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Space Science

An Earlier Universe Existed Before the Big Bang, and Can Still Be Observed today, Says Nobel Winner (yahoo.com) 116

An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics. From a report: Sir Roger, 89, who won the honour for his seminal work proving that black holes exist, said he had found six 'warm' points in the sky (dubbed 'Hawking Points') which are around eight times the diameter of the Moon. They are named after Prof Stephen Hawking, who theorised that black holes 'leak' radiation and eventually evaporate away entirely. The timescale for the complete evaporation of a black hole is huge, possibly longer than the age of our current universe, making them impossible to detect. However, Sir Roger believes that 'dead' black holes from earlier universes or 'aeons' are observable now. If true, it would prove Hawking's theories were correct.

Sir Roger shared the World Prize in physics with Prof Hawking in 1988 for their work on black holes. Speaking from his home in Oxford, Sir Roger said: "I claim that there is observation of Hawking radiation. The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future. We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon. So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points. We are seeing them. These points are about eight times the diameter of the Moon and are slightly warmed up regions. There is pretty good evidence for at least six of these points." Sir Roger has recently published his theory of 'Hawking Points' in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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An Earlier Universe Existed Before the Big Bang, and Can Still Be Observed today, Says Nobel Winner

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  • by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @03:50PM (#60582714) Journal

    is it's turtles all the way down.

    • by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @03:52PM (#60582730)
      Well there's no convenient or even sensible way around this.

      If you follow any chain of cause and effect back far enough, it either has to start with something that happened for no reason (big bang), or else be infinite and have no start at all.

      • start with something that happened for no reason

        That's the "unmoved mover." More popularly known as "God." He wants you to give me 10% of your income, by the way.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man. But it is a lovely work if you can stomach it.

          -RAH

        • I'm out of work. Will you accept 10% of my debt?

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Except "god" is a totally unnecessary and ridiculous addition to the equation. If a "god" could always exist, then so could the universe/multiverse/xenoverse, etc.

      • Incorrect, you never get to effect without cause, you do eventually get to "I don't know" though. That's fine, just own up and don't make up shit to cover up your ignorance.
    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @04:02PM (#60582756)

      It is a crackpot theory from someone who has a history of crackpotism*.

      Roger Penrose is 89. He should be honored for his past contributions to physics. But that should not include taking his current kooky ramblings seriously.

      Hawking Radiation is not "hot". It is cold. A small black hole of 3 solar masses would have a temperature of 2e-8 K. That would be far colder than the CMB, and basically undetectable. As BHs get bigger, they get even colder. Much colder. The radiation goes down as the fourth power of the absolute temperature. So from a big BH, you may get one photon emitted every trillion years.

      So, no, Hawking Radiation does not explain any "hot spots".

      *Penrose's other crackpot theory is that human intelligence is a quantum phenomenon, based on no evidence whatsoever.

      • Serious question (because I donâ(TM)t know)... Does Hawking Radiation really go down with fourth power of temperature? Or are you thinking of Stefan Boltzmann black body radiation, which goes UP with fourth power of temperature?
        • Serious question (because I donâ(TM)t know)... Does Hawking Radiation really go down with fourth power of temperature? Or are you thinking of Stefan Boltzmann black body radiation, which goes UP with fourth power of temperature?

          Same thing. Blackbody radiation varies with the fourth power of temperature. Up or down depends on whether you are comparing lower with higher, or higher with lower.

        • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @04:30PM (#60582858)

          I phrased my comment poorly. Hawking Radiation is proportional to the fourth power of the absolute temperature. Or really the other way around: The radiation is a quantum phenomenon, and the temperature is calculated based on a blackbody that would emit the same energy.

          So a 3 solar mass BH would have a luminosity of about 1e-29 watts, over a surface area of about a billion m^2.

          That is equivalent to a blackbody of the same area with a temperature of 2e-8 K.

