'The Big Bang Was Not the Beginning'

Roger Penrose says he's spotted signs from a previous universe

(NEWSER) – Look carefully into outer space and you might spot the remnants of a
previous universe. So argues Roger Penrose, a pioneer in the study of black holes and
one of three recipients of this year's Nobel Prize for Physics. "The Big Bang was not the
beginning," he tells the Telegraph. "There was something before the Big Bang and that
something is what we will have in our future." Penrose, 89, argues that several "warm"
areas in space are really leftover black holes from an earlier universe or "aeon." The
idea is based on work by his old collaborator, Stephen Hawking, who said black holes
leak radiation and slowly evaporate. But this seems to occur so slowly that their
destruction could take longer than our universe itself.

In a new paper, Penrose says he's detected remnants of at least six black holes from a
universe that ended in its own "Big Crunch" and created our Big Bang. "We are seeing
them," he says. "These points are about eight times the diameter of the Moon and are
slightly warmed up regions." He also tells Space.com that "information" arrived from the
last universe "in the form of a shock wave" of dark matter—which should be perceptible
in leftover Big Bang radiation, and some scientists say they've found it. There's
skepticism, of course, but the notion of recycled universes has gained ground. "It's
classic Roger Penrose," says a cosmologist in London. "It's a beautiful theory and it
deserves a lot of attention." (After all, Penrose proved Albert Einstein wrong.)

Roger Penrose was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics