Cosmic clues to the past

In reply to the Frontiers story “Roger Penrose claims new evidence for cyclic universe” (October 2018), in which the cosmologist says that cosmic microwave hot spots could point to black holes from before the Big Bang – an idea with which some physicists disagree.

Having “skimmed” through his book Road to Reality in under nine months, I soon got the message that Penrose always keeps close to accepted mathematical and cosmological theory throughout. But I do admit to giving up after reading 75% of his other book Cycles of Time. This was because I found the basics of conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) hard to take in, that is until I saw your article. This forced me to revisit the CCC theory and again I could see Penrose’s adherence to conventional fundamental theories through all his arguments. Perhaps this is why the likes of Daniel An from the State University of New York Maritime College and Krzysztof Meissner of the University of Warsaw teamed up with him to analyse the data from the Planck satellite and discovered these rings of temperature gradients in the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Let the theoretical and applied physics community assume that the sceptics James Zibin and Douglas Scott, of the University of British Colombia in Canada, have some credibility about the way CMB simulation data and raw data were analysed. For this reason, a radical look at the problem from another perspective might be relevant. Particularly while the proposed Einstein Telescope and the LISA satellite system are still in the planning stage. Perhaps these teams could be encouraged to bias their detector design towards seeking the cosmic gravitational rumble around these interesting parts of the CMB – even though the base line between the two instruments may be too short to make directional resolution of the source of such low frequency gravitational waves very difficult. We should also analyse other avenues in proposed cosmic particle and magnetic field surveys that could also seek out the sources of these CMB anomalies.

To quote Penrose in Cycles of Time, “it is significant that dark matter and dark energy that have gradually become apparent from detailed cosmological observations in recent decades, both appear to be necessary ingredients of CCC”. Could this spin-off motivate the finance of further research?