**From Nobel prize-winner Roger Penrose, this groundbreaking book is for
anyone "who is interested in the world, how it works, and how it got
here" (**New York Journal of Books).
Penrose presents a new perspective on three of cosmology's essential
questions: What came before the Big Bang? What is the source of order in
our universe? And what cosmic future awaits us?
He shows how the expected fate of our ever-accelerating and expanding
universe--heat death or ultimate entropy--can actually be reinterpreted
as the conditions that will begin a new "Big Bang." He details the basic
principles beneath our universe, explaining various standard and
non-standard cosmological models, the fundamental role of the cosmic
microwave background, the paramount significance of black holes, and
other basic building blocks of contemporary physics. Intellectually
thrilling and widely accessible, Cycles of Time is a welcome new
contribution to our understanding of the universe from one of our
greatest mathematicians and thinkers.