      • I would love to see your math and references supporting this comment
      • by qeveren ( 318805 )
        In a very, very old, expanding universe, eventually even the largest black holes will be warmer than the cosmic background, though.
        • In a very, very old, expanding universe, eventually even the largest black holes will be warmer than the cosmic background, though.

          Indeed. That will happen in about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

      • by Xylantiel ( 177496 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @05:23PM (#60583018)

        In Penrose's defense, he seems to buy into the "outlandish proposal" way of doing things. The problem is that while other physicists recognize what he says as outlandish, unverifiable, and usually vague proposals, the people who don't understand the difference between an unproven hypothesis and a proven theory don't. I suppose it's a classic authority fallacy. People seem to think science should be believed because smart people came up with it, when that's really not the point at all.

        (And it's not like anyone who knows about general relativity, dark energy, and inflation hasn't thought that dark energy could lead to another inflationary epoch, and the only thing that would survive would be black holes. But, as far as I know, Penrose is not someone who seriously studies how whatever caused inflation and dark energy might be related. There are people who actually do. But they don't make outlandish proposals in public, they try to figure out what families of theories are consistent with the vast amount that we do know about physics and what can be constrained with experiments at colliders and in observations of the early universe.)

      • by Tom ( 822 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @06:08PM (#60583188) Homepage Journal

        *Penrose's other crackpot theory is that human intelligence is a quantum phenomenon, based on no evidence whatsoever.

        He is by far not the only scientist with a theory to that effect. There's quite a few names on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] for example.

        • There's quite a few names on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] for example.

          None of them have a background in neurology.

          None of them have any evidence whatsoever to support their conjectures.

          None of them even agree with each other.

          I said Roger Penrose is a crackpot. I never said he is the only crackpot.

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward

            None of them have any evidence whatsoever to support their conjectures.

            How many adherents of string theory have any evidence whatsoever to support their conjectures? Aren't there in fact lots of scientific theories with no direct evidence to support them? Gee, I guess there's a lot more crackpot scientists than anyone realized.

            I said Roger Penrose is a crackpot. I never said he is the only crackpot.

            LOL, internet rando and Slashdot know-it-all calls Penrose a "crackpot" because he doesn't like a couple of his "theories" - one of which Penrose admits is pure speculation.

            Bud, Penrose's list of achievements speaks for itself. You running around he

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            I'll agree that it's a wild speculation that cannot be tested, but I fail to see what a neurologist might add, they have no idea what consciousness is, if it actually exists or how neurons might bring it about. The whole topic of consciousness is more the realm of philosophy rather than science at this point.

            • by LostMyAccount ( 5587552 ) on Thursday October 08, 2020 @08:32AM (#60584712)

              The whole topic of consciousness is more the realm of philosophy rather than science at this point.

              And don't most phenomena start out as philosophical questions anyway until scientifically testable theories can be developed?

              IMHO, anyway, the idea that consciousness and related concepts like agency and understanding not being reducible to analogs of mechanical explanations has some pretty persuasive arguments, such as Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment.

              Thus the idea that consciousness is some kind of quantum phenomenon doesn't seem unrealistic, even if its not "quantum" in some strict sense of quantum mechanics. At a minimum it seems likely to be some kind of emergent phenomenon not easily explained by basic mechanical means.

          • Well, I'm sure you're right. That said, I do note that Christof Kock, who is a neuroscientist, is aware of Penrose's theory, and indeed says that "Penrose's 1989 book, The Emperor's new mind, is a pleasure to read" (Kock, C, The Feeling of Life Itself, The MIT Press, 2019, p 190, note 29). That said, he does say it remains highly speculative and vague, without much empirical support. However, it seems work has been done (by others) to provide a more concrete and testable hypothesis.
      • I thought black holes were supposed to leak Hawking Radiation for an incredibly long time, and then spectacularly explode when they got too small. If it's true that black holes survive longer than any normal isolated matter, they might well be the last explosions, or hot spots, ever produced in a previous universe.

