Cycles of Time

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.

ISBN 0224080369   Pages 304 ISBN13 9780224080361 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 587 Publisher Vintage   Published in London Imprint The Bodley Head Ltd   Height (mm) 242 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 162 Publication date 23 Sep 2010   Spine width (mm) 30 DEWEY 523.1   Academic level Tertiary education, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

"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." "--"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""From the Trade Paperback edition."

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