Has the BICEP2 telescope seen something unusual? Steffen Richter, Harvard University

Swirling patterns in the sky may be signs of black holes that survived the destruction of a universe before the big bang.

“What we claim we’re seeing is the final remnant after a black hole has evaporated away in the previous aeon,” says Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford.

He is co-creator of a theory called conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC). It states that, rather than having started in the big bang, the universe infinitely cycles through periods of ballooning up and compressing back to …