Untitled episode

you might think they're very different from each other the Big Bang is very very dense very very hot the remote future will be very very rarified and very very cold [Music] you've suggested that you know perhaps the Big Bang wasn't in fact the beginning uh you've famous for a view called conformal selectrical cosmology I wondered if you could tell us a bit about this yes well

you see that was where I finally went it took me a long time you see I'd spent the ages trying to make sense of bringing quantum mechanics explaining the singularities that way and I made a sort of just a assumption about singularities in the past with no justification from physics just what I used to call the vile curvature hypothesis vile curvature is a particular kind of

curvature which describes gravitational field getting very strong rather than the matter getting very strong and so I just said okay singularities in the past have got some zero vial curvature just the hypothesis can't do much with that but one of my graduate students Paul Todd he's had a much better way of saying it he said why don't you say that you can stretch out the Big

Bang this is a kind of trick I'd used quite a lot what's called conformal big and small could stretch out the big bang and it can make it nice and smooth he says why did you say it like that and said that it's if you stretch the big bang out then you you can make it smooth that's basically his Criterion that's a much better way of

saying it so I picked up on that I said well why is it so smooth yes well you see the big bang is in a certain sense not singular at all it's really completely different from the singularities in the future why is it not singular at all well it's not singular if you use a kind of geometry which is called conformal geometry now conformal geometry is

the geometry of angles if you like so or shapes small shapes it doesn't you forget distances so big and small are equivalent the different shapes are an equivalent it's a very useful image to have are these pictures due to the Dutch artist M.C Escher yes where he Illustrated particular type of geometry it's called um hyperbolic geometry don't worry too much about that but in these pictures

they're called Circle limits and you the most famous ones with angels and devils and you can see the angels and devils in the middle and as you get towards the edge you can still see the shapes of them are pretty well the same but they're much much smaller and you can see right up to the edge I mean I've looked at these pictures of Ash I've

been seeing some of the originals they're absolutely amazing you can look right up the edge and he's actually made them very very precise yeah to the edge so the picture is that the Universe this is not just for the big bang no I don't think we're around just for Infinity the remote future can be squashed down to make it a boundary yes and I used to

use this trick been studying gravitational radiation gravitational waves in order to study them nicely and to see how much energy they carry and things like that it's useful to squash down infinity and then you can see you've got a nice boundary at the edge and you can do your calculations rather than taking horrible limits and things which is not very good at doing but looking at

the geometry yes of the squash down Infinity yes so you can squash down infinity and now that we have this thing people misleadingly refer to as dark energy it's really Einstein's cosmological constant which he introduced for the wrong reason just after he introduced his theory he wanted the static universe and he needed this extra term when he was persuaded that the Universe was not static but

was actually expanding he ditched his cosmological cards which was a mistake he regarded the introduction of this number this constant as his biggest blunder but the trouble is that Einstein's blunders even turned out to be true and this one actually something like that turns out to be true of the universe so you actually do have this expanding Universe in the future which is doing this exponential

expansion now and you can squash it down and it squashes down rather nicely yes squash is starting to find a space-like boundary which means really it's it's a time in a sense it's time Infinity but it's like a honest time and when you squash it down it makes a nice smooth boundary so you've got a nice smooth boundary beginning which is stretched out big bang and

the nice smooth boundary in squash down Infinity you might think they're very different from each other the Big Bang is very very dense very very hot the remote future will be very very rarified and very very cold but when you squash the temperature goes up when you stretch the temperature goes down the density and temperature go down at the beginning and they dig a you up

at the future and I also I really rather like each other you might think that this really cold rarified remote future is completely utterly different with a big bang where you've got hot dense but when you do this conformal stuff stretch out the Big Bang squash dancing they pretty like each other so I thought well maybe they're not just like each other and maybe they really

are not the same I wouldn't go that far but the big bang is the continuation of the remote future of a previous Eon I'm calling it so rather not rather than calling it our universe which begins with the big bang and ends at the remote future I'm saying that's one Eon I like to spell it in the Aeon exotic so the Big Bang was the continuation

of somebody else's Eon prior to us our Eon in the remote future will be continued into the Big Bang of this remote future it's crazy idea but not so crazy as it doesn't make sense mathematically and physically and it's it's so the what what looks like the the past the past Infinity for us is somebody else's future Infinity so it's cyclical in that sense and yeah

our past Big Bang was the remote future I used to give lectures on this thinking nobody will ever be able to prove me wrong and so I can go on talking about this forever and then I thought hey maybe there is a way of proving so I thought about signals which might get through and the first idea I had about this was collisions between supermassive black

holes you see we are in our galaxy is in a cluster of galaxies there's the Andromeda galaxy which is actually a lot bigger than us they're a black hole is much bigger than ours yeah we are in a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy in the few thousand million years we will the things will come together and our black holes well they won't hit each other

straight away but they'll feed each other out a few more thousand million years no spiral into each other it will go up our one down and have it for today I mean it's not big enough but nevertheless that will produce a huge gravitational wave impulse which will go out and okay that's we won't see much of that we won't be around by then but however things

like that in the previous year will produce gravitational wave signals which we might be able to see right and I claim that we do see them and these are seen the initial analysis was done by my Armenian colleague a lot of people complained about the way he did it and all that and and as you could see from the pictures there's something going on yeah it

just you can't it's not fluke there's something going on there some Polish colleagues headed by Christoph Meisner did the analysis completely differently and they found distinct evidence that these yeah ring structures that you would see in the sky are actually there then I had another idea of what I call it Hawking points you see this is getting back to the black holes the black holes sit

around and sit around and sit around and sit around they do slightly radiate this is hawking evaporation they don't do that until they're hotter than the background yeah black holes are extremely cold however the universe expanding expanding expanding expanding and it gets colder and colder and colder and ultimately the rest of the universe gets colder than the black hole then it starts to radiate away it's

old with entropy stuff you were asking me before and it radiates away and finally disappears in a pop now that's the ultimate fate of a cluster of galaxies in our eon so that'll happen to us eventually and this black hole swallows everything else dominates everything doesn't swallow all the matter probably most of it though and then it shrinks away because it loses its energy by Hawking

evaporation all that gets squashed through into a teensy weensy Point into the next Eon yeah and you get a burst of radiation which would reach something like eight times the diameter of a moon because you don't see you don't see the radiation for 380 000 years 380 000 years it's the photons and the light of energy is jiggled around only when 380 000 years happens and

they can stop the leak out and by then what would have been a point reaches what we now see is eight times the diameter of the Moon so I claim and we see those spots those spots are with a confidence level of 99.98 I I don't do the statistics I rely on my colleagues for that 99.98 percent confidence level that these spots are actually there to

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