Sir Roger Penrose, the brilliant Oxford mathematical physicist, who has made contributions to cosmology (in a famous paper with Stephen Hawking where he disproves the oscillating Big Bang [BB] theory), to the mind-matter problem (The Emperor's New Mind), recreational mathematics, five-fold symmetry in crystals, and now revisits the Big Bang. In an interview with BBC HardTalk, he defends his book thesis (Cycles of Time) that the BB, despite never oscillating, can continue expanding and recycling forever. As Sir Roger puts it (at the 0:50 mark) "it is crazy enough to have a chance," which echoes the comment the grandfather of Quantum Mechanics, Niels Bohr, made at a Columbia University meeting in 1958, when Wolfgang Pauli said he knew his theory was crazy. "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

In the 2007 interview (at the 6:00 mark) Sir Roger opines that the big mystery of the BB, is that all this organized universe (which includes galaxies, stars and us) must in some sense be higher in entropy, more disorganized, more random than the BB, making the BB a truly awesome state of order. One, just one, of many such organized features, is that the expansion rate of the BB would be disturbed if the universe, the entire universe, had so much as one sand grain more or less. Stephen Hawking calculated that at 1:10^60. In this tape, Sir Roger ups the ante to 1:10^123, "an absolutely ridiculously small number" he says. So we are all agreed, the BB is an exquisitely ordered explosion.

The host interjects (at 6:12), "That almost prompts the question, "Who organized it?" Sir Roger sidesteps the question in classic materialist fashion. "Some might put it that way. But I prefer to look at things in a scientific view." Ahhh, so Sir Roger has already determined that the ID question is not science. And this is the root of his crazy theory on how to explain the information in the BB while avoiding the "Who?" question. At this point everything else in his theory becomes mere justification and details, for the assumptions are laid bare.
 
I think I understand what Penrose is saying, and the truly weird thing about it is that I was introduced to this theory from a DC comic book circa 1967, whereas Sir Roger only just discovered it in 2007.

His point is that the universe is dominated by photons at very young age--The Big Bang--and also at a very decrepit age--The Great Whimper. In advocating "Whimper" instead of "Crunch", he is promoting an "open" universe in which the amount of matter is not sufficient to stop the BB expansion, and stars and galaxies sort of dissipate into the void. At the end, he claims, all matter would have been swallowed up in black holes, and then the black holes--via Hawking radiation--evaporate into photons.

Now comes the novel part. Since photons are travelling at the speed of light, they experience no time. They are timeless. Well, if you are timeless and moving, then you are spaceless too. So just as the million-degree plasma of the BB emitted x-ray photons that expanded with the universe and are now equivalent to 3-degree photons in the microwave regime, so also these hugely redshifted photons of the The Great Whimper fill the universe with a very diffuse light. When the last black hole blinks out, then there is no matter to provide an absolute spatial scale, and the best we can do is express everything with ratios. Lo-and-behold, we get the same conditions as we did at the Big Bang--a density of photons per unit wavelength--provided that "dark energy" isn't actually sequestering any energy.

So in this hugely expanded universe with no spatial scale, we just need to rescale Planck's constant and bingo, we are back where we started from, ready for another Big Bang. If you could avoid being scaled yourself, then you would see protons popping out of the collision of photons that were as big as planets, and quarks you could dress in a suit of clothes, but who cares, there isn't anyone around who "remembers" the previous generation of eensy-weensy particles. And so the system cycles over and over again, expanding, rescaling, expanding, rescaling and expanding again for all eternity.

That was the theme of the 1961 DC comic book (#1 34)--if we shrink down to the size of atoms then the electron orbiting the proton looks like a solar system, and if we shrink down to the size of quarks, why we find another whole civilization at the string-size (had they known about strings in 1961). However, if you rescale everything, then energy rescales too, so the conservation of energy becomes a casualty of this rescaling along with thermodynamics and a few other sacred cows. But all that is a small price to pay for the real benefit--God has been rescaled out of the universe--no creator, no contingency, no plan and no purpose.

Sir Fred Hoyle, never reconciled to the Big Bang ascendancy over his "Steady State Theory", would have been overjoyed.