In my post on Stephen Hawking's new book "The Grand Design", I suggested that the attachment of religious people to the Big Bang theory as proof of God was unreasonable since there were other plausible explanations for the origin of the universe. It now seems that the cyclic universe idea maybe more than just plausible and may in fact be the probable origin of the universe.
The evidence comes from the preprint of a paper by Roger Penrose detailing his research into conformal cyclic cosmology. Penrose began researching the idea when he started to view the inflationary (Big Bang) theory from a thermodynamical perspective. Since the entropy of the universe tends to increase in the time-forward direction, Penrose reasoned that it must necessarily decrease in the time-backward direction. He proposes that the extremely low entropy at the moment of the big bang indicates that space and time were not created at that point but merely mark the start of a new "aeon" in the history of the universe.
The evidence for the theory comes from the analysis of CMBR or cosmic microwave background radiation. Using the Wilkinson Microwave Background Probe (WMAP) and the Boomerang balloon data in Antarctica, Penrose and his team have found concentric circles in the CMBR data consistent with shockwaves (see below) from previous Big Bang events.
Of course, for the god-botherers who argued so vehemently against Stephen Hawking and regard the Big Bang as the ultimate proof of God, this is going to be a tough one to reconcile. If the evidence for this theory increases (and there's no reason to think it won't) then modern deists who rely on the First Cause argument to defend their faith are going to have some serious 'splainin' to do. Of course the emergence of evidence has never slowed down their beliefs before so who knows, they may just adapt this new revelation to fit within their iron age fairy-tales anyway.
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