Roger Penrose on "What Happened Before The Big Bang?"

Just arrived back home after a lecture at UWA by Roger Penrose on "What Happened Before The Big Bang?" (this links to the Cambridge online version. Youtube version.) - incredibly stimulating to hear and see an over-head-projector talk on very complex material by one of the great minds of the 20th and 21st centuries. (How fascinating to see the interactive utility of this analogue technology - drawing diagrams on the projector, rather than the stultifying constraints of powerpoint.) I will not attempt to make any remarks about the ideas - and the million questions that have have flooded my mind after - other than to say that it was complete privilege to me to be there, and to think of the universe in the most analytical and grandiose terms - how wonderful is consciousness! His idea of "aeons" and the mathematical congruity of the Big Bang singularity and the infinite expansion of the "heat death" of the universe - they are one and the same as types of hyperbolic infinities. 

It was his birthday today, and in a remarkable human moment, prompted by the kind offices of David Blair, everyone sang him "Happy Birthday" - he must be 77 - and he seemed very moved - it was a wonderful, sincere moment of appreciation of a great man, who with simple interest had shared a public lecture with us all, with wit and generosity. Fascinating! And good on him:)