        Hey... just my own crackpot interpretation.

      • Hawking Radiation is not "hot". It is cold. A small black hole of 3 solar masses would have a temperature of 2e-8 K. That would be far colder than the CMB, and basically undetectable. As BHs get bigger, they get even colder. Much colder. The radiation goes down as the fourth power of the absolute temperature. So from a big BH, you may get one photon emitted every trillion years.

        So, no, Hawking Radiation does not explain any "hot spots".

        From what I can make out of the paper the "spots" are from after supermassive black holes of earlier universes have decayed over timescales much greater than googols of years and mass has "faded out" into photons or other massless particles.

        • From what I can make out of the paper the "spots" are from after supermassive black holes of earlier universes have decayed over timescales much greater than googols of years and mass has "faded out" into photons or other massless particles.

          Black holes don't create hotspots when they fade out.

          A black hole the size of our sun would spread its energy out over a volume a trillion trillion trillion trillion times the volume of our current Universe.

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Sure other universes have existed, but within chaos space, infinite far away and infinitely distant. This universe is unique, it is due to the nature of infinity as it relates to the different states. Normal space and normal time, quantum space and quantum time and null space and null time. It all revolves around fractional infinite which is infinity within itself and as such blah blah blah why bother when other just steal it and claim it as their own.

      • Roger Penrose is 89. He should be honored for his past contributions to physics. But that should not include taking his current kooky ramblings seriously.

        To be fair, becoming a crackpot is basically de rigueur for elderly members of the British Peerage.

        • by ytene ( 4376651 )
          Best as I can make out, Sir Roger Penrose was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1994, earning the title "Knight Bachelor" and acquiring the prefix "Sir" to his name.

          Peers are members of the "House of Lords" and are recognized by the prefix "Lord" to their name.

          I am sorry for the pedantry - and please do feel free to correct if I got the above wrong.
      • How many discoveries started with what everyone else considered to be a nutjob theory? Quite a few, maybe all of them. Maybe that gets the next generation thinking outside of the accepted box.. If no one did that we'd still think the earth had been created in 7 days and was flat.

        This universe is a one hit wonder that's going to peter out forever expanding into nothingness that amounts to an empty cold void? I find that hard to accept when nature is a never ending cycle of creation and destruction. Or does t

      • Doesn't the theoretical black hole temperature formula ( T = hc^3 / 8(pi)GMKb ) indicate that as a black hole evaporates it gets hotter?

        CBM stops currently known black holes of specific size from evaporating, as a low temperature will absorb energy and mass, becoming larger and colder, but it seems possible that a black hole evaporation event could cause hotspots given how the math works (given the right circumstances, i.e. nothing from our current observable universe). Hawking radiation is part of the p
      • It is a crackpot theory from someone who has a history of crackpotism*.

        Roger Penrose is 89. He should be honored for his past contributions to physics. But that should not include taking his current kooky ramblings seriously.

        Hawking Radiation is not "hot". It is cold. A small black hole of 3 solar masses would have a temperature of 2e-8 K. That would be far colder than the CMB, and basically undetectable. As BHs get bigger, they get even colder. Much colder. The radiation goes down as the fourth power of the absolute temperature. So from a big BH, you may get one photon emitted every trillion years.

        So, no, Hawking Radiation does not explain any "hot spots".

        Other than the phrasing you've used (like "kooky ramblings") I think you have taken his claims here seriously. Which I think is good. You've looked at the substance of the claim, concluded that it's wrong and said why.

      • Regarding his 'other' crackpot theory, I thought it was consciousness (rather than intelligence) that he was suggesting may be a quantum phenomenon. It may be 'crackpot', but no-one else has managed yet to solve the "Hard Problem" of how (subjective) experience accompany the (objective) functions of the nervous system.
      • *Penrose's other crackpot theory is that human intelligence is a quantum phenomenon, based on no evidence whatsoever.
        And there is no evidence what soever that it is not. Oops ...

