Dr. Paul Frampton, Louis D. Rubin Jr. Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says, “I enjoyed reading Lynds’ article about an endless and beginningless universe, especially as I have myself worked on such a model recently (Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 071301, 2007). Lynds addresses the key issue of the second law of thermodynamics in a novel way and I’ll be curious to see how far he can take it.”

Dr. Jonathan Vos Post, a former Professor of Astronomy at Cyprus, College. California, and Professor of Mathematics at Woodbury University, California, says, “I consider Peter Lynds’s arXiv paper to be a bold and magnificent speculation. Those who attack him are misguided, in that Peter Lynds’ arguments need to be put in proper historical context, which is apparently outside the educational background of those who prematurely dismiss the subtleties of Peter Lynds insights. Let me refer back to an 1895 paper by the immortal [Ludwig] Boltzmann, which has recently attracted attention in the controversy over so-called “Boltzmann Brains.” The reference is Nature 51, 413 (1895). [Long quote by Ludwig Boltzmann concerning the second law of thermodynamics and the possibility of universe later returning to its present state]. Peter is cursed with having brilliant theories that his detractors falsely assume are based on ignorance. His startling re-analyses of (1) Zeno’s paradox, (2) the nature of Time, and (3) the nature of consciousness, have been spuriously opposed by naive critics who claim that Peter does not know (1) Calculus, (2) Relativity, (3) Psychology. To the contrary, I hold that his ability to ask “simple” questions, and give extraordinary answers, is close in many ways to the genius of Einstein, Feynman, Hawking, Paul Erdos, John Wheeler, Stephen Wolfram, and Frank Zappa.”

Dr. Werner Israel, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a Fellow at Canada’s Institute for Advanced Study Cosmology and Gravity Programme, says, “I found Peter Lynds’ ideas on possible reversals of time’s arrow interesting, in part because I have entertained less bold but not dissimilar ideas myself. In 1991 I co-authored a note in Nature which speculated on the possibility that the growth of entropy near a big crunch might be, not reversed exactly, but enormously diluted by a process called mass inflation at the inner horizons of coalescing black holes. This would make a transition to an expanding phase very nearly reversible thermodynamically.”

Sir. Roger Penrose, Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, says, “Whereas he seems to be quite knowledgeable on many of the relevant issues, his own proposal is actually very difficult to make sense of. He seems to be arguing for a picture in which one’s time-sense somehow reverses in the circumstance of approaching a future singularity, such as that inside a black hole. I am not enthusiastic about his scheme, in so far as I can actually understand it—and that’s because I consider that his scheme really does not make sense, not because I am too wedded to conventional ideas to be able to accept revolutionary new ideas! Of course he might well take the opposite view!”

Dr. Gabriel Chardin, a Professor at the Department of Astrophysics, Particle Physics, Nuclear Physics and Associated Instrumentation (DAPNIA) at the Saclay Laboratory of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in France, says, “I am sympathetic with the general idea Lynds develops. On the other hand, his paper, dealing with important and real questions in cosmology, is using only partially the tools that I would expect to find in such a study. In particular, entropy in a cosmological context should be given in my opinion a large importance to define the arrow of time, using for example the holographic principle.”