Cycles of Time Quotes

“To make this condition mathematically clearer, it is convenient to assert it in the form that the space-time can be continued smoothly, as a conformal manifold, a little way prior to the hypersurface . To before the Big Bang? Surely not: the Big Bang is supposed to represent the beginning of all things, so there can be no ‘before’. Never fear—this is just a mathematical trick. The extension is not supposed to have any physical meaning! Or might it …?”
― Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

“What the Second Law indeed states, roughly speaking, is that things are getting more ‘random’ all the time.”
― Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

“The ultimate behaviour of these matter distributions, taking the form of massless radiation (in accordance with CCC’s §3.2 requirements), can then leave its signature on the crossover 3-surface, and then perhaps be readable in subtle irregularities in the CMB.”
― Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

“Second Law of thermodynamics is not an equality, but an inequality, asserting merely that a certain quantity referred to as the entropy of an isolated system—which is a measure of the system’s disorder, or ‘randomness’—is greater (or at least not smaller) at later times than it was at earlier times.”
― Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe