Sir Roger Penrose: Scientific Heretic
A great article on the Big Bang and the Large Hadron Collider.
The big bounce vs. the big bang
Joseph Brean, National Post
Published: Friday, October 03, 2008
WATERLOO, Ont.. — Among the crushing throng of physics enthusiasts who gathered this week for a lecture by Sir Roger Penrose, who is to the University of Oxford what Stephen Hawking is to Cambridge, the very mention of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland elicited a resounding throaty chuckle.
Everyone knew that when the world’s biggest particle accelerator was switched on last month, its computers were promptly hacked and its superconducting magnets accidentally melted. And provided one is skeptical of all the press reports about how this “Big Bang machine” might create an apocalyptic black hole somewhere beneath Geneva, this is all pretty hilarious, just a few broken eggs for the omelette of discovery.
The capacity crowd of several hundred had a similarly blasé reaction to the nub of the lecture.
“The universe seems to go through cycles of some kind … Our universe is what I call an aeon in an endless sequence of aeons,” Prof. Penrose said in an address enlivened by his breezy Oxbridge banter (10 to the power of 64 years is, for example, “a jolly long time”), and illustrated by overhead transparencies so artful in their multi-coloured, hand-drawn penmanship that they would not have been out of place alongside a baking-soda volcano at a grade school science fair.
But this was top level, cutting-edge physics, hosted by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He described data he received just this week that appears to show traces of the previous aeon in the microwave background radiation that fills the universe and is regarded as the lingering “flash” of the Big Bang. If it actually does, a lot of science will have to be reconsidered.