lrbTheBigBang,whichhappenednearly

lrb The Big Bang, which happened nearly fourteen billion years ago and was the beginning of our universe, was not, in Penrose’s ‘conformal cyclic cosmology’ (CCC), the only beginning. You are permitted to ask what there was before the Big Bang, and Penrose answers that there was an ‘aeon’ before that, and one before that. And the end of our ‘aeon’ will be the beginning of another – a cosmological Ouroboros. ‘There was something before the Big Bang,’ he says, ‘and that something is what we will have in our future.’ There should be empirical evidence for CCC, but it hasn’t yet been found. Many cosmologists are deeply sceptical; some think Penrose has completely lost the plot, and Penrose himself freely acknowledges the apparent ‘craziness’ of the idea. In Barss’s assessment, Penrose remains so attached to CCC because the story is ‘too beautiful, too elegant to be wrong’ – the aesthetics coming first, the conviction of scientific truth following. cr：杭之冯玥希望我好自为之