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Comment by Ralfp | Hacker News Reader

    Nobel disease or Nobelitis is the embracing of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

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Yes, this suggestion is practically impossible to prove (or disprove), and quite fringe, but the listed examples in that article are usually of things people suggested outside of their field after they got the Nobel prize, and often things that were quite easily disproved at the time of suggestion. Meanwhile Penrose suggested CCC (2006) way before he received the Nobel prize (2020). Also, cosmology is Penrose's research area.

what happened before this universe is not cosmology, but religion, and that's not Penrose's field. neither is neuroscience, where he's giving air to similarly unsupported ideas.

>what happened before this universe is not cosmology, but religion

Absolute nonsense

A lot of our well-evidenced scientific ideas today would've been practically impossible to prove at some point in history. I think people forget that all hypotheses are nothing more than thoughtful just-so stories when they're first stated.

"People far smarter than me often have ideas I can't understand. They must be fucked up somehow. I can't see any other explanation for it."

To be fair, Penrose has always been an imaginative character, and the cyclic universe idea stems from long before he was awarded the Nobel.

Clearly, their creativity setting is too high and they're hallucinating answers to questions they weren't even asked.

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