Roger Penrose claims our Universe has been through multiple Big Bangs
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
It doesn't go against the current "dogma", as the Big Bang theory only covers history up until a fraction of a second after the big bang. Anything before that is basically fair game, even though some ideas are further out there than others.
Penrose admits it's a "crazy idea of his", and that's fine. He's looking for evidence and not just speculating. It's much less out there than Hossenfelder's thoughts about FTL travel in her video from yesterday. And not even remotely comparable to Linus Paulings musings about vitamins.
I understand that this is a speculation because it is very hard to collect evidence for that claim but it is still within the wide umbrella of what Penrose devoted his career.
He's made some claims that these "circles" have been found, as some colleagues of his are working on making such observations. Those "circles" have not been independently verified, however, nor is it yet possible to rule out process error in the data, or the observations calculated from the data.
The CMB should show cold spots from evaporated black holes that have expanded to several arc-seconds in diameter. It requires very sensitive survey data, though.
I didn't watch said video, but we have theories rooted in GR and Quantum Mechanics that would allow for FTL travel already using negative energy/pressure. We know there exists mechanisms to create negative pressure, like the Casimir effect. We know the universe is non-local, as per the Nobel prize awarded last year. And we are beginning to see experiments violate local causality. Who's to say we might not be able to engineer FTL travel at some point?
In other words, it's a violation of classical realism, not a violation of locality.
Also 'violates causality' is an awful lot to unpack, and is glossing over so much nuance that I don't think it's really a meaningful thing to say. For example violation of the Bell inequalities does not rule out superdeterminism, and that has a very solid account of causality. It's just not a conventional one.
> The Casimir effect shows that quantum field theory allows the energy density in certain regions of space to be negative relative to the ordinary vacuum energy, and it has been shown theoretically that quantum field theory allows states where the energy can be arbitrarily negative at a given point.[57] Many prominent physicists such as Stephen Hawking,[58] Kip Thorne,[59] and others[60][61][62] therefore argue that such effects might make it possible to stabilize a traversable wormhole.
There’s also solutions to FTL travel that don’t have to violate causality. Space itself is expanding faster than light.
My overall point is it’s weird for scientists to shut down the possibility of FTL travel when we have theories that don’t disprove it outright, especially when we don’t really know whether gravity is a bending in spacetime or is governed by the same rules as QFT. The ER=EPR conjecture really intrigues me, and I think following that path may help lead us to a better understanding of what’s possible.
But you can't use expansion of space to move matter or to travel. You could even argue that distant galaxies aren't even moving at all, they just appear to do so because the distance between them and us increases. Comparing velocities of distant objects in curved spacetime is tricky in general.
However, to manipulate spacetime like that, we'd have to control massive quantities of an never observed type of energy. Like, on the order of the mass of the galaxy, or at least solar masses. And constructing a wormhole between A and B will still take longer than light travels between the endpoints, so I'm not exactly holding my breath.
The Alcubierre drive (assuming it's feasible) will still violate causality though, and the self-consistency principle does not apply, so I'm convinced that's a bust.
My understanding was that there was no such thing as inertial frame observers in GR, and that an observer in GR is actually something traveling on a world line in time with a future light cone and a post light cone. The observer portion in GR is literally the ability to observe with light, not a coordinate system as defined from within an inertial frame as in special relativity.
Thats because in GR, because of the curvature of space, you could not extend a coordinate system across all of existence because you knew that in some areas curvature would cause that to be not accurate. You can sort of declare space effectively flat within a local region but not across the entire universe.
It also wasn't clear what someone moving at an co-frame to the average of all the stuff in the universe has to do with faster than light travel - in a spacetime diagram a co-frame would be vertical with a horizontal constant offset, but faster than light travel would have to be in v > c zone not vertical. Maybe I'm too much of a layman to understand the logic she was using but none of it was very clear to me.
She's obviously a very smart and professional physicist, but this video that she published is bordering on crank territory and it makes me wonder if the social media fame has gotten to her somehow. It's truly baffling.
Correct. The press is adding unwarranted gravitas. I'd file CCC next to the one-electron universe.
To answer the question, within reasonable limits, yes. If it is a thought experiment to provoke looking at a problem a different way, it could be useful. While Fred Hoyle's steady state theory didn't hold much water, using it as a basis to analyze certain problems, he was able to held figure out Nucleosynthesis. The problem is knowing the reasonable limits. Like, don't let it consume your entire life's work and use it as a means to analyze a problem from a different angle.