        BTW: it is not a "crackpot theory", if at all "crackpot" it is a "crackpot hypothesis".

      • It is a crackpot theory from someone who has a history of crackpotism*.

        Penrose's history with crackpotism isn't the same as the regular crackpot's version. The regular crackpot doesn't understand the theory, and doesn't understand the math. Penrose's bad theories, like his quantum consciousness one, doesn't have bad math, and it doesn't involve a bad understanding of quantum theory. It's just that he tends to start believing in things if the math works out, without as much consideration for the evidence. So while he says, "hey, it's possible we use quantum effects in our brain

      • by kbahey ( 102895 )

        I came here to say exactly the same: his later 'theories' are more like wishful thinking, and outside what current evidence supports.

        The issue here is that getting the Nobel Prize will raise his profile, and these fringe theories will gain more traction because of him winning it.

    • we sent the Mutant ones to dimension x

    • is it's turtles all the way down.

      I'm familiar with this and suggest it should be tortoises -- turtles spend most of their time in water, but further reflection on the stacking nature of this makes me think it should be Bears [wikipedia.org] all the way down ...

      • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        is it's turtles all the way down.

        I'm familiar with this and suggest it should be tortoises -- turtles spend most of their time in water, but further reflection on the stacking nature of this makes me think it should be Bears [wikipedia.org] all the way down ...

        Kind of like buffalo.

        Bare bears bare bears bear bear bare bears.

    • At least he's talking about what might happen in the "capital U" Universe. Most seem blind or afraid to go there.

    • Human cock is so big it spits gravity and makes baby universe every 9^9^9 years, just so you can watch anime.
  • I, for one, am getting in on the ground floor on this one and saying there wasn't an earlier universe. #PreachTheTruthOnlyOneUniverse
  • by N7DR ( 536428 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @04:05PM (#60582762) Homepage

    His book "Cycles of Time", ISBN 978-0307278463, covers this theory in more detail and in an accessible manner.

  • Does that mean I am somehow immortal? This is the only thing I want to know.
    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Only if you scan your molecular arrangement into a message that can be sent to the next universe(s) via pre-arranging a bunch of black holes (per my other message).

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Does that mean I am somehow immortal?

      Since you're a figment of my imagination, you'll live as long as I'm not distracted. Ooh a piece of candy.

    • The property(ies) of the universe which present themselves when certain molecules connect, which leads those molecules to gain a drive to persist in their current form, and reproduce themselves, may be the result of some heretofore unguessed property of the universe. I think something like panpsychism [google.com] may be a thing.

      How can something be intangible, yet real, like our consciousness? Information is intangible, yet real. For example, "where is the sabre toothed tiger?" is information. "Where are the mines in t

    • At the very least, your potential immortality is reduced to the part of the timeline after your birth, assuming that your likely lack of pre-birth memory is due to it not existing as opposed to amnesia. Next, your post-birth immortality is not disproven until you die, and even then if death is merely a transformation and you awake with a contiguous sense of self, you can never truly prove your immortality because infinity never ends. Even in heaven, you would have to have faith. Faith abides. That and t

  • TFA: "The idea is controversial...[but] Sir Roger said that black holes had also once been controversial."

    The argument seems to be that although the idea is highly speculative, he was right about black holes, which used to also be highly speculative.

    The fallacy here is that just because SOME past speculative ideas have proved accurate does not mean that most will. We tend to only remember the hits, not the misses.

    • by tsqr ( 808554 )

      I think the argument is that an hypothesis should not be summarily discounted merely because it is highly speculative in nature. I don't think anyone is asserting that most speculative ideas will prove accurate.

  • is not necessarily entirely incompatible with the idea of a universe from nothing.

    I kinda like it that there could have been something before, humanly feeling-wise. I hope he can find the data to prove this, in his lifetime.
  • ...send messages to future universes by arranging black holes? If so, let's get decoding! Maybe it's the blue-prints for a time-travel machine; or better yet, a collection of the best por...uh, jokes of the prior universe.

  • The portals are opening. They are asking for the Tinted One back.

    -5 Political

  • with the Big Bang at a stationary point?
    • Rather than a sine wave like you're picturing, Penrose's theory looks a bit more like a tangent "wave", with Big Bangs at the asymptotes, though that's really not doing it justice either.

      The general idea is that after a Big Rip scenario, the scale of space and time are undefined, so the immensely huge empty universe that's left over is indistinguishable from a tiny pocket of rapidly expanding space -- the inflationary epoch of a new universe, which ends like ours did with a Hot Big Bang when that inflation

      • Very interesting, that makes more sense (as much sense as these things can make), thanks for the info!
      • by mattr ( 78516 )

        Thank you very much for that nutshell explanation. I am amazed at how slashdotters are so nuts that they immediately call a Nobel prize winner a crackpot too. It seems he has expended serious work on the topic and is unafraid to create amazing theories that will shake people up and draw attention. Cycles of time appears to be 12 or 13 bucks, but I found some of his papers on the topic. IANAP and only skimmed the surface a little here and there but it is quite fascinating and beyond just a thought exercise,

  • It is consistent with the theory that we are living in a simulation by some advanced civilizations.

    They provision a computational node for each individual for the duration of each life being simulated. At the end of life the compute node is cleared and re-provisioned for another simulation. There are some glitches in the simulation, notably sometimes the prior memory is not entirely cleared. Thus a few individuals get memories of previous birth. The static object destruction order can not be guaranteed in

    • by JackAxe ( 689361 )
      How does anything exist?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • It is consistent with the theory that we are living in a simulation by some advanced civilizations.

      Which itself is just a stoner's pipe dream, geek driven or not.

    • I'm surprised any information could survive after a reboot of the universe, what with all those cosmic rays flipping bits everywhere.

      • Thank you

        Cosmic rays flipping bits are part of the simulations. But cosmic rays from the universe in which these advanced beings are doing the simulation creating universes for us, could have such cosmic rays flipping bits that stopped the clearing of some memory or a disc sector. I only considered the order in which static objects are destroyed order across dll boundaries and some simulated consciousness being able to break out of the sandbox of simulation and see the other compute nodes and simulations.

  • But many folks, including Einstein, were pretty skeptical regarding the truth of the theories of relativity, at least general relativity. It seems like fairly frequently we see some new observation that confirms the theories. So now we have a brilliant man coming up with what appears to be a hokey idea that there was a previous universe. Extending that, perhaps there were many previous universes and more to come. We're not going to be around to directly observe what this kind of future holds, but we can't
    • So now we have a brilliant man coming up with what appears to be a hokey idea that there was a previous universe.

      Not his idea.

      but we can't ignore the possibility of past and recurring universes.

      Sure we can. That 'possibility' is of no use to us. (Aside from talk in the parlor.)

      Some contemporary observations may find something that confirms the the theory.

      Right.

      • Sure we can. That 'possibility' is of no use to us. (Aside from talk in the parlor.)

        So knowing what causes inflation rather than calling it Dark Energy is no use? Hmmm, interesting viewpoint.

  • One of those giant warm spots is the huge wanker I had in the prior universe. Good times! It's how the Milky Way got made, although, um, that's not milk.

  • and all mass decays away

    And then what? the fabric of spacetime of the previous universe just stops existing? At which point what medium would Hawking Radiation propagate through? this model does not account for the "faster than light" expansion (inflation) of space in our universe. Too many stupid things said here, not his crazy theory anyway, others have come up with better theories than this.

    • right, the holder of Nobel Prize in Physics and many other awards in math and physics, with dozens of achievements in the fields named after him, is talking out of his ass and we should listen to you.

