The universe keeps dying and being reborn, claims Nobel Prize winner
Sir Roger Penrose claims our universe has been through multiple Big Bangs, with more coming.
09 October, 2020
Credit: Adobe Stock
- Roger Penrose, the 2020 Nobel Prize winner in physics, claims the universe goes through cycles of death and rebirth.
- According to the scientist, there have been multiple Big Bangs, with more on the way.
- Penrose claims that black holes hold clues to the existence of previous universes.
<p>Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematician and physicist from the University of Oxford who has just shared this year's Nobel Prize in physics, claims our universe has gone through multiple Big Bangs, with another one coming in our future.</p><p>Penrose received the Nobel for his working out mathematical methods that proved and expanded Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, and for his discoveries on black holes, which showed how objects that become too dense undergo gravitational collapse into <em>singularities</em> – points of infinite mass. </p><p>As he accepted the Prize, Penrose reiterated his belief in what he called "a crazy theory of mine" that the universe will expand until all matter will ultimately decay. And then a new Big Bang will bring a new universe into existence.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"The Big Bang was not the beginning," Penrose said in an <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/06/earlier-universe-existed-big-bang-can-observed-today/" target="_blank">interview</a> with The Telegraph<em>.</em> "There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future."</p>
<p>What proof does the physicist have for this theory he dubbed "<a href="https://physicsworld.com/a/inside-penroses-universe/" target="_blank">conformal cyclic cosmology</a>" (CCC) that goes against the current Big Bang dogma? He said he discovered six "warm" sky points (called "Hawking Points") which are all about eight times larger than the diameter of the Moon. The late Professor Stephen Hawking, whose name they bear, proposed that black holes "leak" radiation and would eventually evaporate. As this might take longer than the age of the universe we are currently inhabiting (13.77 billion years old), spotting such holes is very unlikely.</p><p>Penrose (89), who collaborated with Hawking, thinks that we are, in fact, able to observe "dead" black holes left by previous universes or "aeons". If proven correct, this would also validate Hawking's theories. </p><p>The physicist's <a href="https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-abstract/495/3/3403/5838759" target="_blank">2020 paper</a>, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society<em>, </em>offers evidence of "anomalous circular spots" in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that have raised temperatures. The data revealing the spots came from <em>Planck</em> 70 GHz satellite and was confirmed by up to 10,000 simulations.</p>
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQ3OTQ4MC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyNDk0NDEzMH0.GcLV8x_ctTTYymT2whD9sycdDArlNWsQ4OsN9O7qW4A/img.jpg?width=980" id="8fa68" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ad98fc78f930ba2b0e56906c6010cf59" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="635" data-height="318" />
Hot spots in Planck CMB data.
Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration
<p><span style="background-color: initial;">Penrose's <a href="https://physicsworld.com/a/new-evidence-for-cyclic-universe-claimed-by-roger-penrose-and-colleagues/" target="_blank">2018 paper</a> pinpointed radiation hot spots in the CMB as possibly being produced by evaporating black holes. A <a href="https://physicsworld.com/a/penrose-claims-to-have-glimpsed-universe-before-big-bang/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">2010 paper</a> by Penrose and </span><span style="background-color: initial;">Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia found support for cyclic cosmology in the uniform temperature rings within the CMB. The scientists proposed then that the rings were caused by signatures of gravitational waves from colliding black holes in a universe that preceded ours.</span></p><p>These ideas are controversial within the cosmologist community, with some pointing to the difficulty of conforming an infinitely big universe in one aeon to a super-small one in the next. This would necessitate making all particles lose mass as the universe gets old.</p><p>Check out <a href="https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/e06/PAPERS/THESPA01.PDF" target="_blank">Penrose's most recent paper,</a> titled "Apparent evidence for Hawking points in the CMB Sky" <a href="https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-abstract/495/3/3403/5838759" target="_blank">here</a>.</p><p>For another fascinating Penrose theory, <a href="https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/why-a-genius-scientist-thinks-our-consciousness-originates-at-the-quantum-level" target="_blank">check out his views</a> on the quantum-level origins of our consciousness.</p>
Roger Penrose - Did the Universe Begin?
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Stephen Hawking thought black holes were 'hairy'. New study suggests he was right.
The outer edges of a black hole might be "fuzzy" instead of neat and smooth.
27 January, 2020
NASA
- A recent study analyzed observations of gravitational waves, first observed in 2015.