In context of Roger Penrose, it may be illuminating. Right now, I imagine most are trying to solve the problem starting at the big bang and working backwards. Penrose is essentially trying to pick some arbitrary potential solution and asking, "if this is true, what else must be true" and seeing if he can work his way forward to the Big Bang or not.
He's not a second Josephson.
That can't be true; those are two completely unrelated concepts. Compare "we're living in a simulation", which became mainstream despite the fact that (1) it is even more unfalsifiable than this is; and (2) it is identical in every way to the old, no-longer-interesting concept of "you are a brain in a jar".
Speculating that we might be living in a simulation is of course all in good fun.
An idea being popular does not mean it is not fringe. Otherwise any sci-fi trope from the Matrix or Interstellar could be called “mainstream”. A large number of people also need to believe it is true with a high degree of conviction.
In particular rings caused by the collision of black holes.
And from his talk he had reached out to colleagues from around the world to see if they did exist. So it seems like he does care about it being provable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose#Consciousness
He’s clearly a smart guy… but also has some hot takes.
(Zero judgement intended; only bringing this up as background context.)
Isn't this what most of science was built upon - Is he right or wrong? Sometimes a need for minds who can push ideas into scientific thinking.
If that wasn't the case, then we might not even have Quantum Physics as it is today...
Unlike medical cranks out there, Penrose has (far as I've seen) never said anything of this is definitive - only that there is the potential in his theory that Orch-OR is the likely seat of conciousness.
Sapolski's take on determinism was really a low blow for me, and I've since seen several other intellectuals I respect very highly espouse similar views, and there was a point where I would have agreed in my adolescence, but I've since then developed away from that course of thinking. I often wonder if it's a rationalization which is necessary for the framework of the theory of everything to be coherent.
But a quantum physicist would then ask "to what degree?" because quantum mechanics is very deterministic over large sample sizes (and a few trillion proteins in the brain would be a very large sample).
More importantly though, free will implies the ability to make a choice and that has problems when you invoke quantum indeterminacy to explain it: you don't get "a choice" you get random chance deciding things (and other depressing ideas like "human consciousness can't be backed up, saved or transferred - we really are trapped in these meat prisons and doomed to suffer).
And we've also got eyes, which in principal means that many life forms already have quantum-sensitive apparati, right? Magnetoreceptors as well, and they're also found in "lower lifeforms" in various different forms from the basest phototaxis to extraordinarily refined lens systems which can numerous wavelengths.
And then I suppose when talking in scale — what does it actually mean — to flip that coin when you've only got an N of one in reality.
Of course I would have to concede that I accept an element, even a large one of determinacy, but my experience also precludes the idea of it existing exclusively. I'm really just pattering away right now, frankly I know very little of quantum physics (nothing, really) it's just nice to know someone is willing to furnish a hypothesis contrary to what I believe is the consensus on the topic.
I'm good with that as Penrose is very clear where the uncontroversial science ends and the hot takes begin; he doesn't try to "peddle" anything. "Here is my hot take and this is the TRUTH" is something I have problems with, "here's my hot take a lot of people will disagree with, but I think it may be true because [...]" isn't; and is often even valuable even if the hot take turns out to be wrong, because it exposes shortcomings, omissions, or other things that are not yet entirely clear.
In addition to the empirical lack of convincing evidence, there is also a theoretical problem. In order for CCC to work, you need to assume that all massive particles decay. The is not inconceivable, but involves things like proton decay, which is speculative at best, and electron decay, for which (as far as I am aware) we do not even have a serious speculative mechanism.
But that's my own imagination
>Artificial constrains on technologies of abundance.
If I tell you A happened before B, you can always ask what happened before A.
For example, imagine the sequence of events `A, B, C`. After `C`, imagine that the cycle repeats with the beginning of `A` again, ad infinitum.
Also,i feel there are no satisfactory answers here. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover
That concept is easy to say, but very difficult to mentally accept. We’re too accustomed to thinking of time linearly since we’ve never had examples to the contrary.
For starters, linear things can be infinite too (e.g. integers). Being cyclic and being infinite are separate.
Second, I do not know if time is finite or not, but i do know it lasts longer than i do, and anything that does is essentially infinite from my perspective.
