Claims

CCC's aeon-to-aeon matching requires all rest mass to fade out in the remote future, and no accepted particle-physics mechanism for mass fade-out exists; Penrose presents it as an admittedly unconventional hypothesis.

CCC's entropy accounting is self-consistent: information loss in black-hole evaporation, together with the conformal rescaling at crossover, legitimately resets the gravitational entropy so that each aeon can begin in a low-entropy state without violating the Second Law.

⚠ grades the accuracy of the description — not whether the theory is true

CCC contains no inflationary phase: the near scale-invariance of the CMB temperature fluctuations is instead attributed to erebon decay during the exponential expansion of the previous aeon.

⚠ grades the accuracy of the description — not whether the theory is true

The concentric low-variance circle families in the CMB are statistically anomalous — present at significance (reported up to 6σ) incompatible with a standard ΛCDM sky.

The WMAP and Planck temperature maps contain directions around which annular rings show low temperature variance, often in concentric sets, and these features are reproducible by independent groups applying the published search procedure.

Gurzadyan and Penrose (2013) reported that the prevalence of concentric low-variance ring sets in WMAP data drops sharply when the search is modified to look for elliptical rather than circular shapes, and that ring radii cut off near 15–20 degrees.

An, Meissner, Nurowski and Penrose (2020) reported that the centers of concentric low-variance ring triples are extremely anisotropically distributed, with about 83% of 1134 centers lying within three regions covering roughly 3% of the searched sky.

Meissner, Nurowski and Ruszczycki (2013) reported ring-type structures in the WMAP maps at 99.7% confidence relative to artificial maps of the same harmonic content.

The Planck and WMAP maps contain anomalous compact regions of raised temperature ("Hawking points") with angular radii of 0.03–0.04 radians and a size cut-off, at 99.98% statistical confidence.

The 30 most significant Hawking points in the Planck 2018 SMICA map show no anomalous clustering: their mean nearest-neighbour separation (0.20 and 0.19 rad at the two claimed scales) is within 1σ of the Gaussian-sky expectation of 0.20 ± 0.03 rad (Jow & Scott 2020).

CCC predicts that dark matter consists of Planck-mass particles ("erebons") created at the crossover, which interact only gravitationally, decay completely within an aeon, and whose decays could register as impulsive signals in gravitational-wave detectors.

⚠ grades the accuracy of the description — not whether the theory is true

Penrose (2017) proposed that reported correlated noise between the two LIGO detectors, with the same time delay as the gravitational-wave signals, could be impulsive gravitational events from erebon decay.

For Planck-mass dark-matter particles with lifetime exceeding the Hubble time decaying to two gravitons, the direct gravitational-wave background at 25 Hz is Ω_GW < 2 × 10⁻¹⁰³, about 95 orders of magnitude below the LIGO O1+O2 limit (Allen 2020).

⚠ grades the status of a mathematical question — not empirical support

The disagreement over circle significance traces to the construction of the null ensemble: Gurzadyan and Penrose computed significance against simulations of a pure Gaussian sky plus instrument noise, while all independent reanalyses simulated skies drawing on the full ΛCDM angular power spectrum, under which the observed features are typical.

No CCC-signature search on either side has used a preregistered or blind-analysis protocol: every reported significance, positive and negative, reflects choices of statistic, null ensemble, mask, and search parameters made after inspecting the data.

Standard inflationary ΛCDM, combined with a-posteriori statistics — inadequate null ensembles, look-elsewhere effects, and search criteria sensitive to few-pixel artifacts — fully accounts for every reported CCC signature in the CMB.

The deficit of variance in rings with large radii is caused by the anomalous distribution of the low-order multipoles up to ℓ = 7 of the WMAP CMB maps.

The clustering of low-variance ring centres in a few relatively large regions of the sky indicates effects related to large angular scale features in the CMB maps rather than randomly distributed sources.

The reported concentric low-variance circles and Hawking points in the CMB are real imprints of supermassive black-hole encounters and evaporations in an aeon preceding our Big Bang, as predicted by conformal cyclic cosmology.