When it doubled its volume, it doubled its energy; when it tripled its volume, it tripled its energy. But perhaps all this really tells us is that the quantum vacuum is (despite its name) a something rather than a nothing. At this point, space and time themselves became subject to quantum fluctuations. Peter, 80, Australia. Apart from practical mechanical applications, maybe a cosmological phrasing of the First Law of Thermodynamics can read "There is no net energy in a sufficiently large system." Yes, it's like true love. But of course, a cake has an edge, unlike the Universe, which may go on forever. It deserves more attention from philosophers.For a lover of mythology, Penrose's vision is beautiful. Around 13.82 billion years ago, matter, energy, space and time erupted into being in a fireball called the Big Bang. Professor Cox says that we must imagine it as a motionless ocean of energy filling a void. Although there were no structures in this place, the energy acted on the space, causing it to stretch. It went into creating a Big Bang. They fix this by postulating the existence of dark energy, which is invisible, fills space and has repulsive gravity. Ask an Astronomer is run by volunteers in the Astronomy Department at Cornell University. Crowd Control: A crowdsourced science fiction novel written by CNET readers. For Hawking, however, imaginary time "behaves like a fourth direction of space." As the hot particles cooled and continued to expand into space, matter formed and the stars and galaxies of our universe were born. We don't even know if our universe is a finite size or infinite. If we go back in time to before the big bang the presence of such infinite energy density may be physically impossible. Observers in different locations see different horizons, always with themselves at the center. Any physical event implies change, and change presupposes or would logically require the existence of time. No, wait. The most we can say with confidence at this stage is that physics has so far found no confirmed instances of something arising from nothing.Cycles from almost nothingTo truly answer the question of how something could arise from nothing, we would need to explain the quantum state of the entire Universe at the beginning of the Planck epoch. He explained that Einstein's Theory of Relativity insists space and time form a continuum curved by the matter and energy in it. (Beginner), When was the last time all of the planets were aligned? I have tried to emulate this, and I expect my book will be something that undergraduate and graduate students in physics can read and get something out of, and certain parts are aimed at my colleagues, so this is part of a larger conversation in the field. We've heard a lot about the Big Bang. During the years following Hubble and COBE, the picture of the Big Bang gradually became clearer. But in 1996, observations of very distant supernovae required a dramatic change in the picture. It had always been assumed that the matter of the Universe would slow its rate of expansion. Think of tiny bubbles forming in a vast ocean. Since you can't define it, it doesn't make sense to say that the big bang violates its conservation. The presence of horizons in the universe presents an interesting problem for science, because they represent a limit to our knowledge. Select Accept to consent or Reject to decline non-essential cookies for this use. Official news and information from UB, New York's flagship university. The First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed. This We dont know anything about what came before inflation. Our Big Bang might be the rebirth of one single quantum multiverse, containing infinitely many different universes all occurring together. Yet because we're mere humans, it's hard for us to define and explain a potential infinity we don't entirely grasp. You can unsubscribe at any time. Any trace of the initial conditions of how it got started get diluted because of this exponentially large expansion. So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. In Penrose's preferred multi-cycle form, it promises endless new worlds born from the ashes of their ancestors. (Beginner), What's the difference between astronomy and astrology? Space itself popped into existence and began expanding everywhere at once. How can the very same state be a cold, empty universe from one perspective and a hot dense universe from another? Hierarchy of energy starts with two postulates before the big bang. This was driven by an inflationary vacuum, a high-energy version of the vacuum that exists in space today. (Intermediate), What's going to happen on December 21st 2012? (Intermediate), Is the speed of light constant? But a plausible hypothesis is that the physical world was made up of a soup of short-lived elementary particles, including quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons. What is the Universe? There is still 10^50 kg of mass/energy to be accounted for in this application. Kinney: Its only recently that there has been real observational evidence that supports the model, so up until the last 10 or 15 years, its been a playground for theorists. An unknown energy source stepped down the high-frequency of energy to create the Big Bang event that entered the container of this universe. (Beginner), How long does it take for the Sun's light to reach us? But it was a quantum thing. For instance, an ocean wave has a positive and negative portion relative to sea level. Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. 2022 CNET, a Red Ventures company. Inflation and its relationship to the cosmic horizon help to explain a number of properties of the early universe. Still, I can't help having detected over the years that humans are far less bright than they think they are. But cosmologists have had to make tweaks to the theory, to account for certain observations. The implosion stops in the dense 3rd dimension where our time begins. What is time? It is only a tiny fraction of a second where our theoretical models break down: physics becomes very different from anything we could build an experiment for here on earth and we also struggle to look back this far since our view is obscured by things like the Cosmic Microwave Background. Scientists at Cern have been trying to study antimatter in the hope of understanding more about the early Universe (Credit: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images). It was a big implosion of energy and the beginning of the Universe, first into the 6th dimension. Physicists call inflation the ultimate free lunch! Does Buddhism agree with science when it comes to reality? And the heat of the Big Bang is still around us. But what was there before it? Hawking offered a simple and direct answer. (Beginner), How far can photons move freely in the early universe (Advanced), How likely is it that the Solar System has had or will have a close encounter with another star? Before the Big Bang, there was no matter, and all that existed was an ocean of energy, almost motionless but slightly swaying. Penrose was inspired by an interesting mathematical connection between a very hot, dense, small state of the Universe as it was at the Big Bang and an extremely cold, empty, expanded state of the Universe as it will be in the far future. A universe popping into existence out of nothing is so bonkers that scientists had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the idea. If you have a question you would like to be answered, please email either send us a message onFacebookorTwitteror emailbigquestions@theconversation.com. But to truly understand the Planck epoch, we need a complete theory of quantum gravity, merging the two.We still don't have a perfect theory of quantum gravity, but there are attempts like string theory and loop quantum gravity. In each bubble, the inflationary vacuum disappeared, but its enormous energy had to go somewhere. (Beginner), But seriously: what was there before the Big Bang? Its just basic honesty. In Norse mythology, the serpent Jrmungandr is a child of Loki, a clever trickster, and the giant Angrboda. The key assumption of this model is that just before the Big Bang, space was filled with an unstable form of energy, whose nature In peculiar Oscars ad, Google Nest backs #MeToo movement, Facebook buys Kim Kardashian West celebrity prank show, Humans should avoid aliens at all costs, famed physicist says, carry an imprint from some of the first stars ever born, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. If there is 10^50 kg after the Big Bang, there had to be 10^50 kg before the Big Bang. I liked the fact that he made it accessible and used plain language but took on complex ideas. Kinney: When I started writing the book, I didnt have such a clear conception of the degree to which I would ultimately structure it around a Copernican viewpoint the idea that were not special, that were in some sense ordinary. In the beginning (in the pre-big bang universe) there was only the vast vacuum of space and time. document.write(new Date().getFullYear()); To contact UB's media relations staff, emailub-news@buffalo.eduor visit our list of current university media contacts. All we are pretty confident about so far is that our universe has been expanding for many billions of years. PLUS a free mini-magazine for you to download and keep. By now, we are well into the realm of speculative physics, as we can't produce enough energy in our experiments to probe the sort of processes that were going on at the time. Who really discovered the heat from the Big Bang? When we extrapolate backward the entire part of the universe that we can observe today was converged to a single point around 14 billion years ago. The Black Hole called the Prime that caused the Big Bang, had absorbed the previous Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch. So if time matters not, why does space? | LinkedIn, Why does time seem to flow only in one direction? Astrophysicists dubbed this titanic explosion the Big Bang. Only after that did the hot, dense conditions of the Big Bang emerge: As the doubling of the universe ceased, the energy of the vacuum underwent a metamorphosis, transforming into particles of matter and radiation. It's easy to see quite a few scientific theories as relying on a decision as to when something began. The latter two approaches avoid the need for any uncaused events and this gives them a distinctive appeal. Subscribe from just 16.50 every 6 issues by Direct Debit. (Beginner), What is the significance of the Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Arctic Circle and Antarctic Circle? If there is 10^50 kg after the Big Bang, there had to be 10^50 kg before the Big Bang. It is therefore a great test case for exploring the different ways physics can explain our world. In conformal cyclic cosmology, the direction of explanation goes from old and cold to young and hot: the hot dense state exists because of the cold empty state. All rights