I\u2019m reading a book called \u201cCycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe\u201d by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.\u00a0 Penrose won the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on black holes so he\u2019s a pretty big brain.\u00a0 But so far, the whole book has been a sort of no mathematics discussion of entropy and how the existence of the second law of thermodynamics relates to the Big Bang theory.\u00a0 We spent a whole chapter talking about mixing blue and red paint in a bucket becoming purple and then how an egg falling off a counter on the floor is basically an irreversible process.\u00a0 So far, I guess I follow him on time being a one-way affair.\u00a0 As far as the red shift of very distant galaxies proving the Big Bang theory, I\u2019m waiting to see if he has something a little less mundane to say.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve watched a few YouTube videos with Penrose as one of the speakers and I will say he comes across as a very lucid speaker (at least as far as Nobel laureates go).\u00a0 I just hope by the end of this book it will live up to the title.\u00a0 But already he said something that I found interesting.\u00a0 He said that the estimates of the age of the universe are based on taking the expansion rate of the universe and back calculating how long it took to get to where we are now from an initial condition where the size of the universe was a single point.\u00a0 At the same time, I see how that seems like a straight forward idea and also a ridiculous one.\u00a0 So, the whole universe is a single point.\u00a0 What in the hell does that mean?\u00a0 I\u2019ve read that the conception of the conditions at slightly after the Big Bang has a universe that is almost infinitely hot and at the same time completely devoid of matter.\u00a0 So, everything is photons?\u00a0 But somehow this spawned the universe we see around us today.\u00a0 None of that makes any sense to me.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll admit I have a tiny brain compared to these mathematical geniuses but I have to wonder if they know what the hell they\u2019re talking about.\u00a0 I can sort of believe in black holes and neutron stars and gravity waves.\u00a0 The predictions that have been made in the past seemed to have been confirmed with instruments that have measured gravity waves associated with merging neutron stars.\u00a0 The measurements and behaviors seem to match exactly the theoretical modeling.\u00a0 But when it comes to the cosmological models and how they correlate with observations of the universe we see very large deviations and no convincing evidence for the patchwork fixes like dark energy and dark matter.\u00a0 I think we\u2019re waiting for a new generation of physicists that won\u2019t just sit around spinning unprovable theories and instead actually figure out ways of getting additional data.<\/p>\n
So come on Roger, give me something in the second half of this book that I can point to and say, \u201cThat\u2019s an Extraordinary New View of the Universe!\u201d<\/p>\n