Roger Penrose (Oxford):

Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and Black Holes, as Essential Ingredients of a New Cyclic Theory of the Universe.

Abstract:

The theory of conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) takes what we currently regard as the entire history of the Universe, from its Big-Bang origin (but without any “inflationary phase”) to its final exponential expansion, to be just one aeon of a continual succession of such aeons. The big bang of each aeon is assumed to be an infinitely scaled down continuation of the exponentially expanding remote future of the aeon that preceded it. The existence of Einstein’s tiny positive constant Λ (i.e. dark energy) is essential to CCC’s consistency, as is some primordial scalar material (taken to be dark matter). Colliding supermassive black holes in the aeon previous to ours would have important observational implications for CCC, detectable within the ubiquitous cosmic microwave background. Some intriguing new evidence for this will be presented.

download document (version from 2012-12-15) (pdf, 4,78 MB)

A video of the talk will be available for download by mid of December!