Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

by Roger Penrose

Lee Smolin in his 1997 book Life of the Cosmos.[3.33] Smolin makes the tantalizing suggestion that when black holes form, their internal collapsing regions—through unknown quantum-gravity effects—become converted to expanding ones by some kind of ‘bounce’, each one providing the seed of a new expanding universe phase. Each new ‘baby universe’ then expands to a ‘full-grown’ one with its own black holes, etc., etc. See Fig. 3.12. This collapseexpansion procedure would clearly have to be quite unlike the kind of conformally smooth transition involved in CCC (see Fig. 3.2), and its relation to the Second Law is obscure. Nevertheless the model has the virtue that it can be studied from the point of view of the biological principle of natural selection, and it is not entirely without significant statistical predictions. Smolin makes worthy attempts at such predictions and provides comparisons with observational statistics of black holes and neutron stars. The role of Wheeler’s idea here is that the dimensionless constants might change only moderately in each collapseexpansion process, so that there would be some kind of ‘inheritance’ in the propensity to form new black holes, this being subject to the influences of a kind of natural selection.