      • I did not say listen to me, I merely pointed out reasons it is BS. The guy is a geriatric crackpot as others have been pointing out all over here. I do not care what "awards" he has tbh. I could go on for days about all of mine, but you wouldn't care anyways. Just arrogance really.
        • Your layman's understanding of physics doesn't give you the qualifications to critique his theory, you are essentially ignorant of the subject.

    • by mattr ( 78516 )

      Why not read his paper and then comment?
      It is too advanced for me but the gist appears to be that the spacetime of the vastly expanded universe becomes linked to a crossover space transformation called CCC theory that "preserves angles but not distance" which would suggest that the spacetime is not destroyed just shrunk to a dot. It seems to just be a way to use math to describe something that could possibly account for the concentric rings they found in the CMB.
      https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.516... [arxiv.org]

  • Did you know that the first Universe was designed to be a perfect universe, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster.

  • So, basically, it's turtles all the way down?

  • Even if there was a universe before ours, and another one before that, or thousands or millions, there had to be a beginning, when the very first universe started from nothing.

    Wait, from nothing? Nothing cannot turn into something. Yes, I know about the proposals that talk about quantum fluctuations and such. But fluctuations aren't _nothing_.

    • > there had to be a beginning, when the very first universe started from nothing.

      'Before' means 'earlier in time'. Like 'left' means 'a distance that way on an agreed-upon vector'.

      Before the singularly there was no 'left'. There was no distance as everything was infinitely small.

      As time is one of the four dimensions of spacetime, it makes as much sense to say 'before' time as 'left' without distance. It's something we can say but it doesn't map to this Reality.

      The nature of this universe is that time a

      • This line of reasoning contradicts TFA, which argues that there was a universe before our big bang, before our singularity.

        But leaving that aside, this logic is circular. You argue that there was no time before the Big Bang, so there was no "before." But that does not explain the existence of the Big Bang. If space-time existed before the big bang, we wouldn't be able to explain what caused the Big Bang. Without the existence of space-time, we have an even harder time explaining how it could have occurred.

        W

        • This line of reasoning contradicts TFA, which argues that there was a universe before our big bang, before our singularity.

          But leaving that aside, this logic is circular. You argue that there was no time before the Big Bang, so there was no "before."

          I like where you are going with these thoughts and I have another. Our theories of the Big Bang beginning with the start of the existence of Time may also be wrong. If your theory goes on to say there were previous universes that have expanded out to be so stretched out that there is no matter left it does not imply that time stops at that point. There would be no way for the Hawking radiation to flow if time stopped.

          So, if time continues through until our Big Bang expands in the emptiness of the space of t

  • Just like the movie Men in Black showed in the end, there are monster size aliens playing with planets as if they are rocks or marbles
  • Ok, I'm at best an amateur cosmologist, but...this doesn't really make sense to me. Sure, black holes can and do evaporate, but they aren't going to create universes when they do so - just a pile of radiation.

    The "big bang" was a lot more than an evaporating black hole. It wasn't just an explosion in existing space, it caused space to exist - which means that no remnants of previous events would be visible.

    • What if though, a big bang creates space and time. The big bang itself is created by (say) a black hole collapsing in another universe. That event causes such huge fall out that it breaks out of their spacetime and cause entirely new spacetime to be created (ours). There's no immediate way to see the other spacetime, so we're unaware of it (as are they, probably).

      Just to keep this geek - imagine if spacetime were a docker container. An anomaly within it causes the host to spawn an entirely new container alo

    • This is in the context of Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology [wikipedia.org], where the infinite future of an enormous and rapidly-expanding spacetime becomes indistinguishable from an instant of a tiny pocket of spacetime rapidly expanding: the long, slow Big Rip of our universe appearing as the inflationary epoch of a new universe.

      Our black holes, evaporating very slowly over the course of that long future of our universe, would thus be some of the last and largest fluctuations in the tiny but rapidly inflating next un

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