- The data suggests, according to the researchers, that black holes aren't bounded by smooth event horizons, but rather by a sort of quantum fuzz, which would fit with the idea of Hawking radiation.
- If confirmed, the findings could help scientists better understand how general relativity fits with quantum mechanics.
<p><br></p></div>
<p>What's it like on the outer edges of a black hole?</p><p>This mysterious area, known as the event horizon, is commonly thought of as a point of no return, past which nothing can escape. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, black holes have smooth, neatly defined event horizons. On the outer side, physical information might be able to escape the black hole's gravitational pull, but once it crosses the event horizon, it's consumed. </p><p>"This was scientists' understanding for a long time," Niayesh Afshordi, a physics and astronomy professor at the University of Waterloo, <a href="https://dailygalaxy.com/2020/01/weird-world-of-quantum-black-holes-may-confirm-stephen-hawkings-hypothesis/" target="_blank">told</a> <em>Daily Galaxy. </em>The American theoretical physicist John Wheeler summed it up by saying: "Black holes have no hair." But then, as Afshordi noted, Stephen Hawking "used quantum mechanics to predict that quantum particles will slowly leak out of black holes, which we now call Hawking radiation."</p>
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjYyMjQ3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMzI1MDk1N30.Fnld7ChMUzXy_VdBtxP3kSXHkhqqqclW7GYseub__qY/img.jpg?width=980" id="1d682" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3dd54daf3d98c373321a719b8624844b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser
<p>In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking famously proposed that black holes aren't truly "black." In simplified terms, the theoretical physicist reasoned that, due to quantum mechanics, black holes actually emit tiny amounts of black-body radiation, and therefore have a non-zero temperature. So, contrary to Einstein's view that black holes are neatly defined and are not surrounded by loose materials, Hawking radiation suggests that black holes are actually surrounded by quantum "fuzz" that consists of particles that escape the gravitational pull.</p><p>"If the quantum fuzz responsible for Hawking radiation does exist around black holes, gravitational waves could bounce off of it, which would create smaller gravitational wave signals following the main gravitational collision event, similar to repeating echoes," Afshordi said.</p><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjYyMjQ0My9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzMzI3NTgxMX0.2XJnYQfIv90vqMxBFGvSMxnpyF73-wkkENIOsvGqEjE/img.jpg?width=980" id="0173a" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="80754bdfb6f1c5159c263da4e7f1cbf0" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman
<p>A new study from Afshordi and co-author Jahed Abedi could provide evidence of these signals, called gravitational wave "echoes." Their analysis examined data collected by the <a href="http://www.virgo-gw.eu/" target="_blank">LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors</a>, which in 2015 detected the first direct observation of gravitational waves from the collision of two distant neutron stars. The results, at least according to the researchers' interpretation, showed relatively small "echo" waves following the initial collision event.</p><p>"The time delay we expect (and observe) for our echoes ... can only be explained if some quantum structure sits just outside their event horizons," Afshordi told <em><a href="https://www.livescience.com/black-hole-echoes-unsettle-einstein-relativity.html" target="_blank">Live Science</a>.</em></p><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjYyMjQ1Ni9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyNTg3MDE1OX0.uoQzdeyGHm66Ivj0jvXQiKpeaO3CLCl8AjaH574qYck/img.png?width=980" id="44bac" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="753409b3403a3784c95122d8a9f4af2b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Afshordi et al.
<p>Scientists have long studied black holes in an effort to better understand fundamental physical laws of the universe, especially since the introduction of Hawking radiation. The idea highlighted the extent to which general relativity and quantum mechanics conflict with each other. </p><p>Everywhere — even in a vacuum, like an event horizon — pairs of so-called <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/something-from-nothing-vacuum-can-yield-flashes-of-light/" target="_blank">"virtual particles"</a> briefly pop in and out of existence. One particle in the pair has positive mass, the other negative. Hawking imagined a scenario in which a pair of particles emerged near the event horizon, and the positive particle had just enough energy to escape the black hole, while the negative one fell in.</p><p>Over time, this process would lead black holes to evaporate and vanish, given that the particle absorbed had a negative mass. It would also lead to some interesting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox#Recent_developments" target="_blank">paradoxes</a>.</p><p>For example, quantum mechanics predicts that particles would be able to escape a black hole. This idea suggests that black holes eventually die, which would theoretically mean that the physical information within a black hole also dies. This violates a key idea in quantum mechanics which is that physical information can't be destroyed.</p><p>The exact nature of black holes remains a mystery. If confirmed, the recent discovery could help scientists better fuse these two models of the universe. Still, some researchers are skeptical of the recent findings.</p><p>"It is not the first claim of this nature coming from this group," Maximiliano Isi, an astrophysicist at MIT, <a href="https://www.livescience.com/black-hole-echoes-unsettle-einstein-relativity.html" target="_blank">told</a> Live Science. "Unfortunately, other groups have been unable to reproduce their results, and not for lack of trying."</p><p>Isi noted that other papers examined the same data, but failed to find echoes. Afshordi told <em>Galaxy Daily</em>:</p><p>"Our results are still tentative because there is a very small chance that what we see is due to random noise in the detectors, but this chance becomes less likely as we find more examples. Now that scientists know what we're looking for, we can look for more examples, and have a much more robust confirmation of these signals. Such a confirmation would be the first direct probe of the quantum structure of space-time."</p>
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Has a black hole made of sound confirmed Hawking radiation?
