuinely interested in the reasons and especially the facts you obviously have which I don't. Please let me know where I was wrong!
Then I went to write the outline best I could.
The two are not connected. I left out everything that contradicts modern physics because that was not my goal.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/kleenex-art-that-ended-in...
> to be forfeited to him and his company, Pentaplex Ltd, or to be destroyed.
I think of it as redefining the space that makes the universe, rescaling the size of the whole universe. Anyway, that's my personal take on this so far.
We know that our spacetime is in anti de Sitter space which is a type of hyperbolic geometry. In this geometry, infinity can be thought of as the edge of a sphere containing our universe.
Matter is equivalent not only to energy, but also to frequency and wavelength. Once all matter decays to photons and those photons hit infinity, there isn't anything remaining in the universe that provides any sense of scale. It could be argued that the concepts of frequency, wavelength, time, and length cease to exist.
Since you no longer can measure scale, all those photons at infinity look very similar to the photons in the primordial soup of the big bang. Furthermore there could theoretically be information transfer as the pattern of photons on the sphere vs. the pattern of the primordial soup (visible today as the cosmic background radiation) would be the same.
What does that mean "hit infinity"? I would think that could only happen after an infinite amount of time, in other words never.
From the reference frame of a photon, not only does it instantly arrive at infinity, but infinity and its original position one in the same since length is contracted to zero.
What happens is that the one universe becomes really boring-looking when you look at it from the perspective of one universe, so you use one of your mathematical freedoms (that everything looks the same under a conformal mapping) to shift your perspective. Conformal maps are their own interesting field of mathematics, let me tease you by saying that the usual Mercator map projection has this really nice property that if you zoom in on the map to get a "correct" close-up of any city, you get something that looks angle-for-angle correct at the city scale, you just have to zoom in less on, say, Bogota than Reykjavik because the poles are zoomed so much larger than the equator. By choosing other position-dependent scale factors you can instead get, say, the stereographic projection which has the same basic rule but now which direction is "north" always points to the center of a circle and now Bogota is bigger than Reykjavik, but they still both look "correct" locally, they are just out-of-scale at these longer distances. These angle-preserving deformations of space are called conformal maps. Actually, if you accelerate in any given direction the stars you see all crowd in towards the direction that you accelerate, but they do it conformally. So like the Pleiades will still look to first order like they look now as they squish in towards the direction you are going.
Anyway, there is a subset of physics called quantum field theory and a subset of this subset is called conformal field theory and during the heat death of the universe the QFT becomes a CFT and so you get this freedom to apply conformal mappings, the physics doesn't care and the equations stay the same. Penrose's idea is that if you choose the conformal mapping just right this heat death looks suggestively like a Big Bang for a different universe. So maybe from the perspective of this universe, the universe is ending in a heat death off at infinity, but maybe there is a perspective of a different universe where that same homogeneous ending was actually a homogeneous starting point. You redefine things like "distance" and "time" and stitch together the infinite future of one universe with the Big Bang of another. But like that other universe does not ever itself contract, the contraction comes in this redefinition of everything meaningful. The words of the old eon cease to have meaning and you use the words of the new eon.
Relevant bits:
> "From our own limited and relatively extremely primitive perspective, much more promising would undoubtedly be electromagnetic signals (although neutrinos just conceivably present us with another possibility). The conformal invariance of Maxwell’s equations allow us the possibility of such signals surviving the crossover from one aeon to the next-provided that the wavelength is long enough to avoid excessive scattering by charged particles in the early stages of the subsequent aeon."
> "Alternatively, there is the idea of information panspermia, introduced in [12], and attributed as ”Solution 23 to Fermi paradox” in [2], i.e. the propagation of the ”life codes” by the use of such signals, like the bit strings of human genome and of other species of terrestrial life"
On one hand yes, it feels like it should be the same. On the other hand, it is not parsimonious to create another space when there is plenty of room left in this one.
Should we define another universe as something which never has and never will interact with our universe? If so, anything we can observe of seemingly another universe is in actuality part of our universe.
The topic seems like it could use a consensus about what the words it uses should mean and not mean.
Yes, this is how I would interpret the definition of THE UNIVERSE. My personal interpretation of "another universe" would be something like- a multidimensional vacuum populated with matter/energy that currently exists from our inertial frame of reference, and there is nothing linking our own sparsely populated vacuum to this other universe. i.e. if you can observe it, then it's not a different universe. As Penrose states, this is merely an earlier version of the same universe, which existed before the Big Bang.
Here is a different prediction, a timelapse, of the fate of our universe (as told by Brian Cox), which assumes the universe will continue expanding...
How would you even know that matter is there? This looks like a non-falsifiable statement [0].
I think Penrose's ideas warrant more precisely defined language.
Is that possible?
(Not free I'm afraid)
After reading the article I did some research, and several places mentioned this theory as obsolete.
Crazy indeed, but intriguing.