What if the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning of everything and instead just a bridge from a previous universe into our own? As unconventional as this may seem, the belief is held by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist renowned for his work on black holes, general relativity, and quantum consciousness, among other bold, unconventional ideas: Sir Roger Penrose. [1] His Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) is a scientific theory that imagines that the nature of time, the universe, and even consciousness is perpetually cyclical. [2] The implications of this theory are as revelatory as they are astonishing. It might mean that what we think of as our universe represents just one period of time in a never-ending chain of cosmic “aeons.” It might also mean that the existence of consciousness in the universe could be hardwired into the essence of space itself.

Traditional cosmological theory holds that the universe began around 13.8 billion years ago as the result of a dense, white-hot event we call the Big Bang. In this view, that’s when the first moment of time occurred and the universe’s clock started ticking. Penrose doesn’t agree. According to him, the Big Bang is not the beginning, but the end of a previous aeon—that previous aeon being a fully completed prior universe which, over time, grew into a cold, empty, vast expanse as it reached its peak.

When a universe gets to that final stage—cold, empty, and vast—all the stars have

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