One of Stephen Hawking's predictions seems to have been borne out in a man-made "black hole."
18 June, 2019
Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech
- Stephen Hawking predicted virtual particles splitting in two from the gravitational pull of black holes.
- Black holes, he also said, would eventually evaporate due to the absorption of negatively charged virtual particles.
- A scientist has built a black hole analogue based on sound instead of light.
<p>While black holes may well be points in space into which everything falls and from which even light can't escape, the image many of us have of an ever-growing nonstop universe-eater may not be so. <a href="https://bigthink.com/u/stephenhawking" target="_self">Stephen Hawking</a> didn't think it was. He theorized that black holes eventually evaporate as a byproduct of the gradual release of tiny bits of radiation now known as "Hawking radiation". Such emissions are too faint for us to observe from so far away, but now the behavior of an artificial, lab-created black hole of sorts has lent support to Hawking's theory. There's nothing about this story that isn't <a href="https://bigthink.com/videos/black-holes" target="_blank">interesting</a>. For one thing, this man-made "black hole" is made of sound. It's also formed inside some always-bizarre Bose-Einstein condensate.</p>
What Hawking predicted
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xOTYwNjAyOS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNTU2ODMyM30.WQZs1L8SuWHexiGKXj_uuH0eBlNFdSPtdW14TnctPK0/img.jpg?width=980" id="f6261" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7467feaf63835aeb8733c46a05f28bf5" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />Physicist Stephen Hawking.
Photo: Bruno Vincent/Getty
<p>While it's known that photons can't escape the pull of a black hole, Hawking's equations, intolerant of absolute nothingness, suggested "empty" space is actually full of virtual quantum matter/antimatter pairs that blink into existence, and immediately annihilate each other thanks to their opposite electrical charges, quickly blinking out again.</p><p>Hawking proposed that when virtual pairs pop into existence near a black hole, though, they're torn apart by the pull of the black hole, with the antimatter being sucked in while the matter shoots off into space — at this point, they're no longer virtual, but real, particles. The negative charge belonging to the antimatter particles reduces the energy and mass of the black hole that's absorbed it by a tiny amount — however, when a black hole ingests enough of these, it evaporates. The positively charged particles fly away as what's now called "Hawking radiation." It would be very weak, but nonetheless there.</p><p>Hawking also predicted that the radiation emitted would exhibit a continuous thermal spectrum rather than discreet light wavelengths preferred by individual escaping photons. The temperature of the spectrum would be determined instead by the black hole's mass. </p><p>Part of the problem in testing Hawking's theories was summarized by physicist Silke Weinfurtner, who <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01592-x" target="_blank">has written</a>: </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"The temperature that is associated with Hawking radiation, known as the Hawking temperature, is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole. And for the smallest observed black holes, which have a mass similar to that of the Sun, this temperature is about 60 nanokelvin. Hawking radiation therefore produces a tiny signal, and it would seem that the phenomenon cannot be verified through observation."</p>The analogue black hole in Haifa
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xOTYwNjA0Ni9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMjQyOTQ2Mn0.sN5CVbwsVQf3nYxKLDJhzwb2djqulfBmRTaShuYQOT0/img.png?width=980" id="18b44" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9bf76ae01c1f55d620b63cb2e08bf1d1" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />Physicist Jeff Steinhauer.