reserved. But the evidence is compelling. In essence, the curved surface that is space-time can be compared with our own little planet. But at the birth of the Universe that is, everything the energy needed for the Big Bang must have come from somewhere. For Penrose, each cycle involves random quantum events turning out a different way meaning each cycle will differ from those before and after it. One example is precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background, which built support for inflation and killed off a lot of competing theories.. Then we can go on turning the clock yet further back, into the truly ancient "Planck epoch" a period so early in the Universe's history that our best theories of physics break down. Subscribe to BBC Science Focus Magazine and try 3 issues for just $9.95. Perhaps we should say that the hot dense state emerges from, or is grounded in, or realised by the cold, empty state. He is working on Observational Cosmology, helping to prepare the next generation of surveys studying the origins and evolution of our universe. However, thanks to studies on the rate the Universe is expanding, and applying this knowledge in reverse, we know its age. This may sound like a mathematical quirk rather than real physics, but such particles have been spotted in countless experiments.The spacetime vacuum state is seething with particles constantly being created and destroyed, apparently "out of nothing". Penrose and his collaborators believe they may have spotted these traces already, attributing patterns in the Planck data to radiation from supermassive black holes in the previous universe. Suppose we ask: where did spacetime itself arise from? In the first moments after the Big Bang, the Universe was a hot soup of particles where space and time was still to properly emerge (Credit: Science History Images/Alamy). Second, the basic Big Bang predicts that the gravitational attraction between the galaxies acts like a web of elastic, slowing cosmic expansion. Head shot of Will Kinney. Astronomy books often liken the Universe to a rising cake, with raisins representing galaxies. Sprinkled with hand-drawn diagrams by Kinney, An Infinity of Worlds introduces readers to the science of cosmic inflation and the evidence for it, as well as the theorys shortcomings. Some people believe such parallel universes may also be observable in cosmological data, as imprints causedby another universe colliding with ours. Our observable universe whats inside our horizon is a tiny patch of an infinitely larger space. Kinney: Standard Big Bang theory doesnt have any explanation for why the universe is so smooth and so uniform, for all these basic properties of the cosmos that we see. Read the latest in your favorite channels. (Beginner), (Beginner) >" onclick="window.open(this.href,'win2','status=no,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,titlebar=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,width=640,height=480,directories=no,location=no'); return false;" rel="nofollow">, Are there telescopes that can see the flag and lunar rover on the Moon? It opens up new possibilities for explaining the Big Bang, taking our explanations beyond ordinary cause and effect. Before the Big Bang occurred the Universe consisted of two perfectly flat four-dimensional surfaces. The former reigns supreme in the large-scale Universe, while the latter orchestrates the small-scale world of atoms and their constituents. The first long-lived matter particles of any kind were protons and neutrons, which together make up the atomic nucleus. This era occurred only one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. The Milky Way will run into the other large spiral galaxy in the local group, the Andromeda Galaxy, about 4 billion years from now, right about the time that the sun runs out of fuel and explodes, so we wont be around for this. Subscribe to BBC Science Focus Magazine and try 3 issues for just $9.95. But physics lets us keep on tracing the timeline backwards to physical processes which predate any stable matter.This takes us to the so-called "grand unified epoch". We work with professional researchers who have dedicated their lives to uncovering new perspectives on the questions that shape our lives. There's too much we don't know, because there's too much we haven't experienced and we tend to look at so many things from a human-centric perspective. And how do we know it happened? We also say that space and time both started at the Big Bang and therefore there was nothing before it.. For something to exist, there must be material or a component available, and for them to be available, there must be something else available. (Advanced), Can you fire a gun on the Moon? The twin pillars of modern physics are Einsteins General Relativity and quantum theory. Let BBC Science Focus give you the low down on the birth of The Universe. I think that hyping speculative things ultimately undermines peoples faith in science as a rigorous undertaking.. (Beginner), Why do we not have eclipses every month? (Intermediate), Why do the planets orbit the sun? Until we make further progress towards a "theory of everything", we won't be able to give any definitive answer. BB produced time, space, energy, matter, and the laws of physics in a tiny fraction of a second from a singularity, a point where physics doesnt work or apply. You can unsubscribe at any time. And then there was this chicken. If we made a powerful enough telescope, would we