Is a time crystal a counter example? Guess its not something we would normally encounter anyways.
Maybe cyclicality or just from nothing are only real answers. Illogical as they may seem, in the end something from absolutely nothing would probably solve the problem.
That it understands any part of it at all is already more than can be expected from mere matter.
And that something does not make sense to the human mind doesn't mean that it can not be.
This was Nietzsche in 1885, musing on how developments in thermodynamics had complicated the mechanistic picture of the universe:
> And do you know what "the world" is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by "nothingness" as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be "empty" here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my "beyond good and evil," without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself-do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?- This world is the will to power-and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power-and nothing besides!
In conformal cyclic cosmology, the expansion never reverses. Instead, there is a bit of a mathematical trick. If you assume that all massive particles eventually decay, then at some point the universe will contain only massless particles which travel at the speed of light. In such a universe, scale becomes meaningless. That is to say, if you take a region of space that is 1 light year across and watch it evolve for 1 year; that is indistinguishable from a region that is 1 light second across evolving for 1 second. Taking this to the extreme, such a universe that is infinitely sparse is indistinguishable from one that is infinitely dense. In other words the state of our universe after infinite time is mathematically indistinguishable from the universe at the big bang. Of course, after applying that transformation, you would again see a universe with an infinite future that is also equivalent to the big bang, so you can apply the same transformation again.
I cannot imagine anything being infinite in the physical world. I find the simulation hypothesis more probable than Universe being infinite. Space and Time is not infinite. It may be Gazillions of centuries old, but not infinity. It can't be.
Yes, it's very complex, but there's plenty of room in infinity.
It doesn't need to have a "real" physical instantiation anywhere. It's like the simulation hypothesis, except you don't need the simulation. We're just the inside of an infinite self-experiencing mathematical structure, with nothing on the outside.
There are mathematicians unhappy with the notion even while being well versed in the Cantor (and other) arguments.
You can wander down that rabbit hole via (say) [1] as a starting point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...
[0] Title of a paper by John Wheeler. Can't find it right now, but if you google "it from bit" you'll find a lot of commentary on it.
What does it mean for something to be a physical structure? That you perceive it to be physical? But aren't your perceptions part of the universe? So how would you know if it actually "exists" anywhere?
Space might appear "infinite" if you set up a word problem where you fire two photons off in opposite directions and track the distance between them over time, but without an observer the only place information exists is in those photons, and space is meaningless. Infinities of time are likewise artificial constructs of measurement, there is only the current moment.
It's just that we are talking about googolplex timescales.
"Me," in this case, is a microcontroller that evolved to move muscles on a primate body effectively.
Do we have any reason to believe such a system should be capable of grasping the true nature of the universe? After all, it's far outside the design spec!
Distinction between brain and body not really a thing though, yeah?
Not true, space might just repeat in all directions - a finite volume but with no boundaries. Maybe if you go far enough you always end up back where you came from.
See wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity "Cosmology" section; the key point being The question of being infinite is logically separate from the question of having boundaries.
Edit: To reply to a commenter below, since I'm "posting too fast" according to HN.
> However, I fail to see how you settled on Catholicism to give you the answers you're looking for. [...] And if not, why pick Catholicism over any other major religion?
Fair question. I come from a Roman Catholic cultural background, even though I wasn't raised in a religious household, so the church is where I feel most at home.
> Do you really believe all the stories in the bible actually happened?
No, I don't. I regard the Bible more as a work of literature and a source of spiritual and personal inspiration than a history of events.
> And if this God does exist and wants us to worship him, why doesn't he make that more obvious, and why does he allow children to be raped and worshippers to be gunned down in his own Church?
My view is that God does not want us to worship him. God loves all his children regardless.
Evil exists in the world. It shouldn't, and we should do our best to rid ourselves of it. I'll have more answers when I go through my initiation.
The closest path to god is reality, from personal observation ad questions.
Like when it comes down to it we are all looking for answers that "satisfy" us. What else is there? Logic is just a complex way of verifying that the answers are convincing enough and thus satisfying.
The truth, meaning accepting our best accordance of theory to observable reality, then acting on that? That means not just in physics but in ethics as well and any other area.
That sounds like satisfaction to me. You looked for the answer that made sense and satisfied your notions of reality. But its not like you have access to divine revelation or Truth. You are working on what you think is like based on your observations and throwing ideas that aren't in accordance with what you know away because they don't satisfy you as an explanation.
