In this lecture, Sir Roger Penrose will present powerful observational evidence of conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC). Penrose popularised this theory in his 2010 book Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe.

A dedicated search of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from Planck satellite data, driven by implications of CCC, has revealed a remarkably strong signal (of confidence level greater than 99.98%), previously unobserved, of numerous anomalous highly energetic small regions in the CMB sky.

CCC proposes that our Big Bang was the (conformal) continuation of the remote future of a previous cosmic ‘aeon’ and that these anomalous regions would appear to be the result of individual points on CCC's crossover 3-surface from that previous aeon. They can be readily interpreted as the conformally compressed Hawking radiation from supermassive black holes in that aeon, but seem impossible to explain on the basis of the conventional inflationary picture of our very early universe.

In 1994, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking gave a series of public lectures on general relativity at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. In 1996, Princeton University Press published The Nature of Space and Time, a book based on these debates.

This lecture is organised in cooperation with the Faculty of Science and Engineering, UM.