theoretically be able to see the light from the Big Bang? Want CNET to notify you of price drops and the latest stories? Quoting the last sentence, ' Apart from practical mechanical applications, maybe a cosmological phrasing of the First Law of Thermodynamics can read "There is no net energy in a sufficiently large system." (Intermediate), Is speed of light the same everywhere ? The book also delves into weird but wondrous consequences of cosmic inflation, like the idea, in a model of eternal inflation, that our universe is one of a possibly infinite number of universes that well never be able to see. But before we get to that, let's take a look at how "material" physical matter first came about. A final tweak to the basic theory is needed to explain why the Universe has the same temperature everywhere. (Intermediate), At what speed does the Earth move around the Sun? All the particles and energy in our universe, once confined to a space about the size of a dime, raced away from one another at tremendous speeds. Nothing? Or there could be one single cycle, and one single repeating universe, with the beginning of that cycle explained by some feature of its own end. So when we say before the big bang, we can not just assume that something like "a second before the big bang happened" has to make sense. If energy can't be created, where did it come from in the The galaxies are flying apart like pieces of cosmic shrapnel. To start all this, a chunk of inflationary vacuum of only a kilogram was needed. It may help to understand the hot dense state as produced from the cold empty state in some non-causal way. There is 10^50 here, but as long as there are other universes, dimensions, etc, with a net -10^50, we are ok (all units kg). Views: 82194. Robert is a science writer and visiting professor of science at Aston University. "One can regard imaginary and real time as beginning at the South Pole, which is a smooth point of space-time where the normal laws of physics hold. An Infinity of Worlds: Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe, Download an image of the book cover of "An Infinity of Worlds. The observable universe as seen from any point is finite, but the universe as a whole continues outward forever. So there was this chicken, OK? Our daily newsletter arrives just in time for lunch, offering up the day's biggest science news, our latest features, amazing Q&As and insightful interviews. There was this egg, you see. So everything that we know about and are familiar with came from BB, including presumably Dark Energy and Dark Matter, since all energy and matter was presumably prod Continue Reading Or there could be endlessly repeating cycles, each a universe in its own right, with the initial quantum state of each universe explained by some feature of the universe before. How did the whole system of cycles come about? These came into existence around one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang. But just because a tiny fraction of a second seems small on a human timescale that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of room for a lot to have happened back then that we don't yet know about: maybe our universe started from nothing, maybe it bounced back from a previous universe or started from within another. For example, the future can be infinite, a clock ticking forever, I don't need to imagine anything beyond that. "Nothing was around before the Big, Big Bang," Hawking said. It contains within its belly our own Universe, as well as every one of the weird and wonderful alternative possible universes allowed by quantum physics and at the point where its head meets its tail, it is completely empty yet also coursing with energy at temperatures of a hundred thousand million billion trillion degrees Celsius. The Second and Third Laws of Thermodynamics have been discussed recently in regard to the Universe as a type of heat engine. Commentary: The physicist tells Neil deGrasse Tyson what came before the Big Bang. Read about our approach to external linking. To understand how it emerged, it is essential to unite Einsteins theory with quantum theory. As I have shown in my published work, the laws of thermodynamics - the phenomenological laws - contain methodological errors. I want to give the lay reader a glimpse of current controversies that are very much at the forefront of our understanding. The initial singularity is a singularity predicted by some models of the Big Bang theory to have existed before the Big Bang [1] and thought to have contained all the energy and spacetime of These are distinctively metaphysical ideas which have been explored by philosophers of science extensively, especially in the context of quantum gravity, where ordinary cause and effect seem to break down. It's the moment when something impossibly tiny began to grow over the next billions of years to become the universe that we know (at least partially) today. The energy soup of low mass entered the universe and created electrons and plasma of quarks and gluons. Who really discovered the heat from the Big Bang? It is one of those simple questions that open up a deep discussion about definitions and also philosophy. And where did it come from? The rapid expansion is believed to lead to copious production of certain types of particles called scalars. The cold empty state would continue on forever from the perspective of an observer in its own temporal geometry, but the hot dense state it gives rise to effectively inhabits a new timeline