> That means not just in physics but in ethics as well and any other area.
Oh boy. This makes even less sense for ethics. There is no emperical basis for ethics. Its entirely around what people feel is "right". You can't get to even simple things like murder is wrong just by observing the universe.
I've no doubt you have as much experience as I have people who will reject things that are clearly true, or even arguably true, rejecting evidence, to maintain a position that doesn't stand up. So what I'm saying is, some people don't "accept our best accordance is… to observable reality…". I mean, it amazes me the number of people on HN who will take and hold a position regardless.
> There is no emperical basis for ethics
Do you think I'm unaware of this. But suppose you see a small child in a street crying because they're lost. Assuming we have an inner life, you can deduce the child is unhappy. What is the right thing to do in this circumstance, to help them or walk on by?(I'm assuming the circumstances are as they appear, this is not intended as a trick question).
Morality isn't physics but it's not something too complex to tackle, and the religious don't have a monopoly on ethics (I mention this because you said you are an atheist, like me, and we don't need a book to tell us how to do the right thing Edit: I have been asked online by a Christian what the basis of my ethics is if I'm not religious. Cheeky sod)
Right. However the part you can't deduce emperically is if its a good thing to reduce the suffering of the child.
Sounds simple enough because mainstream morality demands a specific answer. But consider the vegan version of this question - animals clearly are suffering in slaughterhouses, how can you justify just walking by? This is a lot less compelling to a lot of people and yet the argument seems pretty much identical to the child case in terms of pure logic.
All this is to say, i think at the very bottom it always comes down to: i believe what i believe because i believe it. Or to phrase it a certain way, i found an answer that satisfies me. I help the child because it gives me satisfication to reduce the amount of human suffering in the world.
Is it actually necessary to buy into a theory? To belong to an opinion? Is it beneficial?
I find it hard to believe that the mindboggling complexity of protein machinery was purely accidental/probabilistic. I understand how evolution works, and it makes sense, but... to me at least, it seems more likely that there was a creative iterative process that "guided" matter towards the evolutionary system we have on earth vs lightning striking an ocean full of amino acids and DNA/cells/proteins coincidentally arranging in the right configuration to jump start evolution.
That “guide” was natural selection over millions of years.
It’s literally random chance, and if a change is beneficial, it sticks. If we were really “designed” then there are so many failures and inefficiencies that deserve scrutiny.
Chief among them, childhood cancers. Fuck a designer that left that bug in the system and shipped it.
Small nitpick: millions of years is how long Hominini brains have been evolving with stone tools. Mammalian brains had already been evolving for at least a hundred million years, animals in general for seven hundred million years, and the basic molecular machinery like genetics and proteomics had been evolving for billions of years.
The scale at which evolution operates at is truly mind boggling.
> Chief among them, childhood cancers. Fuck a designer that left that bug in the system and shipped it.
How is it the designer's fault if (for example) humans decide to build and detonate nuclear weapons, the fallout is blown across oceans and/or continents and precipitates into water supplies which then manifests as childhood cancers 25 years later (unbeknownst to the citizens)? That's not a "bug", that's just a natural consequence of physics and physical interactions of matter. Rinse and repeat with lead and other compounds which unknowingly are contaminating our environment and causing childhood cancers to happen in the aggregate?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne
[1] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/03/the_continuing_... (Emphasis added.)
I don't think anyone has proven the scales necessary for life to happen by chance. What you have done is worked off the base assumption that abiogenesis happened accidentally and therefore the time and scale needed to do so is the age and scale of the observable universe. Under the infinite monkeys theorem the works of Shakespeare will eventually be produced, but we are not working with infinite time and resources here. We are working with "just" 9 billion years and "just" 100 billion galaxies, which, for abiogenesis seems pretty short especially considering what % of planets have zero chance for life due to their composition and star proximity.
How many billions of years of compute time across how many parallel computers do you think it would take Conway's game of life with random RNG seeds to simulate itself (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8)? Regardless of your answer, I still find it more likely Conway's game of life simulating itself points to an intelligent force of some sort having iteratively created it.
I believe there are questions that aren't meant to be answered, and knowing the truth would break our collective minds.
So I’m surprised to see the Catholicism presented as an alternative to science.
