Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

by Roger Penrose
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In his first book since the bestselling The Road to Reality, one of our most distinguished scientists offers a radical new theory of the origin, and ultimate end, of the Universe.

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Synopsis

* Roger Penrose's groundbreaking and bestselling The Road to Reality provided a comprehensive yet readable guide to our present understanding of the laws that are currently believed to govern our universe. In Cycles of Time, he moves far beyond this to develop a completely new perspective on cosmology, providing a quite unexpected answer to the often-asked question, ‘what came before the Big Bang?’* The two key ideas underlying this novel proposal are a penetrating analysis the Second Law of thermodynamics — according to which the ‘randomness’ of our world is continually increasing — and a thorough examination of the light-cone geometry of space-time. Penrose is able to combine these two central themes to show how the expected ultimate fate of our accelerating, expanding universe can actually be reinterpreted as the ‘Big Bang’ of a new one.* On the way, many other basic ingredients are presented, and their roles discussed in detail, though without any complex mathematical formulae (these all being banished to the appendices). Various standard and non-standard cosmological models are presented, as is the fundamental and ubiquitous role of the cosmic microwave background. Also crucial to the discussion are the huge black holes lying in galactic centres, and their eventual disappearance via the mysterious process of Hawking evaporation.

Editorial Reviews

"Penrose is truly one of the world's leading mathematical physicists" - Scotland on Sunday

"Science needs more people like Penrose, willing and able to point out the flaws in fashionable models from a position of authority, and to signpost alternative roads to follow" - Independent

"A genuinely new idea about the origins of the universe that, although untested, seems to hold together theoretically and must be taken seriously given Penrose's status" - Doug Johnstone, Scotsman

"Cycles of Time can be highly recommended as an example of how cosmologists are now thinking the unthinkable by trying to look back beyond the Big Bang and forward beyond the death of our universe" - Literary Review

"Thought-provoking, edifying" - Sky At Night Magazine

"Cycles of Time is as uncondescending in style and as impenetrable in content as his previous books. Which is not to say that there are not, as before, many pleasures to be had along the way." - Sunday Times

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