all its own. , In 1698, "Thomas Savery designed the first engine that continuously converted heat from fire into useful work." By entering your details, you are agreeing to our terms and conditions and privacy policy. Unfortunately, by now even our best physics fails completely to provide answers. I started working on inflation as a graduate student. His radical theory to explain this correspondence is that those states become mathematically identical when taken to their limits. But the goal is to make that conversation accessible to a lay audience. Our Big Bang Universe is merely one such bubble among a possible infinity of other Big Bang universes in the ever-expanding inflationary vacuum! Anything? Some of them appeal to supernatural forces like a designer. The universe, for example. The leading idea is called the "inflationary universe" model. This latter possibility is consistent with another interpretation of quantum mechanics, dubbed the many-worlds interpretation. Was there even a there there? Today, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, the Universe is 46.1 billion light-years in radius in all directions from our vantage point. | LinkedIn, Why do unit charges balance exactly? (Intermediate), How do we know what we observe is x light years away? Lukas Wenzl is a graduate student at Cornell. It is not only size that ceases to be relevant in these extreme states: time does too. Where there is no universe, no time, no causes or effects, not even sounds made by sheets of whipped The Universe has not existed forever. This is where the physics of the largest things we can describe, at the scale of the cosmos itself, meets the physics of the smallest things, elementary particles and fields. To satisfy the First Law as defined here in this case, if the "after" energy is +10^50 kg, the "before" energy should be -10^50 kg, so that total mass/energy of the more encompassing system is zero, and accounted for. But even if Penrose's vision is vindicated by the future progress of cosmology, we might think that we still wouldn't have answered a deeper philosophical question a question about where physical reality itself came from. This articleoriginally appearedon The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence. So, no matter how small the chance of something occurring, if it has a non-zero chance then it occurs in some quantum parallel world. My understanding is that nothing comes from nothing. After a hundred trillion years or so, the last stars will burn out, and the universe will descend into darkness forever.. Before the bang It's possible that before the Big Bang, the universe was an infinite stretch of an ultrahot, dense material, persisting in a steady state until, for some reason, the Big Bang occured. This extra-dense universe may have been governed by quantum mechanics, the physics of the extremely small scale, Carroll said. Each type of matter particle, such as the quark, has an antimatter "mirror image" companion, which is near identical to itself, differing only in one aspect. Cosmic inflation sets up this initial state. To view or add a comment, sign in. Quantum field theory tells us that even a vacuum, supposedly corresponding to empty spacetime, is full of physical activity in the form of energy fluctuations. Some theories suggest that before our own Universe existed there were others that winked in and out of existence in cycles (Credit: Alamy). To believe in evolution you must believe that the universe began with the Big Bang and this is how the universe and planets were formed before there was life, and then after life began evolution then made life forms more complex. Inflation involves at least 80 doublings, stretching a patch of space about the size of a grapefruit to the size of our entire observable universe in less than a trillionth of a second.. The First Law of Thermodynamics is in question, not time. The Curious Team | Web Design Siliconian| Image Credits| Team Login. LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. (Intermediate), How do you measure the distance between Earth and the Sun? | LinkedIn, Where is the connection between cosmic evolution and Darwin's evolution? However, matter and antimatter annihilate in a flash of energy when they meet, meaning these particles were constantly created and destroyed. Even if causality no longer applies in any ordinary fashion, it might still be possible to explain one component of the Planck-epoch universe in terms of another. He and Euclid believe imaginary time is a "four-dimensional curved surface like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions.". Treat yourself or a loved one - a gift subscription to BBC Science Focus Magazine makes the perfect gift! However, in 1998, astronomers discovered that the Universes expansion is speeding up. The question of what happened before the big bang is a long-standing mystery and it is currently not clear if and how we would ever definitely answer it. In the Planck epoch, our ordinary understanding of space and time breaks down, so we can't any longer rely on our ordinary understanding of cause and effect either. What isnt clear, however, is why this cosmic energy persisted long enough to drive the Big Bang. If the Big Bang did not happen, then evolution logically cannot be possible.. Evolution is not just the development of life on earth. It seeks to answer our readers' nagging questions about life, love, death and the Universe. It was a hard read, in the best sense of the word. If dark