Maybe they’ve reverted since I was a follower?
I did a lot of thinking and writing on the subject and concluded that we're part of what could be called "The Great Project"; see https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/06/metanarratives_... and the other "Favorites" links in the right-hand column.
Accepting God created the universe just moves the big questions one level of indirection upward: Why does God exist? Why does God exist with the characteristics that he does (e.g. why is God X instead of Y)?
It's unclear how this is more satisfying on an intellectual level. It's only more satisfying on an emotional level, as it usually comes with the belief of a personal God that loves and wants the best for you, not to mention an afterlife.
This idea of treating intellect and emotions as a dichotomy rather than as two inseparable parts of a harmonious whole has a history – it goes back to the ancient Greeks. Maybe we should question that idea, rather than just assuming it must be true?
And, is an afterlife really that implausible? Putting "supernatural" accounts of it to one side, how sure can you be that the quantum immortality hypothesis is false? Or: in an infinite future, any event with non-zero probability, no matter how remote its chance, will almost certainly eventually happen. Since the probability of our spontaneous resurrection from the dead (through thermal and/or quantum fluctuations) is unimaginably tiny yet strictly speaking non-zero, in a spatiotemporally infinite universe (as in eternal inflation), almost surely it will eventually happen. If the universe is infinite, an afterlife is almost certain; we don't really know whether the universe is infinite, so let's say that's 50-50, which makes an afterlife 50-50 – even if just as a Boltzmann brain. Of course, you can argue against this if you make certain assumptions about the criterion of personal identity, but we really don't know if those assumptions are true – which brings the probability of an afterlife back to 50-50. And then, if the simulation hypothesis is true (another 50-50), it would be very easy for our simulators to give us an afterlife if they wanted, and they might even feel ethically obliged to do so.
If the probability of an afterlife is actually 50-50, why do some people insist its probability is close to zero? Emotional reasons, perhaps? If you don't accept the religious claim that an afterlife is going to be fundamentally just–eternity suddenly becomes terrifying. What if our eternal fate is to spend aeons as a Boltzmann brain perpetually slipping in and out of existence in the cold darkness of space, a mind whose experiences have the bare minimum of coherence to count as experiences of a mind? What if our simulators are mischievous rather than benevolent, and have designed for us an afterlife in which they have fun at our expense?
Making stuff up to ponder the possibilities is all fine, don't get me wrong. But it shouldn't be given too much weight.
- life is worth living
- doing the right thing matters
All are unfalsifiable. I am deeply skeptical of anyone who claims to not believe unfalsifiable things.
I do think society works better if we assume these things to be rules (to a degree) and as a member of society I act (and benefit) accordingly, but objectively it doesn't matter at all. The beliefs you mention are a lot like belief in 'free will' in that regard, a convenient fiction.
However, I fail to see how you settled on Catholicism to give you the answers you're looking for. Do you really believe all the stories in the bible actually happened? And if not, why pick Catholicism over any other major religion? And if this God does exist and wants us to worship him, why doesn't he make that more obvious, and why does he allow children to be raped and worshippers to be gunned down in his own Church?
> was immediately followed with "you probably have a brain tumor for doing it" comments
Actually most comments weren't of this nature, but you climbed over those to find the one you could plant your flag of martyrdom on.
Like sheesh, imagine saying that in any other context. e.g. someone likes emacs, must be a brain tumour.
I'll share that I've been slowly turning into a buddhist, which is not the religion I was born into. I think there's a few things in common, including a sort of universal love and a perspective that could be phrased "it's not about me", but that there's something bigger/higher/more-powerful going on and my specific life experience isn't the most important thing in the universe. Those two things - love, and humility (maybe that's the best single word?) go a long way towards reducing inter-personal frictions large and small.
As long as these are non overlapping magisteria.
Not sure what your stem credentials have to do with anything here.
The big jump is between "god created the universe" and "that god is the <human religion> one". And I'm not talking about all the contradictions and terrible things in <sacred book> or the absurdity of things like "the son of god saved humankind from offending god (sin)" but there's no (good) answer to a simple fact: "children's cancer", since the official religious answer is "we cannot understand (god's plan)".
So, after that happens, we're back to the originating questions. From where did sufficient matter originate to go bang? And, how did that bang not violate the laws of motion?
