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- Title
The Big Bang and its Dark-Matter Content: Whence, Whither, and Wherefore.
- Authors
Penrose, Roger
- Abstract
The singularity theorems of the 1960s showed that Lemaître’s initial symmetry assumptions were not essential for deriving a big-bang origin for a vast multitude of relativistic universe models. Yet the actual universe accords remarkably closely with models of Lemaître’s type. This is a mystery closely related to the form taken by the 2nd law of thermodynamics and is not explained by currently conventional inflationary cosmology. Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) provides another perspective on these issues, one consequence being the necessary initial presence of a dominant scalar material that interacts only gravitationally, but which must ultimately slowly decay away in a novel but perhaps detectable way. According to CCC, our current universe picture provides but one aeon of an unending succession of expanding aeons each having an initial big bang which is the conformal continuation of the remote exponential expansion of its previous aeon. The observational status of CCC is briefly discussed.
- Subjects
DARK matter; BIG bang theory; NAKED singularities (Cosmology); CONFORMAL field theory; RELATIVISTIC cosmology; HUBBLE'S law; INFLATIONARY universe; CYCLIC universe theory (Cosmology)
- Publication
Foundations of Physics, 2018, Vol 48, Issue 10, p1177
- ISSN
0015-9018
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s10701-018-0162-3