Cycles of Time

With "Cycles of Time," Mr. Penrose has turned his attention back to the Big Bang and some of the seemingly imponderable questions it provokes: What came before" the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago, and how might the universe it brought into being come to an end? 

Mr. Penrose thinks he might have a better answer, which he calls "Conformal Cyclic Cosmology." 

"Cyclic" indicates that the universe somehow circles back to a condition at which it could start all over again, in another Big Bang, an endless cycle of death and rebirth. 

"Conformal" refers to a particular type of geometry: a geometry is said to be "conformal" if its properties don't change when it is transformed in a way that preserves angles but not distances.

Mr. Penrose's crucial point is that, in physics based on a conformal geometry, there is no way to characterize either distances or energy levels as "small" or "large."

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