The current widely-held theory of life, the universe, and everything holds that at some point roughly 13.7 billion years ago everything that now is was packed into a tight little package from which sprung the Big Bang, which violently hurled everything into existence. But 13.7 billion years to get to where we are isn't enough for renowned physicist Sir Roger Penrose, and now he thinks he can prove that things aren't/weren't quite so simple. Drawing on evidence he found in the cosmic microwave background, Penrose says the Big Bang wasn't the beginning, but one in a series of cyclical Big Bangs, each of which spawned its own universe.

By Penrose's estimation, our universe is not the first – nor will it be the last – to spawn from a dense mass of highly-ordered everything into the complex universe we see around us. In fact, it's that high degree of order that was apparently present at the universe's birth that set him on this line of thought. The current Big Bang model doesn't supply a reason as to why a low entropy, highly ordered state existed at the birth of our universe unless things were set in order before the Big Bang occurred.


According to Penrose, each universe returns to a state of low entropy as it approaches its final days of expanding into eventual nothingness. Black holes, by virtue of the fact that they suck in everything they encounter, spend their cosmic lifetimes working to scrub entropy from the universe. And as the universe nears the end of its expansion the black holes themselves evaporate, setting things back into a state of order. Unable to expand any further the universe then collapses back in on itself as a highly ordered system, ready to trigger the next Big Bang.