Penrose's Latest Paper on CCC: Evidence or Wishful Thinking?

[fresh_42]

TL;DR Summary

Penrose claimed to have found evidence for a cyclic cosmology in CMB data.

What do you think about Penrose's latest paper on CCC?

This paper presents strong observational evidence of numerous previously unobserved anomalous circular spots, of significantly raised temperature, in the CMB sky. The spots have angular radii between 0.03 and 0.04 radians (i.e. angular diameters between about 3 and 4 degrees). There is a clear cut-off at that size, indicating that each anomalous spot would have originated from a highly energetic point-like source, located at the end of inflation – or else point-like at the conformally expanded Big Bang, if it is considered that there was no inflationary phase. The significant presence of these anomalous spots, was initially noticed in the Planck 70 GHz satellite data by comparison with 1000 standard simulations, and then confirmed by extending the comparison to 10000 simulations. Such anomalous points were then found at precisely the same locations in the WMAP data, their significance confirmed by comparison with 1000 WMAP simulations. Planck and WMAP have very different noise properties and it seems exceedingly unlikely that the observed presence of anomalous points in the same directions on both maps may come entirely from the noise. Subsequently, further confirmation was found in the Planck data by comparison with 1000 FFP8.1 MC simulations (with l < 1500). The existence of such anomalous regions, resulting from point-like sources at the conformally stretched-out big bang, is a predicted consequence of conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC), these sources being the Hawking points of the theory, resulting from the Hawking radiation from supermassive black holes in a cosmic aeon prior to our own.

(highlights mine)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.01740.pdf

https://www.resonancescience.org/bl...e-Ghosts-of-Black-Holes-from-Another-UniverseThe question is: Has he finally found some evidence for CCC, or is it mostly wishful thinking?

 

[martinbn]

Sorry for the not exactly on topic post, but is there an easily accessible reference for the actual CCC model?

 

[pinball1970]

Sorry for the not exactly on topic post, but is there an easily accessible reference for the actual CCC model?

There are a few of these on YT



the 2006 paper

https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/e06/PAPERS/THESPA01.PDF

@PeterDonis may kindly give a view

 

[PeterDonis]

@PeterDonis may kindly give a view

I'm not sure why I'm being singled out specifically, but here is a brief previous thread on CCC that includes some posts of mine:

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/bgv-theorem-and-penroses-conformal-cyclic-cosmology.994703/

 

[kimbyd]

My views on this model are honestly colored by just how abysmally terrible the first CCC paper was. It was really, really bad.

That said, from a super quick glance at the paper, it looks like they're still trying to identify statistical anomalies in the CMB sky for their evidence. That task is extremely difficult to do well. Extremely. Without even reading it I can guarantee that there isn't enough statistical analysis in a paper with about 6 pages and 0 equations.

It's true that I'm biased here, so I can't be certain I'm looking at it in the right way. But the history of CCC makes me incredibly reluctant to spend much of any time thinking about it.

 

[Arman777]

My views on this model are honestly colored by just how abysmally terrible the first CCC paper was. It was really, really bad.

That said, from a super quick glance at the paper, it looks like they're still trying to identify statistical anomalies in the CMB sky for their evidence. That task is extremely difficult to do well. Extremely. Without even reading it I can guarantee that there isn't enough statistical analysis in a paper with about 6 pages and 0 equations.

It's true that I'm biased here, so I can't be certain I'm looking at it in the right way. But the history of CCC makes me incredibly reluctant to spend much of any time thinking about it.

Can you link the first CCC paper or give the arxiv number

 

[pinball1970]

Can you link the first CCC paper or give the arxiv number

This?
https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3706And this in 2006 Sorry I had trouble with the links

BEFORE THE BIG BANG:
AN OUTRAGEOUS NEW PERSPECTIVE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR
PARTICLE PHYSICS
Roger Penrose
Mathematical Institute, 24-29 St Giles’, Oxford OX1 3LB, U.K.
THE BASIC CONUNDRUM
Proposals for describing the initial state of the universe
hardly ever address a certain fundamental conundrum [1]
— yet this is a conundrum whose significance is, in a
certain sense, obvious. The issue arises from one of the
most fundamental principles of physics: the Second Law
of thermodynamics. According to the Second Law,
roughly speaking, the entropy of the universe increases
with time, where the term “entropy” refers to an
appropriate measure of disorder or lack of “specialness”
of the state of the universe. Since the entropy increases in
the future direction of time, it must decrease in the past
time-direction. Accordingly, the initial state of the
universe must be the most special of all, so any proposal
for the actual nature of this initial state must account for
its extreme specialness. Proposals have been put forward
from time to time (such as in various forms of
“inflationary cosmology” and the previously popular
“chaotic cosmology”) in which it is suggested that the
initial state of the universe ought to have been in some
sense “random”, and various physical processes are
invoked in order to provide mechanisms whereby the
universe might be driven into the special state in which it
appears actually to have been in, at slightly later stages.
But “random” means “non-special” in the extreme; hence
the conundrum just referred to.
Sometimes theorists have tried to find an explanation
via the fact that the early universe was very “small”, this
smallness perhaps allowing only a tiny number of
alternative initial states, or perhaps they try to take refuge
in the anthropic principle, which would be a selection
principle in favour of certain special initial states that
allow the eventual evolution of intelligent life. Neither of
these suggested explanations gets close to resolving the
issue, however. It may be seen that, with time-
symmetrical dynamical laws, the mere smallness of the
early universe does not provide a restriction on its degrees
of freedom. For we may contemplate a universe model in
the final stages of collapse. It must do something, in
accordance with its dynamical laws, and we expect it to
collapse to some sort of complicated space-time
singularity, a singularity encompassing as many degrees
of freedom as were already present in its earlier non-
singular collapsing phase. Time-reversing this situation,
we see that an initial singular state could also contain as
many degrees of freedom as such a collapsing one. But in
our actual universe, almost all of those degrees of
freedom were somehow not activated.
What about the anthropic principle? Again, this is
virtually no help to us whatever in resolving our
conundrum. It is normally assumed that life had to arise
via complicated evolutionary processes, and these
processes required particular conditions, and particular
physical laws, including the Second Law. The Second
Law was certainly a crucial part of evolution, in the way
that our particular form of life actually came about. But
the very action of this Second Law tells us that however
special the universe may be now, with life existing in it
now, it must have been far more special at an earlier stage
in which life was not present. From the purely anthropic
point of view, this earlier far more special phase was not
needed; it would have been much more likely that our
present “improbable” stage came about simply by chance,
rather than coming about via an earlier even more
improbable stage. When the Second Law is a crucial
component, there is always a far more probable set of
initial conditions that would lead to this same state of
affairs, namely one in which the Second Law was
violated prior to the situation now!
As another aspect of this same issue, we may think of
the vastness of our actual universe, most of which had no
actual bearing on our existence. Though very special
initial conditions were indeed required for our existence
in our particular spatial location, we did not actually need
these same special conditions at distant places in the
universe...

I can't post the whole this, perhaps someone has a link?