The Aeon Before Ours · source record · paper

The Big Bang and its Dark-Matter Content: Whence, Whither, and Wherefore

Penrose, R. · 2018

AI-verified citationSRC-PENROSE-2018-FOP

identifier / locator: Foundations of Physics 48(10): 1177–1190. DOI: 10.1007/s10701-018-0162-3
verification note: DOI confirmed via Crossref; full text read on the publisher's page during the 2026-08-22 verification batch. Quotes in the claim and evidence records (mass fade-out, erebons, no inflation in CCC) are verbatim from that text.
reliability notes: The primary source for the erebon dark-matter proposal and for Penrose's own characterization of mass fade-out as 'an admittedly unconventional hypothesis.'

Evidence drawn from this source

Supports· strongCCC-E015

what the source states: "There will, however, be a residue of a relatively small number of massive particles, and for the strict requirements of the theory one must apparently assume that there is a mechanism whereby in the hugely long-term future, mass eventually fades away, asymptotically — which I shall refer to as 'mass fade-out' — an admittedly unconventional hypothesis, but not contradicted by current observation, and not implausible on the basis of a particle physics which is extended from current ideas by the presence of a positive Λ."
what we infer: The theory's own author states the requirement and concedes the mechanism is unconventional — this record supports CCC-C005 (which is a claim about the theory's costs) directly from the primary source, with the mitigation (de Sitter group, mass not a Casimir operator) recorded in the same breath.
limitations: A theory paper: this evidences what CCC requires, not whether nature obliges.

Supports· strongCCC-E018

what the source states: Erebons are introduced as gravitation-only particles: "their mass would have to be something of the order of a Planck mass (10−5 g) or thereabouts, perhaps with some factor such as 8π involved... erebons should be able to decay, with a lifetime of perhaps something like 10^11 years." Their decay replaces inflation as the source of CMB fluctuations: "there is no inflation in CCC." On detection: "There is an intriguing issue concerning whether such erebon decays in our own aeon might be detectable by gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO."
what we infer: Supports CCC-C007 and CCC-C008 as statements of what the theory predicts — the record establishes that CCC has a forward-looking, laboratory-adjacent commitment, which most pre-Big-Bang proposals lack. The vagueness of the parameters ("perhaps," "or thereabouts") is the claim's own recorded objection.
limitations: Order-of-magnitude proposal without a computed decay spectrum or event rate.