energy is stable, if its really a cosmological constant and we dont know if thats true, but thats the simplest idea then the future of the universe is that everything that we see that isnt in our direct vicinity will move away from us. Cosmic inflation a theory first developed around 1980 by physicists including Alan Guth, Alexei Starobinsky, Andrei Linde and Katsuhiko Sato is the concept of exponential expansion of the very early universe. Before the bang, there wasn't even a whimper. But where didthatcome from? It could have no physical explanation at all. Learn more in our Cookie Policy. Solving for XX: The tech industry seeks to overcome outdated ideas about "women in tech.". Drinking Bang Energy before your workout can help you have more energy and endurance to power through your workout. It is not in the dictionary. Book cover with swirling patterns of light on a dark background, with the book title, An Infinity of Worlds, in white font. The universe outside the horizon of an observer at any point is invisible because the light from there has not had time to reach them yet.. Why is twilight short near the equator? Many-worlds quantum theory gives a new twist on conformal cyclic cosmology, though not one that Penrose agrees with. Please take the time to browse our site and first try to use the resources online to find an answer to your question. In addition, mathematical formulations contain the term "incomplete differential". There are three broad options to the deeper question of how the cycles began. Heat, Work, and the First Law of Thermodynamics - ASME, The Universe Engine, and the Third Law of Thermodynamics | LinkedIn, Beginning without a singularity? Before the Big Bang would be, by definition, outside of our universe. What if the Big Bang was not the beginning? In the Big Bang, there was no centre and no pre-existing void, so it didnt happen at any location. They have resisted a merger, which is a problem because, in the Big Bang, the Universe was small. And so, the story of our universe began or did it? Activity will cease.Or will it? Neil deGrasse Tyson,on his "Star Talk" show, sat his fellow physicist Stephen Hawking down and asked for his view. By entering your details, you are agreeing to our terms and conditions and privacy policy. * About the First Law, oddly enough, while apparently the simplest of the Laws, it is the most difficult to accept in this application. It is, admittedly, difficult to grasp how two objects can be identical in this way when they have different sizes but Penrose argues size as a concept ceases to make sense in such extreme physical environments. These fluctuations can give rise to particles popping out, only to disappear shortly after. Then we finally end up with the pure question of why there is something rather than nothing one of the biggest questions of metaphysics. But this particular story has a twist: If cosmic inflation correctly describes what happened before the Big Bang, it may push the ultimate answer to the question of where we came from beyond the reach of science. He explained that Einstein's Theory of Relativity insists space and time form a continuum curved by the matter Human beings have been creating origin stories for as long as human beings have been telling stories, and this is another iteration of that, says Kinney, PhD, professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. Where did the material come from that created the Big Bang, and what happened in the first instance to create that material? But our focus here is on explanations which remain within the realm of physics. However, their claimed observations have been challenged by other physicists and the jury remains out.Endless new cycles are key to Penrose's own vision. especially the big bang violates conservation of energy This doesn't make sense. The reason conservation of energy doesn't apply to relativity is that there is no way to define the total energy of a system in GR (except in certain special cases). '. This rapid inflation, fueled by a mysterious form of energy that permeated empty space itself, left the universe desolate and cold. In the beginning of the Big Bang there was the inflationary vacuum. Kinney: I have been interested in cosmology in general since I was a kid. How our Universe was born from nothing or if there was something that existed before it remains a mystery, but that is not stopping some physicists from trying to figure it out. He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds., The title of my book is from Bruno. (Intermediate), Why is the moon in a different place every night? (Beginner), Why is looking out into space the same as looking back in time? Then again, another famous physicist, Michio Kaku, believeswe should steer clear of aliens entirely. Perhaps it is not "energy" that cannot be created; it is "net energy." Incredibly, the laws of quantum theory permit this to pop into existence out of nothing. If you liked this story,sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "The Essential List" a handpicked selection of stories from BBCFuture,Culture,Worklife,TravelandReeldelivered to your inbox every Friday. Penrose envisages a sequence of endless new cycles for reasons partly linked to his own preferred interpretation of quantum theory. From space-time to dark matter, theoretical physicist Chris Impey outlines what teaching monks cosmology taught him about our different and shared views of the world. 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