Image source: Technion–Israel Institute of Technology
<p>Experimental physicist <a href="https://phsites.technion.ac.il/atomlab/" target="_blank">Jeff Steinhauer</a> of Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, has been <a href="https://www.nature.com/news/one-man-band-the-solo-physicist-who-models-black-holes-in-sound-1.20437" target="_blank">working alone</a> in his lab for years creating sonic "black holes" that suck in and trap sound waves. (He's a drummer, too.) Physicist <a href="https://www.phas.ubc.ca/users/william-unruh" target="_blank">William Unruh</a> of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, first proposed the creation of a sound-wave black-hole replica in 1981 as a safe way of observing the behavior of the stellar version. (After all, creating a real black hole in a lab or anywhere nearby could lead to The End of Life as We Know It.)</p><p>Steinhauer's black-hole replica was "constructed" within a <a href="https://www.livescience.com/54667-bose-einstein-condensate.html" target="_blank">Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC),</a> an extremely strange form of matter in which atoms are cooled to a temperature vanishingly close to absolute zero. At this temperature, there's so little energy available that atoms barely move at all in relation to each other, and thus the entire <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/superfluid" target="_blank">superfluid</a> begins to behave as one big, unified atom. Within such a frigid condensate, weak quantum fluctuations occur, and these produce pairs of entangled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon" target="_blank">phonons</a>, compressional waves that can create the air-pressure changes we perceive as sound.</p><p>Working with a cigar-shaped trap just a few millimeters long, Steinhauer cooled some 8,000 iridium atoms into a BEC. Inside it, the speed of sound, the rate at which the condensate flowed, dropped from 343 meters per second to an almost stationary half a millimeter per second. Reducing the density of one area of the BEC to allow atoms to travel at 1 millimeter per second, though he created a supersonic region — at least compared to the lower speed in the rest of the condensate, that is. Its comparatively rapid current overwhelmed and pulled in any high-energy phonons that came near its event horizon, thus trapping them.</p><p>In August, Steinhauer published a paper in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1241-0" target="_blank"><em>Nature</em></a> that documented his observation of phonons emerging from his artificial black hole in line with Hawking's predictions. Steinhauer reports entangled phonon pairs popping into existence together equidistant across the condensate's event horizon and behaving much as Hawking predicted: One pulled over the supersonic waterfall and trapped in the supersonic region, and the other escaping outward, away from it, just as Hawking radiation would do. The symmetry in the number of phonons inside and outside the event horizon further supported their entangled beginnings and eventual separation, as in Hawking's prediction.</p><p>On top of that, the aggregate radiated phonons did indeed produce a thermal spectrum determined by the system's analogue to gravity/mass, which in this model's case was the relationship between the speed of sound and the flow of the BEC, and not individual phonons' sonic wavelengths.</p>Analogies are usually imperfect
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xOTYwNjk0NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0ODkzNDMyMH0.dt_9tjvChU65e_TuE-idR276Tywb8GnjjxhfqACofj4/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=0%2C70%2C0%2C70&height=700" id="843cf" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="c24f5a5debfcf50a12d691f43bb02177" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />Image source: Alex Farias/Shutterstock
<p>While the behavior of Steinhauer's phonons in his black hole analogue certainly supports the plausibility of Hawking's hypothesis, it doesn't constitute proof. His experiment deals with sound and phonons instead of light and photons, and obviously operates on an entirely different scale than a real black hole — and scale does matter in quantum physics. Still, it's fascinating.</p><p>Theoretical physicist <a href="http://www.th.u-psud.fr/annuaire2.php3?fiche=renaud.parentani" target="_blank">Renaud Parentani</a> enthuses to <a href="https://www.livescience.com/65683-sonic-black-hole-spews-hawking-radiation.html" target="_blank"><em>Live Science</em></a>, "These experiments are a tour de force. It's a very precise experiment. From the experimental side, Jeff Steinhauer is really, at the moment, the world-leading expert of using cold atoms to probe black hole physics." Other aren't as impressed. Speaking with <a href="https://www.nature.com/news/artificial-black-hole-creates-its-own-version-of-hawking-radiation-1.20430#/hole" target="_blank"><em>Nature</em></a>, physicist <a href="http://ulfleonhardt.weizmann.ac.il" target="_blank">Ulf Leonhardt</a> says that while, "For sure, this is a pioneering paper," he considers it incomplete, however, in part because Steinhauer was only able to correlate phonons of high energy across the event horizon, and didn't find that low-energy phonons also behaved as Hawking predicted. In addition, Leonhardt is concerned that what was inside the trap wasn't a true BEC, and that it could be producing other forms of quantum fluctuation that just <em>look</em> like Hawking radiation.</p>
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