Location: Zaal 4/5, Gorlaeus Laboratorium, Einsteinweg 55, Leiden
Time: 19:00 hrs
Was the Big Bang the very beginning of the universe, or was there something before? The proposal of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (abbreviated CCC) asserts that what we presently regard as the entire history of our universe, from its Big-Bang origin (but without cosmic inflation) to its indefinitely expanding future, is but one “aeon” in an unending succession of similar such aeons, where the infinite future of each matches to a big bang of the next via an infinite change of scale. CCC predicts that supermassive black-hole encounters in the aeon prior to ours would actually be observable to us as families of concentric rings of unusual temperature structure in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is information-packed electromagnetic radiation coming to us from all directions, as a signal from the Big Bang itself. Recent analysis of CMB data, from the WMAP space satellite, has been argued to provide confirmation of this pre-Big-Bang activity, which would allow us to “see through” our Big Bang to such events occurring in the aeon prior to ours. The present status of this controversial proposal will be discussed.