To throw a match on this pile: To me, this seems to be science asserting the existence of God. ;)
The universe is not finitely/countably infinite. From the perspective of everything inside it, it is truly infinite. You can't escape something that goes on forever.
If you're saying the universe is infinite in any way, I'm going to need some proof.
If all matter is re-crunched into a "singularity," then no space remains? Right? Or time either?
Where do these residual gravity waves exist? If the void of nothingness? That seems wrong.
I guess based on the article that the theory proposes that not everything is re-crunched (dubious?) but that some stuff remains in the universe (dead black holes are somehow not re-crunched?), and therefore space and time do not cease to exist between Bangs and Crunches?
I don't know. I just don't really understand, which is fine as I am a brain scientist not a physicist.
Penrose has a decent amount of lectures available on youtube that give an accessible but comprehensive introduction to his ideas on a cyclic cosmos, of which this is the most recent, afaik. I recommend it for anyone with a couple of hours who wants to understand where he's coming from.
The only solution is every thing has always existed and there is no such thing as nothing
It is worth keeping in mind that reality is under no obligation to make any kind of sense to us.
I like this. It's reminds one to keep in mind that we have evolved to procreate, not necessarily understand reality accurately. Even wrong models can be useful in terms of passing along our genes.
- Blackhole Cosmology, Eternal Inflation: unscientific, dismiss reality
- Mathematical Universe: unscientific, no reality
Most of these concepts, in all their variety, share the same metaphysical premise that our observed universe was inevitable. To the extent that it appears very distinct, we simply cannot see the overall structure in which it was actually a certainty.
The Boltzmann Brain at least gets closer to facing the issue objectively. The basic reality that we experience today -- in which there's some amount of matter and charge, spacetime, in which eggs only scramble, etc. -- just happens to be so. From our point of view, something highly "improbable" happened in the distant past.
But keep in mind we are also the ones defining before and after based on our perception.
It happens that this matches our view of light propagation/etc, and our understanding of time. But that is today. Not during the big bang or "before" it.
In fact, we also know there were times where the current physical laws did not necessarily apply, shortly after the big bang for example. Currently we believe fundamental forces took time to separate. Heck, even subatomic particles took a very significant amount of time to form.
At a time when physical laws may not apply, things like "our view of the direction of time" would not have applied, either, for example, since most arrows of time boil down to the second law of thermodynamics, see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time. Which means even causality as we think about it breaks down somewhere in there.
This is hard to wrap your head around because it's so alien to how we currently perceive the universe. We want things to fit that perception.
Honestly, even before you get to "before the big the bang", we still can't explain why the universe inflated during the big bang (IE we have no idea what field did it, though we know some things about it, and just expect we will eventually discover it).
Are we inside a black hole, but with time inverted?
I'd rather hear the top 5 theories rather than the officially "accepted" ones from any given "community".
Want to break the speed of light? Why yes tell me and don't let them filter you.
Nobody is filtering anybody. Acceptance is just the end of the process not the beginning. It is expected most hypotheses do not start as accepted and most won't make it that far.
To give a start up analogy: an accepted theory is like a company that is profitable. Most start ups aren't profitable. Some might become so, most won't and will eventually fail. There is nothing wrong with not being profitable, everything starts somewhere, but its still important to describe the stage the company is at accurately.
Shouldn't the real question be " if we can reverse entropy somehow, shouldn't it be testable and what would that test look like?"
Infinite density, no?
Eternal Inflation is a similar idea, but suggests greater spacing between universes allowing for independent physics to develop.
Nobel disease or Nobelitis is the embracing of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life.
Absolute nonsense
It all just started 13.5 billion years ago?
We simply don’t know.
Occam's Razor: what problem with simpler theories does this "possibility" solve?
What do you mean "our belief" ? Yours maybe, but it doesn't satisfy my belief, my belief is different. Or maybe, a whimsical "belief" is not enough, in itself, for theories to aspire to meet. Feelings aren't facts about the nature of the universe.
Belief? Isn't the universe everything, by definition?
Penrose seems to be claiming that there is falsifiable evidence that this "incarnation" is not the only one. that's totally fringe (speculative).
A lot of theory in science is around advance Civilization that existed before modern day human (they are usually referred to as Giants). Hinduism talk about how earlier human were larger in height and have been reducing since the beginning.
People interested in the subject should start at the "Time" section of Hindu Cosmology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology